The Academic Inquisitors

SELF-STYLED WATCH DOG of American higher education, Accuracy in Academia (AIA) has taken its so-called "operations" into the Ivy League. Last week, the right-wing group telephoned a professor at Princeton to question his choice of course books and his selection of an East German guest lecturer. The AIA "reporter"--no doubt someone with a penchant for rhetorical questions--asked whether the professor "knew the difference between propaganda and politics."

Accuracy in Academia--a spin-off of the rightist group, Accuracy in Media--owes its conception and its methods to principles that are dubious at best, dangerous at worst.

The fact that AIA grew out of a media watch-dog organization casts suspicion on its intentions. AIA was founded to trace the origin of a supposed liberal bias in education using the same methods as its media-watching parent organization. Malcolm Lawrence, president of AIA, draws the parallel between media and education: "The classroom can be compared to a newspaper. The professor is the source of information or service for which the student pays."

Lawrence's comparison is dubious and dangerous. Equating classroom and newspaper is like equating the process of debate with its product. Commentators and politicians have made a case against AIA's methods by arguing from the liberal perspective that sees the organization as a right-wing group that uses McCarthyist methods.

But the argument falls on deaf ears. The debate over the legitimacy of AIA is political, and AIA isn't about to recognize the liberal perspective. However, one can challenge AIA on its own ground by challenging the accuracy of AIA's equating of classroom and newspaper.

ITS OWN POLITICAL bias aside, Accuracy in Media's goal of eliminating misrepresentation and inaccuracy on the six o'clock news is a noble one. However, just as classroom and media are fundamentally different, the goals of Accuracy in Academia and Accuracy in Media are not equivalent. To eliminate bias and opinion from teaching is anything but noble. It is, in fact, inaccurate--representing a distorted view of the process of education.

AIA's campaign attempts to convert what is by nature a process of debate into a lifeless recitation of sterile data. Teaching at its best is not unbiased; it is provocative. An effective teacher challenges the student to agree or disagree, and to think of reasons for doing so.

AIA's goal is especially inapplicable to the academic disciplines it targets, the social sciences. The social sciences occupy a hazy realm of interpretation and bias. The verifiable accuracy demanded by AIA is as foreign to the social sciences as subjective interpretation is to basic algebra. We can assert--to take a nice, safe example--that Marx formulated his theories in the mid-nineteenth century; but beyond that, we can say little without provoking objections from a dozen different academic factions with far better credentials than those of AIA.

Inaccuracy and misrepresentation are indeed as inexcusable in the classroom as they are in the newspapers. However, they bear little resemblance to the biases and imbalances condemned by AIA.

Clearly, AIA considers students blind to bias and in danger of swallowing dogma. This premise, a rather pessimistic assessment, throws AIA into a contradictory position. In its inquisition of inaccurate professors, AIA relies on tips called in by student "reporters". AIA places sufficient confidence in its student reports to use them as a basis for questioning professors on their abilities and for publishing indictments. Apparently, these super-student "reporters" see through what is for others an impenetrable haze of liberal bias.

One would hope that an organization founded on such dubious and contradictory principles as Accuracy in Academia would collapse of its own weight. However, one would have hoped the very same thing three decades ago when an unknown Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy stood on the Senate floor with his own set of dubious principles. The American public has the unfortunate ability to support a good measure of absurdity, so long as it wears the mask of good-old patriotic Red hunting.

Accuracy in Academia has yet to gain the credibility or the influence to seriously threaten the academic community. As the saying goes, however, time is on its side--unless teachers and students make a strong stand for the integrity of academic freedom.