An Uncivil Discourse

The campus today is a congested city of thousands of young adults who have come together for the sometimes messy business of learning. Many are products of the new California. Their skins and life experiences span the spectrum, and thus reflect light differently. These differences create tension, which picks its own time and place to erupt, as it did in March.

It began with a full-page advertisement in the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, on Feb. 28. The ad was paid for by an off-campus political action group headed by David Horowitz, a Malibu conservative intellectual and, ironically, a former student radical leader at Berkeley in the early '60s. In the ad, Horowitz declared that a proposal from some African Americans that the U.S. government pay reparations to blacks for slavery would be bad public policy.

The fallout was swift and seismic because the issue quickly mutated into a free speech battle--digging up old bones at Berkeley. The first reaction from administrators and students was puzzlement and resentment because the issue had not been a big deal among them. They didn't seem to realize that Horowitz had sucker-punched them. He is an accomplished author and an intellectual street fighter. Give him an opening with a weak rebuttal and he'll chew your nose off. But he can be chewed on, too. On this day, his intention was to highlight a volatile public issue and then sit back and wait for the reaction--one that would demonstrate his belief that college campuses today give comfort to the enemies of free speech.

It worked.

The day following the ad's publication, all hell broke loose at the office of the student newspaper. About 40 students, accompanied by a faculty member from the African American studies department, stormed the office and demanded a printed apology. Some students, including members of the newspaper staff, took papers out of campus news racks and destroyed them. After a hurried meeting, top editors of the Daily Californian, which is run by students independently of the university administration, unanimously decided to print an apology and to allot generous space for others to counter Horowitz's arguments. The apology stated that the paper had been "an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry."

Then came another reaction. More than 1,000 e-mails cascaded in, mostly accusing the newspaper's editor, Daniel Hernandez, and the university of cowardly caving in to "politically correct" pressure and undercutting the 1st Amendment. Liberal columnist Nat Hentoff, an authority on the Bill of Rights, wrote, "First, although the ad offended many students, there is as yet no constitutional amendment protecting Americans from being offended. Second, the ad is neither bigoted nor racist. It's part of a continuing debate. And to call Horowitz a racist is to cheapen the word and diminish its moral clout."