The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

Intro

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. The leading headlines today are these. Six more people died in new rioting in South Africa. The West German spy scandal grew with the defection of a senior intelligence official. And Union Carbide said both human error and equipment failure were responsible for the big West Virginia gas leak. Robert MacNeil is away tonight; Elizabeth Brackett is in New York. Elizabeth?

ELIZABETH BRACKETT: After the news summary we'll have three focus reports and an essay on the NewsHour tonight. First, the West German spy scandal; a former member of the CIA will lift the veil on that story for us. Then a documentary report on the latest trade battle between Japan and the United States. Next, a debate over whether college professors should be screened for political bias. And finally an essay about the Boss of rock and roll and the message he's delivering to America. News Summary

LEHRER: Six blacks died today in a clash with police in the East Cape Province of South Africa. Another 20 were injured in what news agencies described as the bloodiest confrontation between blacks and government forces in recent weeks. Police said they fired rubber bullets and shotgun blasts at what they describe as a violent mob of blacks who were throwing rocks and gasoline bombs. Our South African report tonight is from James Robbins of the BBC.

JAMES ROBBINS, BBC [voice-over]: Last night outside a beer hall the police opened fire on a crowd of blacks they say were burning it down. Six people were killed and 20 were wounded. It was by far the worst incident in three days of sporadic arson attacks. The trouble developed after pupils started a boycott of the secondary school on Tuesday. Although the township is now quiet, the violence follows a pattern first set in much larger towns and cities. And in Soweto, largest of all the black townships, police and troops are trying to break the school boycotts, using emergency law to arrest hundreds of schoolchildren. It's a criminal offense for children to be out of class and on the streets. Yesterday and today 700 have been picked up and taken to police stations. Once again Bishop Tutu has been in the front line, appealing for calm on both sides and telling angry parents their children would eventually be released to them. But as the arrests continued, the Bishop argued with police and soldiers trying to pull a teenage boy out of a crowd. In the end the Bishop's intervention was ignored and another pupil faces the possibility of a criminal charge.

LEHRER: The possibility of another kind of confrontation emerged for next week, when black church leader Allan Boesak called on blacks to march on the prison where Nelson Mandela is being held. Mandela was the leader of the outlawed African National Congress until jailed 21 years ago. Tonight the police arrested as many as 20 people likely to be involved in that march, possibly including Allan Boesak, who failed to appear for a speech he was scheduled to make. Also today, South African President P.W. Botha repeated his warning that he will not be stampeded into reforming the nation's racial laws. He told a political meeting, "Reform does not come overnight." Elizabeth?

BRACKETT: In England the investigation of a jetliner crash that killed 54 people yesterday focused on one of the plane's engines. Those engines were American-made Pratt & Whitneys. Investigators were asking whether the crew of the chartered Boeing 737 had urged the passengers to keep their seats when fire swept through the cabin. Here's a report on the inquiry and the survivors from Sue Simpson of the CBC.

SUE SIMPSON, CBC [voice-over]: After the panic and the pain, a smile. For the lucky ones, the survivors, it was a day to be thankful. Six of the injured are still in serious condition with burns. Others are out now, I've had it.

2nd SURVIVOR: I had three breaths of the smoke and passed out, and just as I went down and fell over towards the door, I saw this sort of webbing rope, grabbed hold of it and someone must have just given me enough momentum to get my head out and climb off over the wing.

SIMPSON [voice-over]: From some there was criticism about the last minutes of panic aboard the burning plane. David Ashworth and his family ignored instructions to stay seated after the plane had stopped. They raced down an emergency chute to safety.

DAVID ASHFORTH, survivor: The last instruction I remember was for people to stay seated, and between staying seated and knowing they had to get out of the seats, seconds were lost. And I think if part of the procedure told people that there was going to be an orderly evacuation and people knew they were going to have to leave their seats, they'd first of all undo the seat belt, which is a critical part of the situation. You know, seat belts aren't always that easy to undo in panic.

SIMPSON [voice-over]: Representatives of Boeing and the engine makers, Pratt & Whitney, flew into Manchester today from the United States. They arrived in the midst of a debate about the safety of the engine. The American Federal Aviation Administration says it ordered Pratt & Whitney to run a check on the engines after it realized they were involved in seven incidents over the past four years. Notification of the check was apparently passed to the British aviation authorities, but three British airlines say they knew nothing about the check and it wasn't something they'd miss.

COLIN MARSHALL, British Airways: Our checks on our engines are very thorough indeed. And as I say, we do receive advisories quite often from the engine manufacturers, and as soon as we receive them, we act upon them immediately,

SIMPSON [voice-over]: Experts on both sides of the Atlantic say the safety check does not have any bearing on the Manchester disaster. But that could be even worse. It could mean that the engines, used by more than 300 Boeing 737s round the world, have developed a new and previously unknown problem.

