Balance Or Bias?

There was some tough talk last month at a meeting in Washington of the normally staid American Association of University Professors. In an impassioned address during a daylong symposium on academic freedom, Chancellor Joseph Murphy of the City University of New York blasted a new right-wing watchdog group that he said was recruiting students "as a corps of thought police." The group, Accuracy in Academia, was founded last summer by Militant Conservative Reed Irvine as an offshoot of his flourishing (35,000 members) Accuracy in Media, which makes a business of challenging perceived liberal bias in major news organizations.

A.I.A. claims to have more than 200 anonymous student volunteers monitoring and reporting on classroom lectures at 160 colleges around the country. The purpose, says Executive Director Laszlo Csorba, 22, is to ensure "balance and a livelier classroom discussion." As it is, charges the A.I.A., some 10,000 Marxist professors are imposing their views on American students. But to academics like University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, the A.I.A.'s work amounts to "ideological espionage." Frank Vandiver, president of Texas A&M, has warned, "One never knows who is being assaulted in this kind of spying. Nothing can ruin a university faster than fear."

Many delegates to the A.A.U.P. had similar sentiments. Other academics challenged the A.I.A. monitors to speak up in class and freely debate their professors instead of tiptoeing off with reports, which thus far seem few and trivial. Csorba acknowledges that his operatives have turned up only six "active" cases so far. One example: Mark Reader, an Arizona State political science professor who is accused of taking too strong a stance against nuclear war in his lectures.

Perhaps the most telling opposition to A.I.A. has come from a quarter in which it might have been expected to win support: namely, the political right. After the conference, Secretary of Education William Bennett denounced A.I.A. as "a bad idea." And last week Midge Decter, executive director of the conservative Committee for the Free World, described the organization's approach as "wrongheaded and harmful" and urged it to "shut down the operation before it goes any further." Writing in Contentions, her committee's bulletin, Decter argued that in the classroom, accuracy is not the issue. "There is no accurate way," she noted, "to teach the Federalist Papers . . . Bias is something that anyone with opinions can be accused of. How can a person be qualified to teach without opinions?"