A MILLION LITTLE PESOS (via Gene Brown):

'Nobel' lies on campus (Nathanael Blake, Apr 21, 2006, Townhall)

Rigoberta Menchu Tum was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She is also guilty of a literary fraud that would get her expelled from OSU for academic dishonesty if she were a student. Or perhaps not – she’s going to be an honored speaker on campus this weekend. [...]

So ubiquitous is she in academic circles that Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education used her popularity as the symbol for the replacement of great classical works with mediocre multicultural education. “Rigoberta’s peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies. Thus she is really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society,” and her book, “represents not the zenith of Third World achievements, but rather caters to the ideological proclivities of American activists.”

Such criticisms were for naught; Rigoberta won the Nobel the next year, with D’Souza ruefully remarking, “All I can say is that I am relieved she didn’t win for literature.” As it turns out, that might have been more appropriate. In the late 1990’s, the story that informed Rigoberta’s secular sainthood came apart. Anthropologist David Stoll, in research confirmed by the New York Times, revealed that she had been lying all along. She wasn’t illiterate, but had been educated in a prestigious Catholic boarding school. The land dispute central to formulating her Marxism beliefs didn’t pit her family against wealthy landowners, but against their own relatives. Her brother Nicolas didn’t die of starvation, but was alive and well in Guatemala.

But she retains much of her popularity. Her book is still assigned in classes, and she’s still welcome to speak at universities, including my own.