Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Yes, the paper ran my anti-reparations ad, but the editorial printed alongside it was pure slander.
Apr 16, 2001 | Not many individuals would begin a column for a liberal publication like Salon with a reference to the fact that they had been labeled "racist" by a journal bearing the imprimatur of Princeton University.
But that is exactly the reason I cannot in good conscience allow myself this luxury. Having spoken on more than 100 college campuses in the last 10 years, I am acutely aware that there are thousands of students and faculty on these campuses who are in the same position. For many more, the prospect of being labeled racist for reasonable ideas that are deemed politically incorrect inspires fear and a posture of prudent silence. They're potential targets of the same kind of reckless hate speech that Dan Stephens and the editors of the Daily Princetonian directed at me in the defamatory editorial statement they printed alongside my reparations ad earlier this month.
Students and faculty targets of left-wing witch hunts are by no means exclusively conservative or white. But they do lack a national platform to fight back. Under normal circumstances, the national press is not focused on the excesses of political correctness, and campus targets of the left cannot count on a watchful media to defend their free speech. It's quite the contrary. As reactions to my ad have shown, campus media are willing accomplices to the witch hunters of the left. It is for the victims of their campaigns that my own is being fought, and that this column is written.
The Daily Princetonian was late on the list of college papers to whom the reparations ad was submitted. As a result, the Prince's editors were aware of the media commentaries already written about their censorious predecessors, and knew there were consequences for rejecting the ad. They knew, in particular, that the journalistic fraternity they hoped one day to join would be adversely impressed. To yield to the pressure of campus totalitarians and close down one side of the debate would not sit well on their future résumés.
As they put it in their editorial, for them to refuse to publish the ad would "just give Horowitz what he is looking for: another reason to cry 'censor.'" On the other hand, not to follow their natural inclination to do just that would jeopardize their membership in the club of the politically correct. It would antagonize the campus commissars and open the editors to the risk of being denounced as "racists" themselves.
How to resolve this agonizing dilemma? One way would have been to publish the ad and provide readers with a point-by-point refutation of its arguments. But this, apparently, was more of an intellectual challenge than the Prince's editors could handle. How about a public burning instead?
"In no way do we support Horowitz's argument," the editors began their auto da fe. "Printing this ad is the best way to allow our readers to fight against the racist aspects of its message." Thus did they seek to appease two gods and kill two birds with a single stone.
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