By Brian Carnell

Monday, March 12, 2001

The university I attended in the 1980s had a speech code. Everybody I talked to hated that speech code, regardless of whether they were Left, Right, male, female, black, white, Asian, whatever. After several years of lobbying by groups and individuals who were otherwise diametrically opposed on issues, the university finally gave in and essentially eliminated the speech code.

So I always find it odd when I read accounts around the country of students actively demanding that the universities and colleges they attend censor students who say things that these self-appointed individuals find offensive.

David Horowitz has recently pushed all the right buttons of these folks by attempting to place an ad in college newspapers giving ten reasons why the notion of reparations for slavery is not only incorrect but racist as well. Of the 40 newspapers Horowitz sent the ad, only 6 have printed it while 13 have rejected it (some of the papers have yet to respond).

Now certainly newspapers have the right to reject any ad they receive, but of the 6 newspapers that agreed to publish the ad, 4 later went on to cave in and apologize to student activists for running the ad. The sight of newspapers prostrating themselves in apology, of course, fulfills Horowitz's predictions about political correctness on American campuses and he's reaping a whirlwind of free publicity far beyond what his ad dollars could have bought him.

One of the newspapers that didn't apologize for the ad was the University of Wisconsin-Madision Badger Herald. Several student groups protested the newspaper and paid for an ad which the Badger Herald refused to run, but which the UW Madison Daily Cardinal did agree to run. The ad was sponsored by a number of student groups including the Multicultural Student Coalition, La Mujer Latina, Promoting Intergroup Relation son Campus, La Colectiva Cultural de Atzlan, International Socialist Organization, Wunk Sheek, Union Puertorriquena, Wisconsin Black Student Union, Asian American Student Union, National Panhellenic Council, Student Labor Action Committee, and Generation 2008. The text of that ad is a chilling reminder that the urge to censor is alive and well on American campuses.

First, the ad refers to another incident in which the Badger Herald published an editorial cartoon that mocked the Ku Klux Klan. The cartoon was protested essentially on the grounds that regardless of whether or not the cartoon made fun of the KKK, to present any depiction of the KKK in the student newspaper was racist and harmful. The student groups who placed the ad concur with this view,

The KKK represents a racist ideology that historically operated to violate the civil rights and liberties of non-whites through violent action. The KKK cartoon that appeared in the Badger Herald reflects this same racist agenda. Context alone cannot filter out or justify the traumatic effects of a KKK cartoon with images of a swastika that offends Whites, Asians, Latinos, Blacks, Native Americans, and Jews. If a cartoon of a rapist was placed in the Herald, it still represents rape and violent domination over women, no matter what dialogue takes place.

Even though I've read this several times now, I still find it almost unbelievable that a group of college students in the United States actually wrote this drivel. My first reaction was that maybe they really haven't considered the effects of actually following through on a policy such as this, but unfortunately they have.

The racist advertisement [by Horowitz] that recently ran in the Herald is a bold slap in the face to students of color who have to deal with the daily effects of the miseducation that the advertisement produced. These attacks are masked as examples of free speech that have historically been used to reinforce white dominance, which is one form of white supremacy. This type of speech has a debilitating impact on the lives of those students of color who are being targeted by race. Intent is never an adequate justification for impact.

This is an increasingly common view of free speech by some elements of the academic Left. Speech is redefined as a tool of oppression which can then be safely dealt with. Rather than arguing that they would like to censor or ban arguments against slavery reparations, the student groups can then argue that they are simply eliminating racism rather than restricting free speech. This argument has its roots in a more sophisticated attack on speech by radical feminists which blurs the line between speech and action such that a sexually explicit image literally is an act of sexual violence itself.

And, of course, once you are dealing with racist oppression rather than free speech, anything goes. The students' ad considers the fact that "Black students have stormed the office of the Badger Herald on numerous occasions over the past couple years" to be proof of the newspaper's culpability in racism. I suspect a group of pro-life activists who took out an ad noting that anti-abortion activists had "stormed" the offices of a notoriously pro-choice newspaper would be considered an example of the rise of right wing militancy at best (and rightly so).

Finally, the ad calls for the University of Wisconsin to punish the newspaper saying,

Due to this history of abuse and disrespect, students and staff are calling for the UW administration to put the Badger Herald on probation. We are demanding that the campus learning environment be respected, and that the University community take responsibility for assessing the negative impact the Herald's irresponsibility has on student's perceptions of people of color on campus. The call for a better campus climate means that all university buildings should be safe and healthy learning environments. The alternative to this is that student's rights to an equal education free of racial agitation will continue to be violated.

You have to love that last line, calling for "an equal education free of racial agitation," as it could have been drafted by any number of white racists who opposed the civil rights movement. As Salon.Com editor Joan Walsh wrote in a piece on the controversy,

The Horowitz ad is explosive because for too many years campuses have been places where ideological bullies, usually on the left, have been devoted to blocking political debate, rather than engaging in it -- and they've succeeded.

... The reaction to Horowitz's ad proves at least one of the points he makes in it: A morbid attraction to the role of victim, and an unhealthy fear of disagreeable ideas, are all too common in campus politics, and they seem to afflict left-liberal students of color disproportionately.

Horowitz is now calling his detractors "brownshirts," of course, and on the phone he reminds me "the Nazis took over universities first." It's a little overheated. And yet there is something disturbing about the idea that a group of offended students could intimidate student newspapers into rejecting Horowitz's ad, or apologizing for it once they'd accepted it.

Disturbing is about the best adjective I can think of for the ad that appeared in the Daily Cardinal.

Sources:

Badger Herald: UW Madison Independent Racist Propaganda Machine. Advertisement, The UW Madison Daily Cardinal.

Who's afraid of the big, bad Horowitz? Joan Walsh, Salon.Com, March 9, 2001.

Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too by David Horowitz .

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