The Bowdoin Orient

April 6, 2001
Volume CXXXII, Number 20

Controversial newspaper ad provokes protests

by JAMES FISHER, SENIOR COPY EDITOR

   A newspaper advertisement designed to both apologize for the social effects of slavery and argue against government-funded reparations to black Americans has ignited firestorms of controversy in many colleges across the country.
   The advertisement was sent to some college newspapers, although it bypassed the newspapers of most liberal arts schools, including Bowdoin. Although the advertisement has generally been met with a good deal of debate, at some colleges, the advertisement has arrived and departed very quietly.
   The advertisement is a list of ten reasons "why reparations for slavery are a bad idea for black people--and racist too." It was written and submitted by conservative columnist David Horowitz, who offered up to $800 to 59 major college newspapers, including those at Florida State, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Brown, and the University of Illinois, to print the ad.
   By Horowitz's count, 35 papers chose not to run the ad, 14 printed it, and 10 are still deciding. The advertising blitz was focused on daily newspapers with a relatively large circulation in urban areas; most liberal arts college newspapers, including The Orient, have not been asked to sell space for it, although the Dartmouth Daily received and declined to accept Horowitz's list.
   Horowitz is not a stranger to political controversy following him to campus. In the 1960s, he edited a radical left-wing journal, Ramparts. Throughout the 1970s, Horowitz made a well-documented journey to the opposite side of the political spectrum.
   In a column written a few months ago, Horowitz wrote about "the ugly iceberg of paranoia and hate that the political left--beginning with Al Gore and Jesse Jackson and going on to Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy--has recently planted in America's political heart."
   "Rhetorically," Salon columnist Alicia Montgomery says, "Horowitz has much more in common with rabble-rouser Al Sharpton than he cares to admit."
   Horowitz's rhetoric is famous for its grittiness, and it is his tone, not simply his ideas, that causes such a stir on campuses. When he spoke at Berkeley last month, he shared the stage with 30 armed campus police and two personal bodyguards.
   At the University of Wisconsin, the editors of the Badger-Herald, which printed the ad on February 28, confronted 100 of their readers storming the editorial offices demanding an apology for the decision.
   A spokesperson for Wisconsin's Multicultural Students Coalition accused the newspaper as well as Horowitz of "exercising their racism, their power to institutionalize their racism."
   At Brown, newspapers containing the ad were removed by students and replaced with flyers objecting to the paper's decision to run it.
   Those protests have generated additional controversy on campuses regarding freedom of the press. Horowitz has compared the student protesters at Brown and Wisconsin to Nazi brownshirts, reminding readers that "the Nazis took over universities first."
   Some editors, too, are responding forcefully to accusations of racism and thefts of entire print runs by angry students. After all but 100 issues of the Brown Herald were destroyed by student protesters, the paper declared that "we will not apologize for printing a legitimate advertisement that may offend some of our readership" and labeled the theft of the print run "an unacceptable attempt to silence our voice."
   This week, as students at the University of North Carolina marched to protest the ad, Bowdoin remained unaffected by the controversy. The issue of reparations for slavery has not been the subject of any recent lectures or presentations here, said professors in the Africana Studies and Government departments.
   A new book in favor of reparations by Randall Robinson entitled The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks has been ordered by, but not yet delivered to, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.
   And the Orient--along with weeklies at most small liberal arts colleges--has, so far, been left alone.