The Reparations Controversy at Brown

*From Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery, Encounter Books, 2001

Never could I have imagined an event that would so quickly lay bare the tension beneath Brown’s surface. An event that proved to the community, and to the world, just how intolerant the supposed ‘liberal Ivy’ really is.

—Gregory Cooper, ‘01 Brown Daily Herald, May 28, 2001

In the Ivy League, Brown University has a reputation has a reputation as a school for high-class political celebrities and hard line political correctness. Amy Carter and John F. Kennedy Jr. were undergraduates there. But in the speech code era of the 1990s the campus was also the venue for notoriously false sexual harassment and rape cases that resulted in expensive court seltlements and an embarrassing, high-visibility, profile by John Stossel, on ABC-TV’s 20/20. Below the national radar, attacks on visiting conservatives were routine. When Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed spoke at Brown, screaming protestors shouted him down as a “racist,” a “homophone” and an “anti-Semite” making it impossible for anyone to hear him. The gay, feminist maverick Camille Paglia called Brown: “the most visiously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer.”¹

The incidents at Berkeley and Wisconsin were exerting ripple effects across the nation. Both campuses had just erupted, when Joan Walsh’s column, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Horowitz” appeared in Salon. “The Horowitz ad,” Walsh wrote, “is explosive because for too many years campuses have been places where ideological bullies, usually on the left, have been devoted to blocking political debate, rather than engaging in it – and they’ve succeeded.” Coming from a writer with solid credentials on the left (and a former editor of the Wisconsin Cardinal) this was a powerful defense of the intellectual marketplace. By this time the ad had been submitted to more than 40 campus papers with only 9 printing it.²

Brooks King, the editor of the Brown paper, read Joan Walsh’s Salon story about the ad and phone Alex Conant at the Wisconsin Badger-Herald for advice. After taking his counsel, King concluded that the Brown paper should publish the ad if we approached them. He emailed the Walsh article to the other editors along with this advice.³

On Monday, March 12th, the ad arrived and that evening the Herald editors decided to print it without comment. “We discussed it very briefly,” Jahred Adelman recalls. “We thought it might upset some of our readers, but we also thought it’s not our responsibility to censor this conservative opinion. Our decision was in keeping with precedents of Herald advertising policy.” The only serious question was whether the Herald should comment editorially. The idea was rejected because it was thought that doing so would set a difficult precedent requiring every ad that anyone thought controversial to be accompanied by a balancing commentary.⁴ The ad appeared on Tuesday, Marth 13th, under a banner that said “Paid Advertisement.” The place cost me $580.

This relatively small sum—a contrast to the $10,000 speaking fees casually paid out of student funds to Communists like Angela Davis and racists like Louis Farrakhan&mdashwas to become a major focus of the attacks that followed, which once again were directed far more at the paper that printed the ad than the contents of the ad itself. Organizing these attacks was a Nigerian-American named Asmara Ghebremichael, a Brown senior and “Afro-American studies concentrator.” A friend showed Ghebremichael the ad in a sociology class they shared called “Intimate Violence.” Ghebremichael went immediately to work organizing a Coalition of Concerned Brown Students to protest its appearance. By the following day she had 200 signatures on a petition and eleven campus groups in support. These included the Black Student Union, the Third World Action, the Brown Coalition for Social Justice, the Asian American Students Association and the campus chapter of the Young Communist League and the International Socialist Organization.⁵

The coalition united behind two demands: First, that the money Brown had received in payment for the ad would “be given back to the Brown minority community” in the form of a donation to the Third World Center, and second that the Daily Herald provide a “free” page to the Coalition “for the purpose of educating the greater Brown community on related issues and other issues important in the minority community in order to protect ourselves in the future from irrational publications like this one authored by David Horowitz.”

