April 2001
One hundred screaming protesters outside the doors of a small newspaper
office can be intimidating, especially for the editor who is the main target
of their abuse.
The protesters swarmed outside the office of my paper, the Badger
Herald, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after first marching
across campus brandishing placards that read “Badger Herald Racist.” They
demonstrated for more than an hour, demanding my resignation as editor,
because the Herald had run a paid advertisement entitled “Ten Reasons Why
Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea — and Racist Too.” The ad was written
and placed by David Horowitz, a conservative author, and had appeared on
the last day of Black History Month, a full six days before the demonstration,
which took place March 6.
The 10 anti-reparations reasons listed ranged from the commonplace (“There
is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery,” or “Only
a tiny minority of white Americans ever owned slaves”) to the very controversial
(“What about the debt blacks owe to America?”). But our decision to publish
was based on the straightforward view that our paper believes in free speech.
The Horowitz ad was published elsewhere too, and the hostile response
to it was as disturbing as the mobbing of our offices. Angry protesters
confronted staffers of the Daily Californian at the University of California,
Berkeley, after the ad had run. The Daily Cal’s editor, Daniel Hernandez,
printed a front-page apology for running the ad, calling his paper “an
inadvertent vehicle for bigotry” and acknowledging, in a mea culpa wrung
from him by the protesters, that the ad had not passed through the proper
channels.
We were also under pressure to abase ourselves. But the Herald editorial
board refused to run an apology. Instead, we published an editorial saying
that “at the Badger Herald, we only regret that the editors of the
Daily Californian allowed themselves to give in to pressure in the manner
that unfortunately violated their professional integrity and journalistic
duty to protect speech with which they disagree.”
The issues raised here go to the heart of a critical question: Are American
university campuses free and open to a spirit of inquiry, or closed places
where activist cohorts can determine what is, or isn’t, acceptable? Signs
of rot can be detected in the fact that at least 15 college newspapers
— including those at Harvard, Columbia, Notre Dame, the University of
Washington, Georgia Tech and the University of Virginia — have rejected
the Horowitz ad on grounds that it was politically unacceptable.
This is not to say that newspapers must print all advertisements submitted.
The Herald does not prints ads that are completely false. The ad submitted
(and rejected) last weekend by the Multicultural Student Coalition calling
the Herald a “racist propaganda machine” would fall into this category.
But the Horowitz ad is well within the bounds of political discourse.
One student (and student-government representative) at the Badger Herald
rally shouted, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech.” Really? Most
people outside of college campuses no doubt would be amazed to find that
reparations for slavery has become, for some, a nondebatable subject.
On a traditionally liberal campus like ours, any opinions originating
from the right tend to be stomped out with a vengeance. Rather than rebut
Mr. Horowitz’s arguments, the protesters simply tried to drown out his
message with name-calling directed at the Herald. It’s woefully apparent
that the same campuses that once stood for idealistic causes in the ’60s
and ’70s now tolerate only political hyper-correctness and unchallenged
“progressive” thought. Though the students who protested at the doors of
the Herald say they demand “diversity” — UW-Madison’s latest buzzword
— they appear not to accept that principle when it comes to expression
or beliefs.
The most consistent criticism of the Herald’s action in printing the
Horowitz ad has been our alleged lack of sensitivity to students of color
on campus. While I do not deny the passionate reaction by many students
to the advertisement, this is one of the painful and inescapable by-products
of the free-speech principle by which ethical journalists must abide.
Shamefully for the culprits, the most recent maneuver in the speech
wars at UW-Madison is an illegal and cowardly one. Several students have
witnessed others throwing away stacks of Heralds from their racks in university
buildings, while several Herald staff members have retrieved heaps of bundled
papers from garbage cans in the same buildings. How ironic it is that the
diversity of viewpoints the activists are demanding is trashed along with
the open forum in which it can be represented.
Previously published in the Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2001.
Printed with permission of the author.
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