Writing Wrongs

FAS International is a company dedicated to making a fortune out of fame. It runs a mail-order education empire, including the Famous Writers, Artists and Photographers schools, that sells about $90 million yearly in programmed instruction to would-be Hemingways, Picassos and Carder-Bressons around the world.

Lately, however, FAS has become famous for its misfortune. The firm lost $2,200,000 in the quarter that ended last December, mostly because of the recession and a few improvident acquisitions. Then FAS executives asked that the company's stock be suspended from trading on the New York Stock Exchange because its books were too fouled up to permit a second-quarter 1971 earnings report. The stock, which hit a high of 62 in 1968, closed at 4 1/8 on May 19 and has not yet reopened. Both the Federal Trade Commission and New York City's department of consumer affairs are making inquiries into the selling methods of FAS and other home-learning outfits.

Untimely Clock. FAS now faces trouble from another, unlikely quarter: the teaching faculty at Famous Writers School in Westport, Conn. The faculty does not consist of Clifton Fadiman, Bruce Catton, Phyllis McGinley or the twelve other literary luminaries who for undisclosed sums have lent their names and faces to the school's familiar ads ("We're looking for people who want to write"). Rather it is made up of 38 nonfamous writers who actually handle the school's mail-order instruction. Dissatisfied with toiling in regimented obscurity, they formed Local 427 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union earlier this year. After nearly three months of desultory negotiations with FAS, they have authorized a strike.

The instructors want a greater voice in planning the school curriculum.* They also object to the productivity-minded company's plan to install a time clock. As it is, the instructors work a rigid eight-hour schedule in 38 identical soundproofed cubicles, turning out penciled marginal comments and lengthy typewritten critiques on six or seven student assignments a day. "We want to be treated like professionals and less like production-line workers," argues Harmon Strauss, a former Radio Free Europe writer who is Local 427's shop steward.

The teachers are not making any immediate salary demands (present average is about $225 a week), and have not yet carried out the strike threat. One reason is their understandable fear that the company may go under if they do. Donald A. Lewis, a former senior vice president at Foote, Cone & Belding Communications Inc., who took over as FAS president in mid-May, is trying to rescue the firm by selling off some of its subsidiaries, among them the Evelyn Wood franchised speed-reading centers. Strike or not, unless Lewis can come up with $18 million to cover the firm's short-term notes, the nonfamous writers may face the threat of permanent obscurity.

*Courses include fiction, nonfiction, business and advertising writing. The student pays $780 (or up to $903 on the installment plan) for textbooks and the comments of an instructor on each written assignment that he submits. Each student is asked to write 24 manuscripts of up to 3,000 words each over a three-year period. Sample assignment: a 2,000-word essay on "the art of living."

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