The Herald editors rejected both demands. But they agreed to print the op-ed piece by Ghebremichael, which appeared the following day. It was called “Free Speech Is Only For Those Who Can Afford to Pay.”⁶ The column made the left’s case, but typically failed to respond to any of the arguments in my ad. The garbled syntax and gyrating diction of its prose suggested that Brown had failed at least part of its educational mission in respect to this graduating senior:

Brown Daily Herald I assume you must be a little bewildered right now. I know you were scared when we called you asking how much you got paid for the ad entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea – and Racist Too.” Whoops! I assume you didn’t mean to be the test case for David Horowitz’s campus fascism test⁷ but didn’t you hear? There is a political war going on and you are the pawn of it…. For some reason the exchange of money makes everything ok. Dare us even to ask ourselves to distinguish between right and wrong. Naw, you all like to hide behind code words like “liberal” and “conservative” and the most nefarious of all, “pad advertisement.”

But (oh no!) the crisis of free speech! If you don’t print the ad, (you must have thought) Ward Connolly [sic] might write a letter declaring how fascist our universities are…. There is a broader issue at hand here: Are you going to protect the free speech rights of the rich or the poor? Horowitz is saying that as long as you can back your words with money, anything goes: lies, harassment and hate included. He could have sent his commentary as a letter or a guest column, but no, he sent it as a paid advertisement. There was an exchange of money. Thus, the issue is not what was actually written, but the money that went into getting it printed.

They are trying to get us mad so that we demand you recant the ad, and [then] they can scream and yell that free speech is being restricted (a.k.k Vote Republican). But, you know what? We don’t want you to recant the ad. We don’t want an apology. What we do want is this, and we have 200 signatures to prove it. We want the money you accepted for running the ad to go to the Third World Center, and we want one free page of advertisement space to print whatever the hell we want to print.

Ghebremichael’s column was not the end of the money issue, which kept resurfacing as a theme throughout the controversy.⁸ One reason was its deep roots in the ideology of the campus left. In his notorious essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse had written: “The Left has no equal voice, no equal access to the mass media and their public facilities – not because a conspracy excludes it, but because, in good old capitalist fashion, it does not have the required purchasing power.”⁹ Of course Ghebremichael and her comrades could have collected $3 apiece from the 200 student signers of the petition and amassed the purchasing power to pay for an ad. But the issue refused to die.

Asmara Ghebremichael’s column did actually refer, in passing, to one of the arguments I had made: “What sort of integrity do you have,” she asked the Herald, “that you would actually print something that said, ‘There was never an anti-slavery movement until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one.”¹⁰ In fact, this was the entire extent of her comments on the ad except for the blanket charge that all the historical claims were fabricated for profit.¹¹

I probably could have formulated the point in question more carefully, since Ghebremichael was not alone in failing to understand it. But those who found it objectionable could also have made more of an effort to grasp what it was saying. Properly interpreted, the claim was not even controversial, which was a large part of the reason it hadn’t occurred to me to elaborate it further. For thousands of years, until the end of the 18th Century, slavery had been considered a normal institution of human societies. In all that time, no group had arisen to challenge its legitimacy. Of course, there were many slave revolts from the times of Moses and Sparatacus, in which those who had been enslaved sought to gain their freedom. But that as not the point. The freedom that had sought was their own. They did not revolt against the institution of slavery as such.

What happened in the English speaking countries at dawn of the American Republic was entirely unique. Before then, no one had thought to form a movement dedicated to the belief that the institution of slavery was itself immoral. What was important in this historical fact was that it showed that white Europeans who were the target of the reparations indictment had played a pivotal role in the emancipation from slavery.

That a debt is owed tot he white Christians and American founders who launched a movement to end slavery could be seen as controversial (let alone outrageous)¹² shows how bitter what passes for dialogue on race has become. The scholarship on this issue is not the least ambiguous, as can be seen from this passage in an authoritative text on the subject by the Nobel prize-winning historian Robert Fogel:

The last quarter of the Seventeenth Century and the first three quarters of the Eighteenth Century were a watershed between the routine acceptance of slavery and the onset of concerted, successful movement for the abolition of human bondage…. The moment at which abolitionism passed over from apparently ineffectual harangues by isolated zealots to a significant political movement cannot be dated with precision. Nevertheless, 1787, the year a handful of English Friends and evangelicals launched a public campaign against the slave trade, seems to be a reasonable, although not unique occasion to mark the onset of concerted political action to end slavery. Slavery was abolished in its last American bastion – Brazil – in 1888. And so, within the span of a little more than a century, a system that had stood above criticism for 3,000 years was outlawed everywhere in the Western world.¹³ (Emphasis added)

Every professor of American history within range of the ad who knew anything about slavery – and there were surely thousands – knew precisely what I was referring to, and knew that the point I had made in the ad was historically accurate. But not one of them came forward to defend it. Instead they allowed black students, like Asmara Ghebremichael, to remain comfortable in their ignorance of facts that were central to the understanding of their own history. That was what the specter of fear that now haunts our campuses had accomplished.