LEHRER: A pilotless U.S. spy plane crashed today in northeastern El Salvador. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the plane was on an intelligence-gathering flight for the Salvadoran government. He said the cause of the crash was not immediately known. The other spy story of the day came from Europe, where a senior West German intelligence official defected to East Germany, according to reports from Bonn. The official's disappearance was the latest episode in the growing spy scandal within the West German government. Last weekend two women employees of the government were identified as longtime spies for East Germany after they disappeared, presumably to East Germany. Today's reported defection was by Hans Tiedge, a 48-year-old official responsible for catching East German and other spies in West Germany. The Reuters news agencysaid he was known as a heavy drinker with financial, health and family problems. Former CIA official George Carver will help us sort through the story and the damage right after this news summary.

BRACKETT: In Washington, the head of the Ethiopian famine relief organization urged Congress not to impose sanction on his country. He denied charges that the government is not letting emergency shipments of food reach certain areas. The famine relief official spoke at a news conference.

DAWIT GIORGIS, Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission: The effects of an economic embargo on Ethiopia by the United States administration would only condemn these groups to increasing misery, deprivation, poverty and death. I cannot believe that the American people would want this to happen, and I am here to ask that it should not happen. If an economic and trade embargo were to be imposed on Ethiopia, it would be the beginning of a reversal of those high humanitarian ideals which have inspired the best actions of the American nation and people at the best of times.

BRACKETT: Congress has voted to suspend trade with Ethiopia if President Reagan determines that the government is deliberately starving the people. So far the President has not done so.

In Lebanon a truce quieted the streets of Beirut after several days of heavy shelling. Local newspapers reported that Syrian troops would be stationed in the city to enforce that truce. Syrian troops occupied portions of the city earlier in the civil war, but withdrew their units for the last three years. About 25,000 Syrian soldiers remain in other parts of Lebanon.

LEHRER: Union Carbide said today both human and equipment failure caused the August 11th poison gas leak in West Virginia. One hundred and thirty-five persons went to hospitals as a result of that incident at the company's plant in Institute, West Virginia. We have a report on today's announcement from Nell McCormack of public station WPBY in Huntington, West Virginia.

NELL McCORMACK, WPBY [voice-over]: Carbide officials said today their internal investigation of the August 11th leak confirms an earlier theory that steam accidentally entered a reactor containing an aldicarb oxime and dichloromethane mixture. Workers mistakenly thought they had pumped all of the mixture out on August 7th, but 4,000 pounds remained in the vessel, and for the next four days steam continued to enter it, heating up the mixture until it ruptured safety valves and disks on August 11th, sending a cloud of noxious gas into the air, sickening 135 people. Institute plant manager Hank Karawan was asked if workers violated plant procedures.

HANK KARAWAN, plant manager: In this instance, yes. We have a standard operating procedure in the plant called the prestartup safety review that we use when we're putting new modifications into operation, starting up new units, doing something different, okay? A comprehensive prestartup safety review is not done prior to using this vessel for this temporary storage.

McCORMACK [voice-over]: Karawan said if proper procedures were done, workers would have known the mixture was sensitive to heat and they would have disconnected the steam immediately.

REPORTER: Was it human error?

ROBERT KENNEDY, Union Carbide division chairman: I think we'll let you make those conclusions yourself.

REPORTER: Well, I'm asking you, as the man in charge.

Mr. KENNEDY: It's very clear that there is a question of management practices involved.

McCORMACK: Kennedy went on to promise that Carbide will redouble its efforts to clean up emissions, starting with their most hazardous chemicals.

Mr. KENNEDY: We are not going to quit on our people here in the valley or anywhere. In the weeks and months ahead, the record will show that the emissions and the pounds of material released from our plants, not only here but our plants everywhere, will have been consistently and dramatically reduced. Union Carbide has a problem; Union Carbide will clean it up.

BRACKETT: A data processing worker from Brooklyn is $13.66 million richer today. That's his share of the $41 million New York lottery. A pool of 21 winners will share another third of the prize. The 21 are workers in a factory in Mount Vernon, New York. Most of them are immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The known winner who gets a full third for himself is 36-year-old Joe Moore, a regular lottery player.

JOE MOORE, lottery winner: I went to a little candy store in my neighborhood on Tuesday night and I bought $20 worth of random numbers, and then basically took the numbers home, put them down, and then after the Lotto drawing I went and checked the numbers out.

