Agitation by Ad

David Horowitz fully intended to provoke debate when he sent college newspapers a full-page advertisement denouncing calls for reparations to black Americans for slavery.

But even Horowitz, a conservative Los Angeles author and activist, says he has been stunned--though somewhat pleasantly, he acknowledged--by the flaming controversy he managed to ignite.

“People are telling me I’m a public relations genius,” an unapologetic Horowitz said by telephone from Massachusetts last week as he juggled media requests and college appearances. “But I never expected this.”

Since it began in February, the ad has landed like a series of grenades on campuses from coast to coast, setting off angry demonstrations and bitter, sometimes agonized discussions about the limits of free speech at American universities.

The uproar has been wrenching for many involved, from the protesters moved to march on student newspaper offices to the young editors forced to face them.

The content of the ad--which argues against reparations in part because blacks already receive redress through welfare and affirmative action programs--is not the only issue. Horowitz said he was taking aim at what he calls a prevailing liberal orthodoxy on college campuses.

“There is a widespread intolerance of conservative views,” said Horowitz, a former radical leftist who veered sharply right in the 1980s. “People want to silence anyone who disagrees.”

Some college students and administrators strongly challenge this view. But even some who decry Horowitz’s methods, and the inflammatory, racially tinged nature of his ad campaign, agree that there is de facto censorship on campuses.

Contrary to their image as centers of lively debate, those critics say, American colleges are stifling dissent when it runs counter to majority--generally liberal--views.

“On campuses like this, the range of acceptable opinion is definitely narrowing,” said Julie Bosman, editor of the Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which ran the ad. “There is a climate of political correctness here.”

Harvey Silverglate, a Massachusetts attorney and civil libertarian, said colleges, both formally and informally, have silenced unpopular views through “harassment codes” that outlaw speech considered offensive to certain groups, including women, gays and minorities.

“It’s a very small step from censoring speech to students feeling they have the right to squelch offensive views in newspapers and books,” said Silverglate, the author of a book on the subject.

“There’s no question that there is a stifling of ideas on college campuses,” he said.

“That is not true, at least not at Brown,” countered Sheila Blumstein, interim president of Brown University, where the ad’s publication created fissures among students and faculty that have yet to heal.

All sorts of topics get debated on campus, just as they have for decades, she and other presidents said. She denied that right-wing views are suppressed, and said discussion of the Horowitz ad proves the point.

“If any orthodoxy existed, I don’t think we’d be talking about his ideas,” she said.

In the 10-point ad, Horowitz argues that black Americans do not deserve compensation because white Christians ended slavery years ago and because blacks already receive redress through welfare and affirmative action programs.

Instead of asking for recompense, he says, African Americans owe a debt of gratitude to the country for the freedom and prosperity they enjoy.

After the ad ran March 13 at Brown, incensed protesters formed human chains and threw away thousands of copies of the newspaper, the Daily Herald.

At the University of Wisconsin, more than 100 shouting demonstrators marched on the off-campus offices of the Badger Herald to demand that Bosman, 21, step down. She refused.

Papers at most of the 61 colleges approached so far have declined to print the ad, either because it violated policies against accepting political advertising or because it was considered offensive.

A few, including UC Berkeley and UC Davis, ran it but later apologized to readers.

“Horowitz set a trap and we fell right into it,” said Daniel Hernandez, editor in chief of Berkeley’s Daily Californian. In the paper’s handling of the ad and the subsequent controversy, “we made mistake after mistake after mistake,” Hernandez said glumly, including the fact that the editors never saw the ad until the advertising staff ran it.

Hernandez, who endured more than a month of angry, occasionally abusive e-mails and phone calls, said Horowitz had tried to make “a cheap point in a cheap way,” by forcing college editors to run the ad or risk being branded as opposed to free speech.

“We couldn’t win,” he said.

Yet other student editors said they were able to air the issue in a constructive way.

At Yale University’s Daily News, the paper’s business manager turned down the ad because of concerns that it could offend readers or advertisers.

But after negotiating with Horowitz by e-mail, editors commissioned an op-ed piece, which ran April 2 under the headline “Reflections of a Campus Provocateur.” In it, Horowitz explained his views and complained about what he described as a leftist crusade against him.

“The piece he wrote for us was fantastic,” said Editor in Chief Michael Barbaro, 21. “We ran a couple of letters and had some dialogue about the issues on the op-ed page. But sadly, after all that, there wasn’t much response.”

The Harvard Crimson also refused the ad, but ran a legible version of it in the paper’s news columns, alongside a story detailing the nationwide campus controversy.

Advertising coordinators say Horowitz’s ad would have triggered alarms at many larger, non-college papers as well.

“It would certainly have raised red flags for us,” said Barry Levin, an advertising standards coordinator for The Times. “It’s always a fine line between protecting free speech and printing something that would be offensive. This would have been a tough one.”

By his own admission, Horowitz, 62, has always delighted in going on the offensive. Once he baited critics on the right; now he baits them on the left.

A former editor of Ramparts, the leftist Vietnam War-era magazine, Horowitz now runs Frontpage Magazine, a conservative Web-based publication, and heads a foundation called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

Horowitz began his rightward shift after he sent a friend to work for the Black Panther Party. The woman was murdered and Horowitz came to believe that the Panthers were responsible, though no one was ever charged.

His conversion to the political right occurred gradually, over many years. These days, he says he has accepted the label of conservative provocateur but adds that he was deeply offended to find himself branded a racist.

“There were black students quoted after the incident at Berkeley who were in an obvious kind of pain,” Horowitz said in a telephone interview, as he raced from a Boston television interview to a debate at MIT. “But my feeling is that if an argument hurts your feelings, you fight back, you say what you think on the issues. You don’t call in the sensitivity police.”

Ward Connerly, a conservative University of California regent who considers Horowitz a friend, said no one should have been surprised at his methods. “All his life he’s been an in-your-face kind of guy,” said Connerly.

But Horowitz is not racist, said Connerly, who is African American. “I know that not to be true.”

A staunch opponent of affirmative action, Connerly said he generally agreed with Horowitz on the reparations issue but strongly disagreed that compensation already has been made to blacks through welfare and affirmative action. “Those are things the nation does for all of those presumed to be in need, not just for black people,” he said.

Connerly said he agreed with Horowitz that universities are intolerant, particularly on issues of race. A controversial figure on many college campuses, Connerly himself has been booed and hissed off university stages.

“There are certain areas that are sacrosanct and one of them is race,” he said.

At MIT, reparations advocate Dorothy Benton Lewis debated Horowitz in a discussion before an audience of several hundred. All sides described it as a balanced, relatively respectful exchange.

Lewis, national co-chair of a grass-roots organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, said Horowitz’s ad had succeeded in raising the profile of an issue that has received scant public attention.

Many people, particularly black college students, have since contacted her organization, she said, including many who said they have been propelled to do so because of their anger over the ad.

Still, Lewis, who has been working on the reparations campaign for more than 30 years, is dismayed by the way it has risen to prominence.

All of a sudden, “somebody comes along and inflames the issue with a lot of misconceptions but gets a whole lot of attention. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way things happen in America.”