Chronicle of Higher Education - daily web update - Wednesday, March 3, 1999
Through Ads, Conservative Group Attacks Professors Who Defend Controversial Book
By DENISE K. MAGNER
A conservative think tank is running advertisements in student newspapers at six leading universities attacking professors who have defended Rigoberta Menchú's controversial autobiography even though the book has been labeled a fraud.
The Center for the Study of Popular Culture, based in Los Angeles, is paying for advertisements in the campus newspapers at Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities, and at the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The first ad appeared in the Illinois student newspaper last month, but most will not begin appearing until today.
The advertisement calls Ms. Menchú a "Marxist terrorist" who has been "exposed as an intellectual hoax." It continues: "This fraud was originally perpetrated and is still defended by your professors and by the Nobel Prize Committee."
Ms. Menchú's autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchú (Verso, 1983), is widely used in college classrooms. In a book released in December David Stoll, a Middlebury College anthropologist, charged that the autobiography was filled with lies and half-truths. Since then, Ms. Menchú has defended her book but has acknowledged that she took liberties with the truth.
David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, said the purpose of the advertisement was to put scholars who continue to defend the book on the spot.
"There should be a little embarrassment at this point about having a party line that is so out of sync with reality," Mr. Horowitz said. "Here you have a spokesman for some guerrilla terrorists, spouting Marxism, which is a totally discredited intellectual doctrine, and you have an academic left which is so powerful that it can make her drivel canonical."
Besides Mr. Stoll, the only academic who is mentioned in the advertisement is Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College. The ad says, "Tenured leftists like Wellesley's Marjorie Agosin have declared in the face of these disclosures that 'Whether her book is true or not, I don't care.'" Ms. Agosin's quote appeared in an article about the controversy in the January 15 issue of The Chronicle.
Mr. Horowitz said he chose the six universities in some cases because he wanted to get the attention of certain leftists on those campuses, like Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Urbana-Champaign, and in other cases because his center had previously placed ads in their student newspapers. He wanted to run an ad in Wellesley's student newspaper -- to target Ms. Agosin -- but a staff member mistakenly placed the ad in Brandeis's newspaper.
Ms. Agosin could not be reached for comment. But she has said that Ms. Menchú's autobiography speaks to a larger truth about the brutality of the Guatemalan military and its support from the U.S. government. "I think Rigoberta Menchú has been used by the right to negate the very important space that multiculturalism is providing in academia," she told The Chronicle.
Mr. Bérubé said the ad campaign was mildly bothersome. "Because Horowitz has got a certain amount of intellectual wherewithal, this attack has more credibility than the attacks on gay Teletubbies, but I really don't see this as much different." Mr. Bérubé has never used Ms. Menchú's autobiography in his classroom, but he notes that he has used Benjamin Franklin's, even though it has factual inaccuracies.
So far, the ad campaign has cost the center about $5,000, says Charles M. Rousseaux, a spokesman for the center, which may run additional ads depending on how this round is received. He said the center wants to put pressure on academics to answer for their continued use of Ms. Menchú's book. "Why are they teaching something that is patently false and intellectually dishonest?" he said. "Unfortunately, I believe the answer is, out of loyalty to a political viewpoint rather than loyalty to the truth."