BRACKETT: This evening the third and last winner was identified. She is Debbie Turcotte, a 29-year-old bartender in Troy, New York. Spy Tales

BRACKETT: We focus first tonight on a true-life spy story. It is a story of a spy catcher who turned out to be the spy. The head of Germany's counterintelligence unit, Hans Tiedge, has defected to East Germany. The West Germans suspect that Tiedge had been an East German spy for 19 years. Officials in Bonn say his defection threatens the country's intelligence networks. Besides Tiedge, three other West Germans in sensitive positions have also disappeared and are assumed to be in East Germany. To help us understand this spy scandal we have with us George Carver. Mr. Carver spent 26 years in top-level posts in the CIA. His tours included extensive stays in West Germany. He is now a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Mr. Carver, first, how much damage does this mean for West Germany?

GEORGE CARVER: Well, it could mean a great deal of damage, because the whole system that the Germans have for protecting themselves against constant KGB and East German intelligence activities must be presumed to be compromised. And it's the compromise of the system, the methods, that is even more serious than any particular piece of information that was passed.

BRACKETT: Well, can you tell us what exactly was his job, why did he have so much access?

Mr. CARVER: All right, fine. The Germans split the FBI, as it were. They have an organization called the Bundeshant fur Verfassungsschotz Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which does the investigation at the federal level of counterintelligence. Now, the BFV has no arrest powers. The arrest powers are all vested in the Bundescriminalamt, or federal criminal police. This is to prevent the rise of another Gestapo. In the BFV there are four directorates. Hans Joachim Tiedge was what they call abteilungsleiter, the chief of abwher(?), the fourth directorate, which was responsible for counterespionage and counterintelligence directory. It's as if the officer in the FBI who was in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence suddenlly showed up in Moscow.

BRACKETT: Well, how much damage does this mean for the West German spies who are in East Germany? That's who he was in charge of, basically?

Mr. CARVER: No, he's not in charge of them, and again, I do not want to downplay the seriousness, Elizabeth -- it is very major, but you want to keep it in proportion, too. The collection of intelligence on East Germany is the responsibility of another different organization known as the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, which is now headquartered in Cologne. So his, Tiedge's, job would have focused on allegedly making it difficult for the East Germans and the Soviet Union and all others to carry out intelligence operations inside the Federal Republic, but he would have had no responsibility and presumably relatively little knowledge of what intelligence operations the West Germans were conducting in East Germany or anywhere else.

BRACKETT: What about the three other people who apparently also have disappeared or defected and are probably in East Germany? I understand those three people, plus Tiedge, were all in place for nearly 20 years. How does that happen?

Mr. CARVER: Well, it happens because you have a very complicated social situation with the legacies and aftermaths of World War II. There was for openers a very strong desire on the part of the Germans and on the part of all of the victorious allies and on the part of everyone else to ensure that you had no rerun of the 1930s and 1940s, and above all to ensure that you had no recrudescence of any kind of Gestapo. So the counterintelligence internal security function was deliberately Balkanized when the Federal Republic was set up. This is, for example, why the investigative function is in one agency, the arrest and execution function is in another. Then the Germans have a policy, a deliberate policy, understandable, that anyone who shows up at any German consulate and says "I am a German" can become admitted to the Federal Republic as a citizen.

BRACKETT: How often are those people East Germans who may have taken another identity?

Mr. CARVER: Quite often. That's how many people came in. Then you have a great deal of civil libertarian concern. The minister of interior -- the Ministry of Interior is one of the two portfolios that goes to the FDP, or Free Democratic Party, is a coalition partner of both the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, or the CDU. And the FDP is very zealous in its protection of civil rights, as well it should be. So when you've got Balkanization, not to mention the federal-state Balkanization, zealous concern about civil rights, deliberate breaking up of centralization and efficiency, a policy of unrestricted, effectively unrestricted, immigration, plus the East German Ministry for State Security, Ministerium Ferstatszigher Heit(?)

BRACKETT: Mr. Carver, let me --

Mr. CARVER: -- going, you've got a happy ground.

BRACKETT: I'm getting a little confused with all those titles. Does that also mean that East Germany is better at this than West Germany? Is their system, does it make it easier for them to play spies than it does for West Germany or for the West?

Mr. CARVER: It does, Elizabeth, because they are ver thorough, they operate under no civil libertarian restrictions. The head of the East German intelligence service, Marcus Wolf, who has been doing it for over 20 years, makes John Le Carre's Karla look like a rank amateur. They use every device that they can think of. They do meticulous work on screening -- if a girl, if a secretary in a key installation, and this has happened many times, has trouble with her boyfriend and she likes Bach, she will meet a very handsome, devastating young man who happens to like Bach. And this happens time and time again. They also, because of the division of the country and because of the division of families, the East Germans are well equipped to remind someone that your uncle, your aunt, your grandmother, your college friend, your former wife, your children can suffer or be harmed if you don't cooperate and play ball. And so the game in Germany is for real; it is played by devices that the American Civil Liberties Union would not approve of, but the ACLU's writ does not run in either West Germany or East Germany, particularly in the East, and therefore you have a serious problem.

