Michael Sells, mentioned in the news story forwarded, is the author of another excellent book, "The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, "(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Additional documentation on his website, http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.html
I entered UCSC as a sophomore, so did not have to go through the mandatory for freshpersons, "core course, " at Merrill College, UCSC. (Merrill, named after Merrill, Lynch the uberfinanzcapitalists. A Merrill heir, who had just got back from Sandinsta Nicaragua gave us a talk on land reform there once.)Part of the assigned reading was, the embellished autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu as told to Elisabeth Burgos Debray (I assume married to Regis), which was blown apart by David Stoll, in, "RIGOBERTA MENCHU AND THE STORY OF ALL POOR GUATEMALANS, " Westview Press, which receives a Stalinoid headlining here, http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/aug99/msg03132.html . The controversy was treated to and fro in many fora from the NYT, frontpage and the radical left academic journal, Latin American Perspectives. For another recap, "The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy, "Edited by Arturo Arias, University of Minnesota Press, March 2001, 416 pages, pb.
Do the instructors at UCSC, present the controversy, "teach the conflicts, " as E.J. Graff advocated for the, "culture wars, ", ??? To 19 yr. olds? Nah, just use the "progressive" version of Freire's, "banking theory of knowledge, " and flood out the hegemonic bourgeois ideological phallocentric discourse, with a simplistic reversal with none of depth present in Marx writing on capitalism. This afternoon, I skimmed over a bit of a Ward Churchill book on genocide published by City Lights Books, "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, " (with none of the howling errors in the citations I found in another collection of Ward Churchill "edited" by South End Press, which misspelled Shlomo Avineri and R. Munck on the difficult tensions between nationalism and marxism, published by Zed in London). In one of the chapters (horrors he cites Robert Conquest!) he relates being denounced by a bunch in a class of undergrads, after reading sections of Marx from, "Capital, " for presenting a pro-capitalist pov. And this , right after, a student indignantly, 'sez that, "Black, " is not PC [yes, she unironically, 'sez, he isn't, "politically correct, " (a phrase first in use in the 30's in the CPUSA, see it in publications in the Greenwood Press series, "Radical Periodicals in the U.S.")], that, "we now say, "Afro-American, " to which he retorts, " Oh should I have just been talking about the Afro- American Panther Party and COINTELPRO? Michael Pugliese