Agitation
Over An Ad
 |
Marching
to Allen Building: students cross campus
to President Keohane's office |
Debate raged on campus in March as the Duke community reacted to an
advertisement, published in The Chronicle, against reparations for
slavery. A protest staged in the Union Building preceded a sit-in
at Chronicle offices and a silent demonstration outside the office
of President Nannerl O. Keohane.
The full-page ad, “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is
a Bad Idea—and Racist Too,” was written by conservative
author David Horowitz and appeared in the March 19 issue. Of the forty-seven
college and university newspapers receiving the ad, nineteen had rejected
it as of March 22. National news stories, focusing on campuses beyond
Duke, reported on angry students confiscating newspapers and editors
feeling compelled to issue apologies. Chronicle editor Greg Pessin
’01, in an editor’s column, “Why The Chronicle ran
the reparations ad,” wrote, “The controversial opinions
presented by this advertisement are sure to offend many and should
provoke responses from people on both sides of the issue. Unfortunately,
students at other campuses have squandered the opportunity to explore
the issue and Horowitz’s viewpoint, choosing instead to focus
on whether his voice should have been heard in the first place.”
Outside the president’s office, according to The Chronicle, “The
group of mostly black students, many in tears, formed a human chain
as they handed Keohane petitions that listed two demands of the university
and four of The Chronicle.” Keohane, in e-mail messages to the
protest’s organizers, rejected one demand—that the administration
and individual departments withdraw ads from the student newspaper—and
accepted another
—that the administration compile a report addressing progress
on demands made by black students in 1969, 1975, and 1997.
Chronicle editors rejected all four demands directed at the student
newspaper—that it provide space free of charge for an ad refuting
Horowitz’s argument and place a full-page apology beside it the
next day, that it return profits from the reparations ad to Horowitz
or donate the $793.50 to another cause, that it adequately cover minority
issues, and that it establish a formal system to review advertising
decisions. The newspaper said the last two demands were already in
place.
On March 26, a forum and a panel discussion, sponsored by the university,
the Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and the DeWitt Wallace Center
for Communications and Journalism, drew an overflow crowd to the Sanford
Institute’s Fleishman Commons. The panel included Chronicle editor
Pessin; Wil- liam Raspberry, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and
Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism at Duke; Houston Baker,
professor of English and Afro-American literature and culture; Ellen
Mickiewicz, Shepley Professor of Public Policy and director of the
DeWitt Wallace Center; Susan Tifft ’73, Pat- terson Professor
of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy; William Van Alstyne,
Perkins Professor of Law and specialist on constitutional law, civil
rights, and civil liberties; and protestors Kelly Black and Carliss
Chatman, both Duke seniors.
Mickiewicz, in beginning the discussion, said the controversy pointed
to the fragility of the campus community, a notion that is “neither
simple nor permanent.” Chatman said “the whole community
should find [the advertisement] offensive,” and—along with
others on the panel and in the audience—suggested that the controversy
transcended a particular editorial policy. Black, president of the
Duke chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, said the better course for The Chronicle would have been to
publish Horowitz’s views as an opinion piece; some in the audience
said the newspaper should have put aside the ad and treated the national
controversy surrounding the anti-reparations ad as a news story. Black
also questioned why a segment of the community would have to feel
hurt in order to provoke the kind of dialogue that others were lauding.
Baker, from the perspective of “an African-American scholar of
the twenty-first century on a putatively enlightened campus,”
declared himself “insulted and vilified” by the ad. He said
the appearance of the ad was symptomatic of a campus environment that
wasn’t fully welcoming of African-American students.
Raspberry, mentioning his forty years in the newspaper industry, said
that in general, “the idea that opinions should be suppressed
is repugnant.” In this case, he added, each side had credible
arguments, and “people can disagree without being racists or
fools.” At the same time, “The Chronicle doesn’t exist
in its own little First Amendment vacuum; it is part of this community.”
If the decision were up to him, he said, he would have rejected an
ad clearly meant to provoke an “incendiary” reaction.
Other panelists leaned in a different direction. Tifft observed that
newspapers are on shaky ground when they censor opinion. She mentioned
the 1950s-era decision of The New York Times to ban book ads promoting
Spartacus because the work supposedly promoted socialist views. And
she said that the notion of “community standards” is amorphous.
There’s at least one newspaper, she noted, that refuses to run
stories with a gay theme owing to its sense of its community.
Van Alstyne emphasized the significance of The Chronicle’s independence.
He referred to a past Chronicle decision, some ten years ago, to publish
a Holocaust denial ad—a step that, he said, stimulated campus
interest in the Holocaust. By contrast, he noted, the con- tent of
the current ad is “tepid.” In weighing the choice between
publishing and withholding publication, a campus newspaper—in
the interest of supporting “higher education rather than controlled
inculcation”—should find it “better to err on the side
of trusting your audience to be able to read and to know how to distinguish
information from propaganda,” he said. The suppression of opinion
isn’t justified, he suggested, merely to “preserve the thin
veneer of community.”
For his part, Pessin told the audience that Duke is “first an
academic community,” and that implies an obligation to “discuss
intellectually all views.” The value of diversity, he said, should
extend to “diversity of ideas.” He added, “Content
can be offensive” in any given issue of his publication, but
there are times when “the free exchange of ideas can come at
the expense of comfort.”
At the end of the program, which lasted well over two hours, Raspberry
declared himself impressed that the exchange was “sharp and civil.”
A student in the crowd, one of the protest leaders, said he was determined
to encourage students to stay “politically active” around
the issue of race. |