BRACKETT: Does this mean there's damage to the United States as well? Did we rely on the information of the West German counterintelligence agency?

Mr. CARVER: Well, the damage to the United States would be serious but derivative. We rely to some extent on the counterintelligence information of our allies, but no intelligence service relies totally on what anybody else tells it. We looked after protecting our own resources and assets. And again, Hans Joachim Tiedge would not have had, in the course of his official duties, direct access to information that the United States wanted considered classified about its own or about NATO capabilities. But I don't want to downplay it. He made it easy for the East Germans and the Soviets to conduct their intelligence operations, and for that reason he did a great deal of damage indeed.

BRACKETT: Do you think he was in place for 19 years? There was some speculation that he'd had some recent personal problems and perhaps he had just been turned by the East Germans.

Mr. CARVER: It's relatively unlikely that he was just turned, but no one will know until there can be a very careful after-action damage assessment how long it may have been, how long he may have been working. But you have to start out assuming the worst. Herr Heribert Hellenbroich, who's the head of the BFV and is a very thorough officer, and he has to assume with his colleagues that he could have been working for 19 years and working it back from there. And I certainly don't envy him his job tonight.

BRACKETT: What does this mean for relations between East and West Germany?

Mr. CARVER: It means that they will take a distinct turn, a very chilling turn. Chancellor Kohl yesterday said as much when he spoke to the Bundestag and alerted them to the fact that the story was about to break.

BRACKETT: Is this as serious as the spy scandal of several years ago in West Germany, would you say?

Mr. CARVER: Well, it depends on which scandal you're talking about, Elizabeth. There have been quite a few of them. The two that I think it equates with in seriousness are when it turned out that Gunter Guillaume, Willy Brandt's personal assistant when Brandt was chancellor, was working for the East German intelligence service, or when --

BRACKETT: That's the one I mean, as a matter of fact. Is this as serious as that one, just quickly?

Mr. CARVER: Yes, I think it is, and it's also as serious as when Otto John, the head of the counterintelligence service, the BFV, was shown back in the late '50s to be an East German agent.

BRACKETT: Okay, thank you very much, Mr. Carver, for joining us. Microchip Battle

LEHRER: Next, a focus report from the front of the 1985 war with Japan over trade. The issue is the memory chip, the key to America's once invincible high-tech semiconductor industry. Correspondent Tom Bearden is the reporter.

TOM BEARDEN [voice-over]: They are the heart of the information age: tiny chips of silicon that contain thousands of electronic circuits that can remember. A chip like this can store 64,000 bits of information. They're called D-RAMs, or dynamic random access memory. Americans invented them and perfected the extremely complex methods needed to mass-produce them. D-RAMs fueled the explosive growth and spectacular performance of the electronics industry over the past decade. They're found in a myriad of consumer products: personal computers, programmable videotape recorders and microwave ovens.

Twenty years ago the only kind of chips anybody here in Boise, Idaho, ever heard about were made out of potatos. Today the area supports one of the largest concentrations of semiconductor manufacturers in the country. One of them is Micron Technology. Their plant is on the outskirts of town, surrounded by sagebrush and desert. It's one of the most celebrated of the small entrepreneurial electronics companies, a firm that made millions selling chips. They did that by cutting the price of D-RAMs by 40 last September, bringing howls of outrage from their competitors. Micron sold D-RAMs for $1.95 last year. But today the wholesale price is under 60 cents. Micron says that's less than what it costs to produce them. Ironically, Micron has been laid low by other price cutters: the Japanese. Today many work stations at this $100 million facility are vacant. Much of the machinery is idle. Micron has been forced to lay off half its work force.

RANDY GEILE, Micron employee: It's always hard to see your friends, people that have done a good job, have families, in the middle of the winter up here in Idaho try to lay them off. But you know, it's something that is the survival of the company.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: The layoffs were only the beginning of Micron's survival strategy. They declared war on the Japanese.

JOE PARKINSON, president, Micron: I would like to have the government hit the Japanese right between the eyes. I think there's been too much talk and not enough action. And the Japanese have come to believe that that's all that's going to happen, is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of talk.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Joe Parkinson is the president of Micron. Other ailing companies are asking for federal help in opening Japanese markets they consider closed against them. But Micron considers that hopeless and is pursuing an uncharted legal course alone. In June, Micron petitioned the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate what they claim are predatory Japanese pricing policies. Micron is accusing Japan of dumping D-RAMs in the U.S. to destroy the domestic industry. If the investigation finds the charges to be true, Washington could levy punitive tariffs.