The evening Ghebremichael’s column appeared, Brooks King and members of the Herald editorial board sat down to discuss matters with the radical coalition. “We declined to meet their demands right off the bat,” King said later. “Things went downhill from there.” Before the meeting dissolved, one member of the coalition said: “If you don’t give in to our demands…no one’s ging to read your papers. We’re going to ensure that your papers aren’t read on campus.”¹⁴

The next morning was Friday, and the Coalition made good on its threat. Its members fanned out across the campus and stole the entire edition of the Daily Herald—nearly 4,000 copies&mdash from the distribution points.¹⁵ In place of the missing papers the Coalition left pink and orange fliers explaining their rationale for the theft: “It is the profits gained from publishing Horowitz’s ad that incited our action.” The flier continued: “Members of the Coalition do not regret the necessary removal of the papers in protest and self-defense. The Herald’s decision to run the ad…was a direct assault on communities of color and their allies at Brown.” Then, in a perfect Orwellian flourish, the vandals also proclaimed: “The Coalition has never opposed free speech.”¹⁶

The theft was a frong-page story in the Boston Globe and, over the next few days, also made the front page of the New York Times and was picked up by the Washington Post, ABC News and the BBC. On Sunday, Brooks King went on NBC’s Weekend Today to debate a former Herald columnist and member of the International Socialist Organization—a Trotskyist sect and pillar of the Coalistion—who had resigned his position on the Herald staff to protest the ad.¹⁷

The Daily Herald staff responded to the vandalism by reprinting 1,000 copies of the stolen issue and hand distributing it to students on Saturday in the “Ratty,” the Student Union and dining area. Brooks King described the theft as “an action meant to intimidate and frighten,” and the editors announced they would pursue criminal charges against the culprits. They condemned the act as “an unacceptable attempt to silence our voice.” The president of the campus ACLU, Carl Takei, was equally blunt: “This is the worst possible thing the coalition could have done, both to themselves and to free discourse at the University.”

It proved to be a defining event for the Brown community. A day later, university president, Sheila Blumstein, issued a formal statement: “Consistent with its commitment to the free exchange of ideas, the University recognizes and supports the Herald’s right to publish any material it chooses, even if that material is objectionable to the members of the campus community. The Office of Student Life will review information concerning these incidents.”¹⁸

The coalition leaders now found themselves in the defensive, and were forced to argue extravagantly that their theft was an act of “civil disobedience.” For help they turned to their faculty mentor, Professor Lewis R. Gordon, head of the Afro-American studies program and author of books on “black philosophy” and “African existentialism.”¹⁹ He was a member of the Radical Philosophy Association and he had written several articles for Political Affairs, a journal that describes itself as the “theoretical organ of the American Communist Party.” Gordon’s most recent book, Existentia Africana was dedicated to his mentor Professor William R. Jones, author of a treatise called Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. In the preface to Existentia Africana, Gordon describes Jones’ work as a text in which “black liberation thinkers [are challenged] to take seriously the possibility that the signs and symbols of the Western religions upon which they depended may harbor the seeds of their destruction.”

Asmara Ghebremichael and her fellow Coalition leaders were feeling inadequate to answer the droves of television reporters descending on Brown. They asked Gordon to represent their case to the reporters, and then from then on.

