Revised History of AIA

In the current issue of Radical Teacher, one of their writers tries to relay our history, with some success. “But these old patterns of red-baiting took a new direction in the 1980s, concurrent with the wave of higher education reforms and the rise of the New Right under Ronald Reagan,” Pam Chamberlain writes in an article entitled “The Right v. Higher Education: Change and Continuity.” “For example, in 1985 Reed Irvine, a conservative critic with well-developed connections inside the beltway, founded Accuracy in Academia (AIA) with the goal of exposing leftist teaching in higher education.”

“He patterned this organization after another of his groups, Accuracy in Media, which he had started in 1969 to counter the anti-Vietnam war message creeping into mainstream news reporting.” Chamberlain works at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., a “progressive research center.”

“For his new project Irvine solicited unpaid student informants and began publishing Campus Report to target individual teachers and schools and expose what he thought were egregious examples of biased teaching,” Chamberlain relates. “The first target was Mark Reader, a political scientist and antinuclear activist at Arizona State University, and the first informant was the former editor of its student newspaper, Mark Scully, who described Reader as speaking ‘for his comrades in the political science department, for the sweeties in the Women’s Studies Department—for every puffed up pedagogue on this campus who just wants to do his own thing.’”

“Scully went on to become AIA’s first national director.” Reader, long after clashing with AIA, remained a presence at ASU, eventually as a professor emeritus. Incidentally, AIA’s first national director may have been Matthew Scully but its first executive director was definitely Les Csorba.

“It issued a lengthy report on Reader, which pointed out that he was spending a great deal of time in a course supposed to be devoted to political ideologies talking about his fears of all things nuclear, including the peaceful uses of nuclear energy,” our founder, Reed Irvine, said of AIA’s role in the contretemps in a letter to the editor of Time magazine. “We said that he should either teach the course as advertised in the college catalog or the course description should be changed.”

Of the ASU episode, Chamberlain writes, “This incident set the tone for an abrasive style of attack on progressive and liberal faculty that has been taken up since the 1980s by many groups such as Students for Academic Freedom and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.” That puts us in very distinguished company.

“What then, should be done?” Chamberlain asks. “If the mission of conservative attacks is to discredit higher education in the eyes of the public, including the government, then progressive strategists might craft counter-campaigns that address this goal head on.”

“For one thing, we must often refuse to accept the terms of the debate (an example is, ‘Are leftist teachers engaged in indoctrination?’), and instead frame the counterattack to focus on the Right’s ultimate targets (for instance, ‘Are colleges serving our society well and do they deserve our support?’).”

In an age in which colleges and universities pay millionaire-presidents out of federally subsidized budgets, post 60-percent graduation rates and incur the enmity of employers for failing to teach students to write coherently, that may not be a great strategy. Chamberlain’s other suggestion is also perplexing.

“Identify and ally with other movements that have been attacked by the Right and that have some connection to potential student populations, such as immigrant or welfare rights activism, or progressive, K-12, public education reform,” Chamberlain advises. “Remain open to other possible alliances, such as with labor, social welfare, or health care groups, that could join in mutually beneficial support.”

“And continue to engage in and encourage research exposing the strategies and tactics of the Right, as seeking to perpetuate unfair power and privilege.”
And how does that differ from what colleges and universities are doing now, in the last bastion of “unfair power and privilege”?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.