Mr. PARKINSON: What we're asking the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission to do is to enforce United States laws, okay, which require that foreigners who deliver a product in the United States do so at a fair price. And if they can prove that their costs are that low, then we have no complaint. But I feel very certain that their costs will be proven to be higher than our costs and that they will be proven to have been illegally selling in the United States.

CARL SCHWARZ, Hitachi attorney: Hitachi is on record as saying that it sells those chips at a profit.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Carl Schwarz is a Washington lawyer representing the giant Hitachi Company, which is fighting the Micron petition.

Mr. SCHWARZ: I view it as just another aspect of the seemingly orchestrated effort by some U.S. semiconductor manufacturers to put the blame for the economic downturn that they're now experiencing on their Japanese competition. Japanese companies are a convenient scapegoat and thispetition is simply another aspect of that campaign.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Japanese chip manufacturers say they can sell their products so cheaply because of superior manufacturing and management techniques. But Micron and others say this sales flier issued by Hitachi is solid evidence of Japanese dumping. It tells distributors to continue to undercut competitors' prices until they win the bid. Schwarz says that flier is not very significant.

Mr. SCHWARZ: That flier has been so far blown out of proportion that if -- it's nothing more than, I'm sure, what you and I have seen almost on a daily basis from companies that are selling a product and say we will not be undersold. That product, that flier, was the product of three young -- American, by the way -- employees at Hitachi San Jose sales facility. That flier was sent out to distributors without the knowledge, much less the approval, of Hitachi's top management.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: But Parkinson says the win-at-any-cost philosophy reflected in the Hitachi flier points out the need for a strong U.S. response. Opinion in Boise about Micron's petition seems to be divided. The governor and state agencies are backing the company, but Idaho is a conservative state with a strong free-market tradition. There are few indications of a groundswell of support from the general public. John Carpenter runs a computer store. He too has felt the pressure of Japanese competition but says tariffs aren't the answer.

JOHN CARPENTER, computer retailer: I'm a free-market man myself and you -- anytime you start putting trade barriers in place it may have a positive effect on one industry but it's going to have a negative effect on other industries.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Debra Oktober worked in marketing at Micron. She was laid off in June. She's opposed to trade barriers, even though Japanese competition cost her her job.

DEBRA OKTOBER, former Micron employee: Let's look at the way that the Japanese management and their workforce deal together. Let's look at that Japanese work ethic and the way that they're structured within companies. I think America has a lot to learn right now, and just to build a wall of tariff, we're going to lose in the long run. That's a very short-term cure for me.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Parkinson contends his plant is more efficient and enjoys significant advantages over the Japanese. He insists that Japanese government industrial policies have targeted his markets, that government money is being used to intentionally drive American firms out of business.

Mr. PARKINSON: It's basically a small entrepreneurial company started with farmers' money here in Idaho against, you know, government-supported companies in Japan.

BEARDEN [voice-over]: Parkinson believes the only long-term solution has to involve the U.S. government because he believes the Japanese are waging an economic war that is merely an extension of World War II.

Mr. PARKINSON: That war is still going on. It's being fought on a different front now; it's being fought on an economic front, but it's being waged very effectively by them, and you know, from my perspective, we need to wake up and recognize that this one's got as high a stakes as the last one did in the '40s.

Mr. SCHWARZ: My response to that is it's really unfortunate that we have to have people descend to such depths. It does no one any good to make references to the war in connection with current trade-friction policies or problems.

Ms. OKTOBER: It would feel like sour grapes and self-serving to be bitter about someone that can come along and do a job better. I think instead of that, maybe to look at it and say, "Hey, this is an opportunity. We can learn from them and maybe go one better."

BEARDEN [voice-over]: A decision from the Reagan administration on Micron's petition is at least a year away. Up to now the administration has been unsympathetic to similar requests from other industries.

BRACKETT: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a debate over whether college professors should be screened for political bias, and we tune in to the music of Bruce Springsteen, and this time we listen to the lyrics.

This is pledge week on PBS and we are taking a short break now so that your local public television station can ask for your support. That support helps to keep programs like this one on the air. We'll be back shortly.

[fund-raising intermission] Testing for Bias

LEHRER: Next, the new effort to monitor the politics of college professors. Accuracy in Academia is the organization behind the program, which begins with the just-opening new college year. The group is concerned about a liberal bias on many college campuses and it has asked students to observe and report back on the political biases of their professors' teachings. It is an idea that has outraged some as a threat to academic freedom. We sample some of the outrage and the debate about the program tonight with the president of Accuracy in Academia, Malcolm Lawrence, and the executive director of the American Association of University Professors, Ernst Benjamin.

Mr. Lawrence, how exactly will your program work?