When classes resumed on Monday, campus police officers and Herald staff members stood guard over news racks containing the new edition. When interviewed by reporter Andy Golodny, Professor Gordon took an aggressive if somewhat incoherent posture in explaining the students;’ actions: “If something is free, you can take as many copies as you lied. This is not a free speech issue. It is a hate speech issue.” Gordon was seconded by Kenneth Knies, a teaching assistant in this Afro-American Studies Department, who said: “I have talked to students who told me that they can’t perform basic functions like walking or sleeping because of this ad.”²⁰

As a result of the theft and the passion it inflamed, the offices of the Herald and the Afro-American Studies Department became targets of hostile phone messages and email flames. Anonymous callers to the Herald would say, “You’re a racist,” or “the Brown Daily Herald is racist,” and hang up.²¹ Some of the emails were sent by anonymous off-campus visitors to the Herald website, others by angry students. The Herald editors attempted to brush them off.

On the other side, similar emails were not treated merely as ugly annoyances or measures of how high feelings were running. In the hands of Professor Gordon and his supporters, ventilations of outrage at the activists’ antics were regarded as racial harassment, a sign that Brown was “unwelcoming” to all minorities, and a bloody flag to wave at every turn of the battle.

Hello. Is this the asshole that ripped off all those papers because of that slavery article? What a bunch of chicken shit, bullshit. I mean, you’re proving that you’re inferior. You’re proving it more and more all the time. And wait ’till you get out in the real fucking world. You’ll find out really how useless you are…

A second message apparently left by the same caller used the word “nigger” in unambiguous hate speech. Two members of the Coalition were sent a letter containing a photograph of African children with war wounds. “Reparations?” the letter writer asked. “You’ve got to be kiddin!! Keep dreaming—something for nothing again!! … You are blessed in this country! These children could be you!!”²²

Gordon and his followers lost no time in laying responsibility for these incidents at the door of the Herald and the ad I had written. Under their pressure, President Blumstein shifted gears. Four days after she had condemned the Coalition’s theft of the papers, she issued a second statement. Ignoring the anger the Coalition had provoked the ascribed the problems to me: “Even as we uphold our principles, we cannot deny the impact the publication of this advertisement has had on the Brown community as a whole. It was written to be inflammatory. In addition it was deliberately and deeply hurtful.”²³

Blumstein didn’t specify how the ad was deliberately, let alone deeply, hurtful. Nor did she attempt to justify her accusation that the ad was intentionally inflammatory. It could be so interpreted only if its text was deliberately or unwittingly misread. For example, Charles Bakst, a former editor of the Herald and now a political columnist for the Providence Journal-Bulletin called the ad “an insult to anyone’s intelligence” and described it as “bizarre and brazen” bidding his readers to “mull this assertion about the ‘debt’ blacks ‘owe’ to America.” Then he quoted my words: “If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves.”²⁴

In an attempt to resolve the conflict, Brown president Blumstein organized several meetings between the sides. The first brought leaders of the Coalition together with members of the student government, Herald editors and various deans. Lewis R. Gordon was the only professor invited. One of the Herald editors present, Patrick Moos, summed up the result: “We thought we were coming in to sit down and talk rationally, but the coversation was very one-sided. All the administration—including people I really respect—werea cting like we were clearly in the wrong. No one stood up for us.”²⁵

A subsequent panel of professors who discussed the issues before 500 students²⁶ proved no more productive. Five of the six opposed the Herald’s stance. The Herald assigned a Brown sophomore named Alex Schulman to cover the even. Schulman wrote:

Many at Brown, and in America, agree with Horowitz in some, many or even all of his assertions. What about the marginalization of these people? What about the implied idea that they too are racists and somehow share responsibility in the hurt of the Brown community?…²⁷

One panel member, a professor in the Afro-American Studies Department named James Campbell went so far as to personally attack Herald editors Brooks King, calling him a “cynical opportunist.” Alex Schulman thought this reflected the double standard at work among the professoriate. “Are we expected to believe that it is intrinsically horrific for a student of color to read Horowitz’s ad, but somehow okay for a respected professor to tell a gathering of Brown students that their peer and hardworking editor-in-chief is a cynical opportunist?”

Professor Gordon was also on the panel and “resisted no opportunity to narrate stories of racist telephone messages at his office.” But, Schulman observed, “there was virtually no mention of the extensive threats that Herald editors and supporters have endured since the ad ran in print.” The Herald staffers were students too. Maybe they were not black,²⁸ “but if words hurt, they hurt everyone.”

