Battling at Brown

The Horowitz controversy can't be understood without examining the business of race in America

by Kathleen Hughes

Brooks King (right) with other 'Herald' editors

UP ON COLLEGE Hill, where the grass is just taking on that heartening shade of green, students are shedding wool sweaters for shorts and tank-tops even if it's not yet 60 degrees, and grounds crews and events offices are preparing a coif of the entire campus for parents coming to collect their children after the year that may have pushed their tab into six figures, life ain't so pretty.

Although Brown is widely seen as an open and enviably liberal campus, it has also been accused of egregious political correctness, which usually means speech and behavior stripped of any possible offense. Recent events such as the remarkably short presidency of Gordon Gee, plus the shouting down of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed in March 2000, and authors and pundits such as Camille Paglia and Dinesh D'Souza over the last decade, suggest that PC at Brown means intolerance of unpopular views. "This is a campus where certain attitudes are protected, supported, and enhanced with all kinds of outlets and resources . . . while others are to be prohibited," says music professor David Josephson. "The academy is supposed to be about ideas. If we're not about ideas -- we might as well close up shop."

Enter David Horowitz's paid polemic against paying reparations for slavery.

Brooks King, co-editor in chief of the Brown Daily Herald, read a story in Salon about the controversy caused by the ad at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he circulated an e-mail to his co-editors asserting that the paper should run the ad if it was received -- which it was, a few hours later. Although some accuse King and the BDH of baiting controversy, he insists that his receptiveness was based strictly on the Herald's advertising policies. "We all knew our policy and knew we should run the ad if we got it, even though, based on the controversy at the other schools, there might have been a temptation to back off," King says.

Given the reception extended by Brown students to conservative voices in the recent past, the outraged response to the Horowitz ad -- culminating in the hijacking of 4000 copies of the March 16 edition of the BDH by dozens of students -- might be considered as predictable as a trout chasing a well-placed prince nymph. What is less predictable, however, and also disturbing, is the hate mail sent to a student involved with Horowitz protests. In any case, the controversy has lifted the lid off Brown, offering a glimpse of the complicated view of race and politics within its ivy-strewn walls.

Continued from the cover

As it turns out, the BDH's decision to publish the Horowitz ad was within a journalistic tradition worthy of the New York Times and Harper's Magazine which, respectively, sell political advocacy space to controversial groups like TomPaine.com and Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME). "A college newspaper should take more chances [than a metropolitan daily] -- it should be absolutely open to all perspectives," says Alex Jones, a Pulitzer-winning former New York Times media reporter, who directs the Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "The idea that it should be less open . . . completely contradicts the whole university experience. Most people go to college to find out what they don't think."

Newspapers across the country have lined up to support the Herald, Wisconsin's Badger-Herald, or Berkeley's Daily Cal in printing the Horowitz ad. Some 32 Brown and BDH alums, including National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, the New York Times' James Risen, and Ariel Sabar of the Providence Journal, paid for a full page BDH ad on April 2 to voice their support: "They [BDH editors] understand apparently better than others on the campus that the First Amendment would be meaningless if it protected only safe, unobjectionable speech."

Members of the Coalition of Concerned Brown Students

Still, the Coalition of Concerned Brown Students, whose members claim responsibility for stealing the March 16 Herald -- and are depicted as being largely African-American, although they are multi-racial -- felt they had no other recourse but to steal the papers, which they consider an act of civil disobedience, not an assault on free speech. After two brief meetings with BDH staff, explains coalition member Gwen Forrest, a senior, who, incidentally, is white: "We felt that the BDH was not willing to sit down and have any discussions about its history and practices . . . The action [of taking papers] was necessary to draw attention to the harm that was done."

By "history and practices" Forrest is referring to a perception among critics that the BDH gives short shrift to the Third World community, which includes not just African-Americans but all students of color. And if the coalition was self-assured in their action of taking the papers on March 16, the hate mail that was received after the controversy, and thus, somehow, a result of the publication of the ad itself, has only made them more so. And although Horowitz was supposed to come to Brown to debate Cliff Montiero, president of the Providence chapter of the NAACP, a conservative student group canceled the visit, citing concerns about possibly violent protests.

All in all, it's one fine mess, albeit one that would be oversimplified by pitting rampant political correctness against free speech at Brown. To be resolved, the unfinished business of race in society, and in the society of an Ivy League institution, must be considered. For the record, the Brown class of 2004 is seven percent African-American, seven percent Latino, one percent Native American, 14 percent Asian-American, and 71 percent white. This means that there are half as many African-Americans and Latinos, three times as Asians, and about the same amount of whites as in the United States, according to figures from the 2000 Census.

