The Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), a conservative Los Angeles-based think tank, has placed advertisements in several university newspapers, including The Crimson, decrying professors' use of the book I, Rigoberta Menchu.

Menchu, a Quiche Mayan, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for this autobiographical work, which details the terrors perpetrated against her family during the Guatemalan insurrection.

However, since the prize was awarded, the book's actual authorship and the truth of its accounts have been called into question.

In January, Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll released a book called Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans that reexamines and challenges many of Menchu's claims.

After examining Guatemalan archival material and conducting interviews with survivors of the events, Stoll concluded many of the claims Menchu makes in the book were either distorted or completely fabricated.

Menchu's Nobel Prize was never revoked. She still stands by the truth of her account, blaming any problems on Elisabeth Burgos, the Venezuelan anthropologist who transcribed interviews with Menchu and actually wrote the book.

CSPC puts out several news analysis publications including FrontPage Magazine. The organization's advertisement claims that many professors still advocate Menchu's viewpoint, ignoring the question of credibility.

"Rigoberta Menchu Nobel Laureate and Marxist terrorist now exposed as an intellectual hoax," the advertisement reads. "This fraud was originally perpetrated and is still defended by your professors and by the Nobel Prize Committee."

The advertisement has run or will soon run in campus newspapers at Yale, Columbia and Brandeis universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Harvard.