My Visit to Brown: A Progress Report

In the spring of 2001, I placed an ad in the student paper at Brown giving “Ten Reasons Why Reparations For Slavery Is A Bad Idea – And Racist Too.” I thought it was a bad idea because it was being proposed 137 years after the fact, and that it was racist because it made all non-black citizens responsible for slavery and promised restitution on the basis of skin color rather than any actual suffering of the individuals to whom restitution was to be made. Even though recent polls showed that the opinions in my ad reflected the anti-reparations attitudes of three-quarters of the American public, forty college newspapers refused to print the “Ten Reasons” on political grounds. On the thirty campuses where the ad was allowed to appear, there were protests by student leftists. The protesters threatened the editors of papers printing the ad and tarred the names and reputations of anyone associated with it, denouncing them as racists.

The worst of these disturbances was at Brown, a school that had already earned a reputation for itself as being one of the most politically intolerant campuses in the nation. Leftists stole and destroyed the entire issue of the Brown Daily Herald, where the ad had appeared, and threatened to continue their attacks until the paper folded or was brought to its knees. In a signed statement, sixty members of the Brown faculty supported this vandalism and joined the protesters’ attack on the ad suggesting that its author and the student editors who printed it were “racists.” The faculty statement was an explicit rebuke to Brown’s president, Sheila Blumstein, who had made mild remarks in defense of a free press and free speech.

The ugly intolerance that enveloped Brown so affected the lives of its student community that there are still convocations, two-and-a-half years later, to deal with the repercussions. One year after the event a member of the Undergraduate Student Council still recalled its traumas: “Last year on UCS, I returned from a meeting physically shaking after being called a liar and other names by council members for defending The Herald’s printing of David Horowitz’s reparations ad.” Many other testimonies appeared in the Herald written by bewildered students who had recently voted for Ralph Nader or Al Gore but now found themselves stigmatized as bigots and worse.

During the controversy meetings were held to discuss the issues and deal with the roiling emotions. Leftist organizations brought in outside speakers, including a Black Muslim and a Black Panther to stir the campus brew. Brown’s College Republicans attempted to set up a debate between the head of the Providence NAACP and myself. In the Salem-like atmosphere that had enveloped Brown, I considered it a small victory that the most famous civil rights organization decided not to join the mob and shun me. But the invitation was soon withdrawn when two campus leaders – the head of the College Democrats and a spokesman for the International Socialist Organization — threatened violence if I came. Without a formal invitation, there was no way for an outsider like me to get to campus so the event never happened.