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otherwise be channeled into violence and destruction. It would seem logical that any enterprise with hope of reducing prison violence would be expanded by the administration, not curtailed. The best example of a successful writing program inside TDC were the writers’ workshops sponsored by the Windham School System and Texas Commission on the Arts and organized by Austinite Grady Hillman, who served as TDC’s writer-inresidence. This twoyear program involved hundreds of inmates, whose work culminated in a short film and published book. “Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners” was a first place winner among educational films at the American Film Festival in New York last year. Writer’s Block, a Texas prison anthology, has just been printed and will soon be available in book stores around the state. These projects result from properly directed inmate energies, projects that bring favorable recognition to Texas and Texas prisons. But the basic issue remains the Constitutional rights of free speech and free press as long as the material presented is responsible to the truth. Should these rights be denied, even to those errant citizens serving time in the state penitentiary, truth and justice can hardly be considered as having been rightly served. As former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black stated in the July 2, 1945, New Republic: “Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some.” Washington REED IRVINE, president and founder of Accuracy in Media group called Accuracy in Academia misinformation” in the college classroom While MA doesn’t say so, the hope of its founders is to save students of a liberal bent from the clutches of Marxist professors with their fake postulations and secret agendas. Students and senior citizens are to be recruited across the country to take or audit liberal arts courses at nearby colleges, then send in to MA tape recordings or notes of a professor’s statements. If MA determines the information is incorrect,. then it will directly approach the professor asking for a rectification. If refused, the group will publicize the “errors” in existing campus publications or in its own newsletter. AIA will probably tap into a growing conservative student network, comprising 50 or more college newspapers and various student activist groups, including the College Republicans and Students for a Better America. “Since young students may not have the knowledge or the time to carry out this function as carefully as would be desirable, we are asking mature adults to volunteer to enroll in courses near their homes to serve as auditors for Accuracy in Academia,” says the blurb for the new project, adding, “If funding permits, we will pay expenses, including tuition, for the volunteer auditors.” MA James Ridgeway’s columns are a regular feature of the Texas Observer. will.concentrate on state universities and colleges to begin with, according to Irvine, in part because AIA auditors won’t stand out in large classes that consist of students of all ages. Malcolm Lawrence, a 60-year-old retired foreign service officer who himself ran a private secondary school in Switzerland and now is an education activist on the right, is to be AIA’s president. He is the author of the “Parental Consent Letter,” a form letter that parents can send to local school boards stipulating that the parent must give his or her consent before the school curriculum can include any one of 35 different issues, including evolution, family income, sex attitudes and beliefs, or even courses on world hunger. Two million copies of his form letter have been distributed by various right groups since January. The Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club all have distributed the letter. Currently he cohorts a two-hour weekly radio show concerning education on the Contact Radio Network, an affiliate of Christian Broadcasting Network. He was a consultant for the Department of Education, successfully lobbying in Congress for the Hatch amendment, which requires parental consent on a range of subjective issues from politics to religion. “How will you recruit students and auditors?” my colleague Katherine Magraw asked Lawrence in a recent interview. “Person to person,” Lawrence replied. “And we will probably work . . .with some young groups on campuses. We might hook up with the Young Americans for Freedom. And there are other groups. We might just call up university newspaper editors. We will get reading lists from a number of professors, where these are available. Essentially the appeal is for people who are located in university towns who have the time and the inclination and who want to support AIA to look into whether they can audit courses free of charge.” “Will the auditors challenge the professors?” Magraw asked. “They would,” Lawrence said. “Let’s say an ex-foreign service officer STAY ONE NIGHT AND THE NEXT NIGHT IS HALF-PRICE except Friday & Saturday P.O. Box 8 Port Aransas, TX 78373 Invasion of the Classroom By James Ridgeway THE TEXAS OBSERVER 7