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Censorship rampant on campus
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 11, 2001 The advertisement that conservative convert David Horowitz has been placing, or trying to place, in college newspapers across the country is not the racist manifesto it's been made out to be, but it is decidedly offensive to many African-Americans. The ad, titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks -- and Racist Too", goes on to state, rather bluntly, arguments against slavery reparations. Even so, what he has to say on this issue has all appeared before under the bylines of mainstream columnists. But the issue surrounding Horowitz's ad is not whether its ideas are agreeable, but whether the tolerance demanded by minorities and women on college campuses is also afforded those who don't embrace their liberal orthodoxy. Horowitz has plainly shown the answer is: not really. His ad has been rejected for publication in at least 32 college papers, and while there have been a handful of papers which did publish it, the editors of three of those have since apologized for doing so. At Brown University, the ad's publication set off angry student protests. The offices of the independent Brown Daily Herald were stormed and the protesters demanded the paper apologize, provide the opposition free space for rebuttal and give the ad revenue to a Third World student coalition. The editors acceded to all the demands except to apologize. Student activists retaliated by stealing and destroying thousands of copies of the paper, a reaction similar to the one against the Daily Californian at the University of California at Berkley when it ran the ad. Making bonfires of newspapers seems to be the way today's students deal with opinions with which they don't agree. Activists at Cornell University stole and burned bundles of the conservative Cornell Review after being angered by a satiric article on "Ebonics," and about a quarter of the press run of the Buffalo State College student publication were stolen because of an unflattering description of an African woman. The trend toward vandalism and censorship is nationwide and seems to be growing, according to Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. With the proliferation of speech codes and anti-harassment rules, students seem to believe they have a right not to be offended. Of course, no one has that right. It's axiomatic that freedom of speech and the right not to be offended are mutually exclusive. What students should be learning at college is that hearing something obnoxious or offensive is a small price to pay for our expressive freedom. Yet college administrators have only encouraged a victim mentality among students by trying to use school behavior codes to equate offensive ideas with actual injury. Universities, places that are supposed to represent free thinking and the vigorous exchange of ideas, have become incubators of rigid political correctness -- from the top down. Horowitz's experiment in intolerance on college campuses was a resounding success. . . . or is that failure? He proved that our next generation of leaders is under the chilling impression that the way to deal with uncomfortable words is through censorship.
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From the Times Opinion page |
