But I do know that fearlessness appears to be in short supply among both activists and journalists on campus today. I called Eric Storck at the Cardinal to congratulate him on continuing the paper's free-speech legacy. I asked if he'd been offered the reparations ad yet -- I knew Horowitz was in the process of approaching the Cardinal -- and Storck, a little embarrassed, told me he wouldn't sell Horowitz ad space right now.

"At this point I wouldn't take it. It's clear the message has already gotten on to this campus, and I don't feel the need to rekindle feelings that have already been stirred," he said haltingly.

The Cardinal regularly takes provocative ads, Storck admitted -- it recently accepted an ad from an anti-abortion group that both staff members and community activists argued should have been rejected. Why the different standards for the reparations ad?

"I'm not gonna say we wouldn't have taken it two weeks ago, but with all the protest and everything, now we would not take it," he said.

So the fact that some activists picketed the Badger Herald means that Horowitz won't be able to place his ad?

"Yes. In this specific case, yes. There's anger on campus now. Given the circumstances right now, it would be inappropriate for us to run that ad. With the discussions regarding race on campus, it's just not an appropriate ad. The Multicultural Coalition is very upset."

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.

Leave it to the left to give Horowitz an issue that gives his take on race and political correctness new life and new credibility. "To be honest, we feel kind of duped by this man," Daniel Hernandez of the Daily Cal admits. "He's gotten more exposure than any ad could have given him. It's kind of embittering."

Indeed it is. But it's an important lesson for Hernandez and his contemporaries. They could have taken Horowitz's money and, if they despised his arguments, screwed him with it, attacking his arguments in the same pages he paid good money to have his words published. By refusing his money, spineless campus journalists are getting screwed by him instead.

Recent Stories