ERNST LAWRENCE: Accuracy in Academia is a spinoff of AIM, Accuracy in Media. We have just been established as of August 1 and we started networking already hundreds of students who have contacted us. We haven't asked the students to cooperate with Accuracy in Academia; they've heard about the creation of this organization and expressed a willingness to monitor courses, send us reports as to where they think there are inaccurate reports, inaccurate indicators from professors, whether it's left, right or center. It so happens that the greatest threat seems to be from the liberal side, and there are reportedly some 10,000 Marxist professors, for example, who apparently believe that the only way we're going to survive as a nation is to scrap our Constitution, our borders, and indeed have a revolution and shift into socialism and communism. So we want to know the extent to which they are giving misinformation in their proselytization of children.

LEHRER: And then what will you do with these reports?

Mr. LAWRENCE: We will check them out first with the professor. We will release no names -- we don't want to be the academic National Enquirer, we're not seeking sensationalism. We're going to be gentlemanly about this. We're going to see if it's taken out of context. If in fact he persists in pursuing what we consider to be inaccurate information, we will then have these published in our newsletter or try to get the local college paper to publish them. And we essentially think that we have an information duty to the nation to tell the people what's going on. The taxpayers, the alumni associations -- we think it's a job long overdue.

LEHRER: And you're talking literally about what a professor might say in a lecture or in response to a question in the classroom, right?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Well, we're not talking about his ability to give his opinions, his views, his right to freedom of speech. We're talking about the information that he imparts that we think is either unbalanced, inaccurate, misleading, misinformation, whatever you want to call it.

LEHRER: And you --

Mr. LAWRENCE: So he -- yes, go ahead.

LEHRER: No, you go ahead.

Mr. LAWRENCE: He has his right to say what he wants. We think the student who has paid for the tuition charges has the right to repeat what the professor says, whether it's to their parents or to Accuracy in Academia. It's an open forum.

LEHRER: Is it your position that the majority of college campuses or in most classrooms there is a liberal bias by professors?

Mr. LAWRENCE: The feeling is that there is certainly more of a liberal bias than a conservative bias, and of course when you get into something like Marxism or communism it falls off the chart. I don't think many liberals, whether they're commentators or college professors, really want to overthrow our government and set up communism. But there are people like Professor Bertel Ullmann, who teaches at New York University, who thinks that if you take his course you will be converted to the science of communism or Marxism or whatever he's professing. His book happens to be in use in 100 universities. Then there's a Saul Landau at the University of California who's pro-Castro, and students tried to have a balanced presentation from the other side and were unsuccessful. So these things are out there. Tomorrow, beginning at University of Minnesota, there's a one-week conference on Marxism put together by the Communist Party and professors at the University of Minnesota. And the Minnesota state representatives are very much upset about this, and they are appealing to the university to not only stop this kind of activity but have these professors dismissed and removed from the campus. Now, this is their idea, not mine. We don't get into personnel matters.

LEHRER: All right. Mr. Benjamin, what's wrong with what Mr. Lawrence is up to?

ERNST BENJAMIN, American Association of University Professors: Well, a very great deal is wrong with what Mr. Lawrence is proposing. There's a kind of shift in his logic from talking about accuracy at one moment to talking about ideological conformity at the next. We as professors are certainly committed to accuracy -- that is a professional standard and professional obligation. We are committed to trying to render the best judgment we can in terms of our disciplines. But we have to be free to arrive where our best judgment takes us, and we can't be subject to a continuing intervention and review by some self-styled outside group that's going to come in with its tape recorders and send off the lectures to some kind of central committee for review.

LEHRER: What's wrong with that?

Mr. BENJAMIN: Several things are wrong with it. What a professor says is public, but what a professor says to the students is part of an educational process. When the professor is suddenly placed in a situation where every word is going to be scrutinized by a group which is going to make some kind of external judgment of it, it's going to change the relationship between --

LEHRER: Give me an example of how that could work?

Mr. BENJAMIN: Well, what I would foresee happening is a lot of professors will start writing out their lectures to make sure they get every word right. They'll start having to tape-record their own lectures to be sure that they're not being misquoted. They're going to have to take extreme care because they don't know how this outside group is going to use it. And it's going to destroy the natural rapport of the classroom. On top of that, if one group can come in and do that, why not every group? How many different groups are going to come in and start reviewing, not merely the accuracy but the ideological orientation of the different faculty?

LEHRER: And where would that lead then?

Mr. BENJAMIN: Well, I think it'll lead two ways. One, it'll have a chilling effect on academic freedom. The other is that it may lead to the kind of contention and disorder on the campus that we've recently recovered from. If you've got all the groups coming in there and not having a free exchange of ideas but a kind of battleground of doctrine and testing, that would certainly be very destructive to the educational process.

LEHRER: How would it impinge on academic freedom?

