Conservative critics of higher education like Dinesh D'Souza and David Horowitz have pounced on his findings to push their claim that the academy is held captive by politically correct professors. The anxiety, he says, comes from the way his work is being used as a political football by opposing camps. Now a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College in Vermont, Stoll, MA '87, PhD '92, is watching this spectacle unfold with a mixture of anxiety and pride.

The controversy has dredged up old arguments from the campus culture wars of the 1980s - questions about the political motivations behind revamped reading lists and the slippery nature of truth itself. Stoll's 336-page book has touched off a furor played out on the front page of the New York Times (which sent a reporter to Guatemala to confirm his charges), in full-page college newspaper ads and in outposts of intellectual discourse like the New Republic and the New York Review of Books. 'Such works provide rebels in far-off places, into whom careerists can project their fantasies of rebellion.' 'Books like I, Rigoberta Menchú will be exalted because they tell many academics what they want to hear,' Stoll writes in Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1999).

Stoll also excoriates American academics for naively buying Menchú's story, an account of villainous soldiers and noble peasants that neatly fit the preconceived notions of many professors. His conclusion: Menchú fabricated some of the most horrific details in her story, manipulating it to create a work of propaganda that would be useful to the anti-government guerrillas she joined in 1981. Eventually Stoll interviewed more than 120 of Menchú's neighbors and relatives and reviewed thousands of pages of Guatemalan government documents. Starting in 1989 when he was a PhD student at Stanford, he scoured mountain villages in Guatemala's Quiché province, a region whose Mayan peasants were devastated by that country's 36-year civil war. He'd be criticizing a woman whose harrowing story made her a symbol of oppression and led to her winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.īut Stoll plowed forward with an inquiry into the events described in I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (Verso, 1984). After all, Stoll would be questioning an internationally acclaimed book that had become a mainstay of the multicultural canon. David Stoll knew he was likely to stir up trouble when he began looking into disturbing inaccuracies in Rigoberta Menchú's first-person account of brutality at the hands of the Guatemalan army.

I rigoberta menchú