High on buzzwords but low on data, a controversial legislative panel created to investigate political "indoctrination" at state colleges held its first hearing yesterday at Pitt's student union.

By the end of hour one, student protesters had interrupted the hearing, strutting through the ballroom and chanting "HUAC, go away," a reference to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee.

By hour two, the "select committee on academic freedom in higher education" heard its first overt mention of communism.

And by afternoon's end, the panel and its invited speakers had walked through a minefield of evolutionary theory, creationism and Holocaust deniers, issues that had varying degrees of relevancy to the subject at hand.

The inquiry is controversial because Democrats and college professors view it as a thinly veiled attempt by majority Republicans to stamp the autonomy, not to mention the liberal political ideology, out of academia. Republicans in the House say the inquiry is necessary because conservative students have reported being intimidated, or graded unfairly, by liberal professors.

State Rep. Gibson Armstrong, a Lancaster County Republican who spearheaded the creation of the panel, said that he's collected 50 complaints from students who say they feel intimidated, or "indoctrinated." Democratic lawmakers wonder about Mr. Armstrong's accounting methods, given that none of them has received a single complaint.

"I don't think we're brainwashing anybody, [which] is what you're implying," said state Rep. Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill.

The vote to create the panel -- which doesn't have any legislative authority and doesn't require the governor's signature -- was a party-line tally, 108-90. Democrats voted against it, GOP for it.

As a result, the initial admonition that came from state Rep. Tom Stevenson -- "This is no witch hunt," he said -- went largely ignored by the people convinced that the inquiry, if not a witch hunt, is at least a red scare.

He told the audience, which grew as the afternoon wore on and classes let out, that the inquiry would focus on a college's institutional duties, not an individual professor's ideology.

But it didn't take long for the first speaker, Stephen Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, to note that college professors at state schools tend to be more often liberal than conservative. Though there's no comparable study of Pennsylvania's state-owned and state-related universities, Mr. Balch examined the political donations from Pennsylvania professors, concluding that humanities and social sciences professors were more likely to donate to a Democratic candidate than to a Republican one, by a 30-1 margin.

As for Mr. Balch, a registered Republican, he's donated money to a group called "The Freedom Project," which is dedicated to advancing the Republican agenda and keeping Congress out of the hands of "union bosses, trial lawyers and campus radicals."

Mr. Balch said the liberal majority at colleges can be damaging in a variety of ways. First, it leads to the indoctrination of students, which runs contrary to a professor's mission to pass down knowledge, but not ideology. Second, the liberal majority is a self-perpetuating circle -- alternative voices, namely conservatives, don't feel welcome, and are less likely to apply for faculty or graduate school positions.

The staff becomes "so one-sided, so inbred," that they no longer recognize the possibility of competing viewpoints, he said.

Third, the exclusion of alternative political viewpoints leads to unchecked advocacy and activism, which, in Mr. Balch's eyes, ought not be the mission of a professor, or a state university.

If colleges go out of their way to promote ethnic and racial diversity among the faculty and the student body -- a concept that Dr. Balch's group disagrees with -- then it should at least go to the same lengths to promote diverse political viewpoints, he said.

And if they don't, it is within the Legislature's purview to hold schools accountable and tell them to "get it right," he said.

Hogwash, said Joan Wallach Scott and Robert Moore. Ms. Scott, a gender studies professor and former chair of the American Association of University Professors, and Mr. Moore, a St. Joseph University professor, said the concepts of academic autonomy and faculty tenure are in place to prevent government from telling teachers how to teach -- or how not to teach.

They also objected to the "academic bill of rights," outlined in House Resolution 177 (the one that authorized the special panel).

The "academic bill of rights" is redundant in the places where it calls for a grievance procedure for students who feel they've been graded unfairly or capriciously, because all universities have such grievance procedures in place, said the two professors. Where the "bill of rights" is not redundant, it is either unnecessary or downright dangerous.

Mr. Moore said he is skeptical of the claims of rampant political intimidation or unfair grading that are collected mostly online, without any fact-checking.

"I'm a social scientist," he said. "I would like to see data."