Mr. BENJAMIN: It impinges on academic freedom because this group is testing the ideological purity of the professor's statement, not its competence. The reason I can say that is, first, they're recruiting students based on their ideology, not based on special competence; secondly, they start out by saying the need for this is that "Surveys show that a number of graduate students at one particular school of journalism were of the liberal left." And that they say is the evidence of why this has to be done. Now, that's an ideological test; that's not an academic test.

LEHRER: He's right about that, isn't he, Mr. Lawrence?

Mr. LAWRENCE: No. We're looking for information; we're not going after individual professors or their political interests or positions. We are not selecting students. Students are writing to us; they're calling us. Now, we don't ask them if they're conservatives, if they're liberal. As a matter of fact I got a question the other day from a student, whether a Marxist student who monitored a conservative professor could send information into us for evaluation and I said yes, sir, we'd be willing to look at that.

LEHRER: Does that make you feel any better?

Mr. BENJAMIN: Not a bit better because I know that in fact, as they've declared the group to whom they send their information and the groups with whom they work, are all not merely conservative but radical right-type of groups. But it wouldn't make me feel any better if it was the left doing this. In the AAUP one of the things that we've had to do is to protect moderate faculty from the hecklers, from the people on the left who would disrupt their classes. We're opposed to any kind of interference in the academic process.

LEHRER: Why?

Mr. BENJAMIN: Because the whole nature of the academic enterprise requires not only the free exchange of ideas but a really honest, open, relaxed exchange of ideas where you can think and be thoughtful. And if you turn it into a political process, if you turn it into an electoral, competitive, political process, you're going to destroy the intellectual integrity.

LEHRER: What do you say to that argument, that this isn't the place for that?

Mr. LAWRENCE: I say that one minute after the upper echelons of academia found out what we were going to do, the best they could come out with were knee-jerk labels: right wing, brownshirts and all these kinds of things. This borders on paranoia. If these professors are telling the truth, if they're teaching a balance, if they're not ashamed of what they're doing, if they think they don't have to be secretive, then they have to really publish or perish. I should think they'd want everybody to know what's going on in their classroom.

LEHRER: What about his point, though, that this is not the place for that kind of thing?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Certainly it's the place for that kind of thing. Most universities have some kind of taxpayers' funds in them, whether it's state, federal or local. There's no psychiatrist-patient relationship here. This is not an inner sanctum. We think a student can take notes, for ages students have taken notes. Now they're bringing in tape recorders.

Mr. BENJAMIN: What we're talking about is the exchange of ideas versus some kind of political test of what professors do. Now, the proper role of the university is the free exchange of ideas and certainly there are no secrets in the university. But the ideas are supposed to be tested for their truth and their value by other competent people. Professors are tested all the time by other professors. Let's suppose that he's right and that there are 10,000 Marxists of some sort or other out there. There are 600,000 professors. That means there are 590,000 other trained Ph.D. professors keeping an eye on those alleged 10,000. Now, why are these students and these people in Mr. Lawrence's group going to do a better job of testing those professors than the 590,000 trained professors who are already out there, the provosts, the deans and the public representatives in the form of the board of trustees?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Well, we're not going to evaluate higher education. The top educator in the country, William Bennett, has already said that the public is intimidated by the university types and we need some kind of consumer group to look at them. I don't think he was thinking of Accuracy in Academia, but maybe we can fill part of that bill. I think it's interesting that Mr. Benjamin's group represents perhaps less than 10 of the university professors in the United States, and when he uses things like --

LEHRER: Is that right?

Mr. BENJAMIN: We have about 60,000 members.

Mr. LAWRENCE: Out of 600,000, plus 225,000 part-time professors. So it's even less than 10%. And when he utters such things as "right-wing groups" it's obvious where he's coming from. I mean, a right-wing professor doesn't label Accuracy in Academia right wing; he probably calls it good.

LEHRER: Are you suggesting that his organization is a left-wing group?

Mr. LAWRENCE: I didn't say his organization was. I said that the knee-jerk labeling borders on paranoia when someone has to be rebuked, as he stated in The Washington Post, for something that hasn't even started yet. This is hysteria in addition to paranoia. What are they afraid of?

Mr. BENJAMIN: We're not afraid of anything. We are deeply concerned that this kind of group is going to be disruptive on the campus; that it's going to interfere with the intellectual freedom, not only of the faculty but of the students; that it's going to cause contentiousness. We think it's unnecessary. We think there are far more serious problems of education today. We think there are problems of funding; we think there are problems with minority participation; we think that there are problems of recruiting a new generation of faculty. We don't think we need the diversion of this kind of test of the ideological purity of faculty.

LEHRER: But you're not backing off what you said a moment ago? You believe that Mr. Lawrence's group is a radical right organization --

Mr. BENJAMIN: Yes, I do.

LEHRER: -- concerned with radical right ideology?

