Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
March 20, 2001, Tuesday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A14
LENGTH: 477 words
HEADLINE: TOLERANCE 101
BODY:
THE IDEAS AGAINST slavery reparations contained in an advertisement placed in student newspapers around the country may well be insulting to minorities on campus. But they are only ideas. Far more dangerous than offensive ideas is their censorship, because censorship knows no ideology and will eventually muzzle the views of the minorities as well.
The controversy has been simmering nationwide but erupted at Brown University last week when the independent Brown Daily Herald accepted the ad, from the conservative writer David Horowitz, listing 10 reasons to oppose the payment of reparations to descendants of American slaves. Calling the concept of reparations "racist" and suggesting that payment had already been made in the form of "racial preferences" such as affirmative action, Horowitz's polemic was meant to provoke the political correctness crowd on campus - and they took the bait.
At Brown, students mounted a noisy protest against the newspaper, storming the office and demanding an apology, free space to print the opposition view, and an agreement that the paper give its $700 ad revenue to the "Third World community." Then they took a far graver step by stealing and destroying an edition of the paper later in the week.
Horowitz's views - delivered with particular animus by a former leftist with all the zeal of a convert - are surely offensive to minority students, some of whom are particularly sensitive to the insult that they are only attending the Ivy League institution as "affirmative action babies." But being offended is not the same thing as being oppressed. This distinction is crucial to recognizing true oppression when it occurs and not cheapening it by defining it down to the status of "disrespect."
The protesters at Brown, the University of California, and elsewhere have only given Horowitz the ammunition he sought: proof that would-be liberals are as intolerant of difference as anyone else. This effectively neutralizes an issue upon which liberals once could claim the high ground.
It is essential for Brown and other universities to be welcoming places for women, minorities, and others not among the traditional elites. But the pursuit of diversity cannot come at the expense of open debate, especially in an academic setting. Civil rights cannot exist without civil liberties. As Brooks King, editor of the Daily Herald, put it: "Running the ad was more liberal than not running the ad."
Rather than directing their rage against the newspaper, Brown students should be fighting Horowitz's ideas with well-reasoned arguments of their own. Happily, the Brown Daily Herald Web site indicates that some of this is already happening. This is the lesson that students should take from their crash course in the First Amendment: The only effective antidote to offensive speech is more speech.