Although the campus adults were putting enormous pressure on the Herald, the students were not giving in. To oppose the Coalition, a junior named Carl Takei , head of the Brown ACLU and other students took a page out of the playbook of the campus left and created an organization called Students of Color Against Censorship. Takei was especially concerned about administration members who had agreed with the Coalition’s claims that the ad was a “racial assault and a form of hate speech.” He sent the following email to Blumstein:

A number of individuals on this campus have described the Horowitz ad as being ‘hate speech’ or a ‘hate assault,’ in an attempt to justify the Coalition’s claims that this is not a free speech issue. The Horowitz ad is clearly a political advocacy piece.

Takei asked Blumstein to “send a clear message to your senior administrators that the Horowitz ad is not an example of hate speech.”²⁹

At a faculty meeting called by Blumstein to discuss the issue, Physics Professor Philip Bray expressed his dismay at the attack on the paper. “I am concerned that some students insist that taking the Brown Daily Herald is not thievery,” he said. “Those papers were stolen from thousands of students, staff and faculty, and that is theft.” There was audible support for Bray’s views from some of the faculty attending. Then Lewis Gordon rose to speak. “It is utter insensitivity to leap to certain conclusions about acts of civil disobedience. You can say ‘hear hear,’ but I find it grotesquely hypocritical.”³⁰

While Bray and other supporters of the Herald remained isolated and unorganized, Lewis Gordon was busily rallying the faculty left. On April 4th, the Herald leaded a private letter to President Blumstein, which was eventually published over the signatures of 60 Brown professors. The faculty signers were “angered and saddened by the lack of leadership” the University had shown, and saw it as an attack on Brown’s minorities: “Your refusal to condemn the advertisement as a form of harassment has – perhaps inadvertently – led to the silencing of many people of color on campus.” Even worse was the University’s effort to inquire whether the theft had involved a vioplation of university rules. The professors were outraged: “A few students of color have even been egregiously slected by the administration as scapegoats for an investigation of violagions of Brown’s student code of conduct.” Rather than a theft, they argued, the removal of the papers was a “symbolic protest over both the publication of Horowitz’s commercial ad, and the Brown Daily Herald’s refusal to provide the students with equal space, free of charge, for a response to the ad’s racist and assaultive statements.”

The statement continued: “Faculty and staff of color on campus, together with their white supporters, increasingly feel genuinely harassed and unwelcome at this institution,” and called for an investigation of the email flamers:

As you know, the University can use IP addresses to trace the source of every communication, anonymous or otherwise, on the web…. Rather than actively investigating those who have been posting anonymous threats and racial slurs online, which have assaulted and silenced Brown’s community of people of color, the University has chosen to investigate a few students who took part in this symbolic act. We find this misplaced investigation shocking…. Surely, the University has a greater responsibility to its faculty, staff and students of color to “investigate” those who are publishing such injurious comments, than it does to scapegoat a few students for what was clearly an action undertaken collectively as a symbolic protest against a blatantly racist advertisement that went unchallenged by the University.³¹

The faculty statement drew a response from a handful of brave professors. Whereas the 60 signers of the letter were drawn from departments that taught history, political science and African American studies, the opposition came exclusively from departments where political correctness was not part of the hiring or teaching process: the medical school, and the music and biology departments. The most pointed remarks were contained in a letter to the editor of the Herald by Professor Kenneth R. Miller, author of Finding Darwin’s God – A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution.³² The situation at Brown, he wrote, could be “a classic study of how political tyrannies develop.” He urged Blumstein to make this an object lesson for students. “Ideologies of both and right and left take control of free societies by taking a legitimate concern for grievance, claiming that the institution of a free society are not sufficient to deal with it and then installing themselves in position of absolute control and authority.” Miller pointed to McCarthy Fifties as a time when lives, careers and institutions were estroyed by crusaders of the right int heir zeal to protect the country against Communism. He then drew a parallel to the situation at Brown:

The faculty who signed that letter have, just like McCarthy, taken a legitimate issue—the fear of racism—as their own…. In [their letter] they asked you to condemn the Horowitz advertisement as a form of “harassment;” a remarkable request showing how thoroughly they have confused words with deeds. Not surprisingly, their [letter] also refers to an act of petty theft as “symbolic action” and asks the University to investigate newspaper writers who have “viciously slandered” Brown faculty members. They’d be pleased, no doubt, if you formed a standing “Un-Brunonian Activities Committee” to police speech and thought among students and faculty – all in the name of protecting us against racism.