Mr. BENJAMIN: I certainly do.

LEHRER: And you say that's not so?

Mr. LAWRENCE: No, it's not so, and I think it's a shame when the fear of someone taking notes --

LEHRER: Well, what words would you use to describe the ideology?

Mr. LAWRENCE: I would call myself anything but liberal. The main thing I'm interested in and the thing Accuracy in Academia is interested in is maintaining our current capitalistic system, our democracy, a strong national defense, and if you have large percentages of Marxist professors or radical professors advocating the overthrow of the United States and the gradual revolution that Marxists think is coming about, then this is what we want to point out to the American public. They can say what they want; we really want the public to know what they're saying.

LEHRER: All right.

Mr. BENJAMIN: My reaction is that a group which calls itself Accuracy in Media and starts throwing out charges that there are professors out to overthrow the government of the United States ought to come up with a little bit of data before it makes those kind of statements.

Mr. LAWRENCE: Try Accuracy in Academia instead of Media.

LEHRER: Gentlemen, thank you both very much. Message from the Boss

BRACKETT: Finally tonight, an essay about the country's hottest rock star, Bruce Springsteen, a performer whose music you have surely heard but whose message you may have missed, even if his latest album has sold 13 million copies. Our essayist, Bill Barol of Newsweek, is one of the thousands who heard Springsteen at his sold-out Giant Stadium concert.

BILL BAROL, Newsweek: The song is "Born in the USA," the title tune from Bruce Springsteen's seventh album, sung this week on the stage of Giant Stadium in New Jersey. The album is an enormous hit, and the song has made Springsteen, already a very big rock and roll star, into something bigger: a national icon. In this year, the year that spans the '84 Summer Olympics and the '85 summer of Rambo, the song and the performer have tapped a deep well of patriotic feeling. Springsteen's songs are simple, moving testaments to the power of faith in hard times, specifically the hard times felt by working-class Americans in the sunset days of an old industrial economy. The music has brought him enormous success. But this year, with "Born in the USA," he has achieved something more. In the minds of millions he has come to stand for America itself. Even our 74-year-old President tried to pick up the tune last September. He was campaigning for re-election at the time in Springsteen's home state of New Jersey.

Pres. RONALD REAGAN: America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen.

BAROL: What's especially interesting about all this is that few people, from the President on down, seem to be listening very closely. Maybe people hear what they want to hear. In Born in the USA they've chosen to hear an exultant fist-shaking anthem for the new American patriotism. The only problem is, that isn't what the song is about. Listen carefully.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN [singing]: "Got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man."

BAROL: This is the story of a young man whose life starts badly and then gets worse when he is sent to Vietnam. It's a bleak, harrowing song, and if there's a message of hope there, I can't hear it. Maybe the misinterpretation isn't all that surprising. There is hope in much of Springsteen's music. In any case, it really doesn't matter. What counts is that the song and all the ones that went before have won for Bruce Springsteen a global soapbox. What he's chosen to do with it is revealing and heartening.

At every place along the road these days, Springsteen takes a minute to stop the music. This alone is unheard of. It breaksthe first rule of rock and roll, which is that nothing stops the show. But what happens next is extraordinary. Standing alone at the edge of the stage, Springsteen talks to the people, and what he tells them is what lies closest to his heart. He tells them that outside the stadium walls, in their own hometowns, folks are in trouble. Not characters in songs; real people. Unemployed steelworkers in Pennsylvania; the hungry and homeless in New Jersey. Then he tells them the name of a local community action group and suggests that they get acquainted with it. The people listen and at the end they applaud. It's hard to imagine any other rock star doing this, and harder still to imagine them donating $10,000 at every stop as Springsteen has done since last fall.

We pick our own heroes, and who we choose says a lot about who we are and who we want to be. Springsteen is an American hero, a real one, because he's a symbol of the best that's in us, the part of us that talks straight and treats people fairly, the part that's humble and compassionate. Maybe that's what explains the bond between Springsteen and the fans. It's a tight connection, heart to heart, and although it's unspoken, its spirit is unmistakable. What it says is this: we have promises to keep, you and I, to ourselves, to our neighbors, to America. Tonight we'll dance, but tomorrow let's all live up to our promises.

LEHRER: The observations of Bill Barol of Newsweek magazine. Again, the major stories of this Friday. Six blacks died in new rioting in South Africa and the police arrested several opponents of apartheid, possibly including the Reverend Allan Boesak, who has called for a mass protest march next week. Union Carbide blamed both human and equipment failure for the August 11th poison gas leak in West Virginia that sent 135 people to hospitals. And West Germany's chief spy catcher defected to the other side as the West German spy scandal got worse.

Good night, Elizabeth.

BRACKETT: Good night, Jim. That's our NewsHour for tonight. Have a good weekend.