The nature and extent of actual racism at Brown remained shadowy and subjective. The letter fromt eh 60 faculty members produced none of the “threats” to themselves and campus minorities, they alleged. But it did provide an appendix with “examples of hate speech from the Brown Daily Herald’s online forums.” The email flames were revealing, but not in the way professors intended:

• Perhaps we should call them “Third World ingrates or better yet crybabies. They are humiliating our school, and diminishing the value of our diplomas. That such moronic students should be permitted to step through the Van Winkle[sic] gates is the real crime. How on earth were they accepted in the first place? Perhaps affirmative action had a TINY bit to do with it?
• I am offended by the term used in the article “People of Color.” This is a racist term used to exclude only White people….
• Or maybe you are a product of affirmative action, which would explain your limited ability to rationalize. I feel sorry for Brown because they have obviously lowered their standards for admission. That would explain the Third World Center membership and their inability to deal with opposing viewpoints in an adult manner.
• Well – if I, a White Non-Jewish male, stole some periodicals, which I had a “racial” problem with, I would be charged with a “HATE CRIME.” If a “person of color” says “nigger,” that’s OK. But if I call a nigger a nigger – Whoah …. There’s a problem. I’m so fed up with all of this “you ow me for slaver.” I don’t own a nigger and I wouldn’t want one in my house. SO GET A LIFE or go back to the “Africa” that you all want the title of.

The use of the N-word has acquired totemic significance in environments like Brown becoming like “Yaweh” a word that is forbidden for the orthodox to utter to hear. But while the emails reflected some callow undergraduate attitudes and some genuine resentment, they were hardly evidence of racial terror at Brown.

I had been invited by the College Republicans to speak at Brown in the beginning of April, and was scheduled to go there after three speaking engagements that had been already set for me in the Boston area.³³ But just prior to my departer, Todd Auwater, head of the Brown Republicans, contacted my office. He said the invitation was being withdrawn, because the left was threatening violence if I came.³⁴

The College Republicans had planned the event as a public debate. A self-described “liberal Republican,” Auwater told a reporter his rationale for organizing the event: “[Republicans] believed that by getting these arguments out in the open, the Brown community would come to a deeper understanding of the issues.”³⁵ Auwater invited Lewis Gordon to debate me. Gordon declined invoking the baroque excuse that “it would be irresponsible for me to do since my position on black reparations is that it is too narrowly defined as an issue.” The head of the Providence NAACP accepted in his stead and the Brown Administration reluctantly went along with the idea. Laura Fried, Brown’s executive vice president for public affairs commented: “I think Horowitz’s brand of free speech is noxious, but students have the right to bring whomever they want onto campus as long as they make the proper arrangements.”³⁶

After I accepted the invitation, Auwater was visited by Josh Segan a former president of the College Democrats. He was accompanied by the representative of a Marxist sect called the Student Labor Alliance, and by the member of the International Socialists who had resigned from the Herald over my ad. According to Auwater, “They told me that Horowitz’s presence would result in violent protests. They were concerned that the emotional state of the campus was so fragile that having a debate at this time would result in unpleasant things happening.” Auwater did not want violence and rescinded the invitation. The Brown Administration conducted no investigations of the threat.

An intriguing footnote to the incident was buried in the Journal-Bulletin story. When talking to Auwater, “Segall said he heard that several students burst into tears when they heard that Horowitz might be coming to campus.” Apparently, victim-hood is a campus art form at Brown.

But while I was being denied a platform, the campus left was able to arrange a speaking engagement for Sam Anderson, a self-styled founder of the Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party – and to finance his visit. Anderson told a packaged audience in Brown’s MacMillan Hall, “The people here who have taken up the struggle against a man named ‘Horror-itz’ have done a great thing.”³⁷ He spoke about the larger struggle against “white supremacy” and the “eradication of its material basis,” which was “capitalism.” Cuba, he said, was a good example of a country that had eliminated capitalism. He warned his audience “the struggle is not a nice struggle…. The enemy is not nice.”

During the question period, a white audience member asked the Panther to clarify who this enemy was. “Am I the enemy because I am white?” Anderson didn’t blink. “The enemy I”m talking about is predominantly the white class and their Negro lackeys,” he said.

Another event the left arranged was a forum on April 7th that featured Lewis Gordon and Nation of Islam spokesman Brother Everett Muhammad. About an hour into the meeting, “one senior upset that many black students didn’t know the facts they’d need to rebut Horowitz, condemned Brown as a racist institution with no interest in African-Americans.”³⁸

It was a telling point. The black students had been shunted to the background in the battle. At its outset Asmara Ghebremichael had thrown down a gauntlet. “We don’t want an apology,” she had written in her original Herald column. “What we do want is…one free page of advertisement space to print…an article on reparations. This one won’t be full of propaganda and lies however.”³⁹

The article never appeared. During the entire controversy, the students objecting to the ad had not been able to produce their promised rebuttal. On the other hand, neither had the entire faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department at Brown.

Lewis Gordon’s presence on the panel made the moment particularly tense. After listening to the student’s complain, the professor sprang to the defense of the institution that was paying him a six-figure income, and launched into an attack on the black students present who until this moment had depended on him. “Professor Lewis Gordon, who is head of Africana studies and has rallied support for the coalition among the faculty, chided the senior for her ‘very sweeping’ statements, noting, ‘I’m Brown University, too.’ Black people at Brown have taken ‘a lot of heat’ over the years to make the university what it is, Gordon said, and the students’ ‘politically immature’ actions and ‘anti-intellectualism’ are damaging to all.” Gordon then warned the black students in the audience against further divisive complaints.⁴⁰

Brother Everett Muhammad, the Black Muslim, who was not beholden to Brown, came to the student’s defense. “Muhammad expressed anger about the tone of Gordon’s admonitions, and they argued loudly. A student started crying and shouted, ‘Why are black people arguing wth each other?’”

At this point, Gordon exited the hall, and a black studies professor from Roger Williams University took the microphone to defend the young activists: “I think these students, being a minority,…being aware of that issue, constantly makes you feel very isolated.” It was another moment of blame, another passing of the buck. Misguided by their faculty mentors, and by apolitical tradition that instructed them to regard themselves only as victims and to seek confrontation with the rest of the world, these students had worked themselves into a painful corner, and none of their mentors was going to show them the way out.

1. Travis Rowley, “U. Must Reclaim Ability For Conservatives To Speak Freely,” Brown Daily Herald, April 17, 2001; Gregory Cooper, “Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole,” May 28, 2001. [↩]
2. My office kept a running scorecard of these incidents at our website www.frontpagemagazine.com, so that others – including the press – could see the story as it unfolded. [↩]
3. Norman Boucher, “The War Over Words,” Brown Alumni Magazine, May 2001. [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. “AASA Stands In Support of TWC’s Demands of Herald“, Daily Herald, March 15, 2001 [↩]
6. March 15, 2001 [↩]
7. “Campus fascism” was a term I had used in interviews with the media to describe the attacks on my ad. [↩]
8. A subsequent Herald guest column written by David Abramson, director of undergraduate studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown, had this programmatic (if ungrammatical) headline: “Money Provides Access To Media of ‘Free Speech.’” The article showed how fashionable the Marcuse-Marxist model still was and how deep the animus against (and ignorance of) the American Founding: “What is…offensive is the awareness that the very Constitution was once used to support the financing of slavery is now being used to legitimize claims that the relationship between economics and public speech is a disinterested one.” David Abramson, “Money Provides Access to Media of ‘Free Speec’,” Brown Daily Herald, May 1, 2001 Neither Ghebremichael nor Abramson bothered to explain why it would be so difficult for say the 200 student signers of the petition to pony up $3 apiece to cover the costs of the ad. [↩]
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