The debacle must discuss the role of the press, even in a small community like Brown, where news travels fast and the editor may sit next to you in biology class. Here's the hopeful news, some say: if there's a place where this can occur, it's Brown. "People on both sides of this issue here are actually trying to figure out the best way to deal with a question that society actually doesn't much to do with -- race," says Chris Amirault, an assistant professor of education.

THE BROWN DAILY Herald has something of an elevated place at Brown, according to Amirault, who describes the paper as nearly a professional school in itself, noting the BDH alumni who have graduated to jobs at the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post. There has been criticism about coverage of stories involving race, and the fact of a largely white staff doesn't help matters. King says strong efforts have been made to recruit minorities, but to little avail. This year, there are two Latinos and one African-American on staff. With Asian-Americans added in, however, King says, the staff is 21 percent non-white. "It's easy for people of color to see a white and Asian organization . . . and when mistakes are made," he says, "to attribute them to racial insensitivity rather than simple human error."

One such squabble, a faculty member recollects, involved an overtly racist illustration of a black man in a cage on the cover of a spring special issue in the late '80s. The illustration was likely meant to convey spring fever by showing an animalistic man trying to break free of his cage. Unfortunately, the animalistic man had dark skin.

A more recent and telling instance of conflict between the Third World community and the Herald took place in December 1999, when an e-mail list estimating the qualities of African-American men at Brown spawned increasingly nasty lists in response. It got to the point that Karen McLaurin-Chesson, dean of the Third World Center, sent an e-mail to all African-American students, berating the behavior and urging its cessation, King explains. The BDH assigned King to cover the story, and he tried to gain entrance to a community meeting at the Afro-American program center, despite requests from Third World students to not report the story. King stayed outside the meeting, gathered what few quotes he could, wrote the story, published it, and endured the subsequent outrage. This seems like an instance of blaming the messenger. It was a legitimate campus story, and King was trying to do his work as a reporter.

Still, the notion persists that the BDH simply omits or misrepresents the news and activities of students of color. The University Council of Students (UCS) took up this notion in February 2000, when it suggested that the BDH open itself to a third-party audit to assess the paper's coverage of non-white news and events. "This practice . . . has recently been carried out by the URI student newspaper and is standard practice at the Providence Journal," former UCS president Seth Andrew wrote in a February 25, 2000 letter to the editor. Andrew also suggested that BDH financial and operations records be open to the public, as are, he maintained, the records of all companies with UCS contracts, including Champion and Gear apparel companies.

The BDH refused on both counts, thereby forfeiting $42,000 in student fees it had been receiving from UCS as a bulk subscription. "We're not averse to conducting our own audit," King says, "And may do it in the near future. We would use results to modify our own coverage." What was objectionable, notes King, was writing such an audit into a business contract.

Although the UCS/BDH split of February 2000 seems mostly premised on the fact that Andrew felt the paper's financial stability didn't require a student subsidy, most recounts of the split emphasize the racial audit, and thus reflect a snowballing notion that the paper needs to heed some community input. Yet Andrew's comments about racial audits at other papers weren't exactly right.

According to Carol Young, the Journal's deputy managing editor, the Journal did a content audit once, in 1995, with 13 editions, between November 6 and 18, prompted by an editorial cartoon that was found offensive in the black community. The auditors, however, were not a third party, as Andrew proposed for the BDH, but four staff members of diverse background and experience. An internal survey of Journal staff's opinion on diversity and fairness of coverage was also done. Finally, the Journal distributed papers to the community, asked people to critique it, and held meetings to gather feedback. Such meetings continue today. Says Young, "We're pretty aggressive about trying to build relations with various communities throughout the state."

BEYOND THE particularities of the BDH-Third World Center discord, more general race relations at Brown aren't perfect, and are often characterized by self-segregation -- which suggests, above all else, that Brown, like the outside world, struggles with race. As one faculty member puts it, "Of course, there's racism at Brown." This may not come as a shock to Ruth Simmons, soon to take the reins as the first black woman to lead an Ivy League college, who has described being racially profiled while shopping.

Students have a variety of descriptions of racism at Brown, from racial stereotyping in class discussions, to the fact that the university doesn't pay a living wage to its workers, and pays a low work-study wage to its student workers, both groups whose members are disproportionately people of color. Coalition member Irene Tung, a senior, also cites low minority recruitment -- despite long standing lip-service to improvements -- and a lack of ethnic studies program, again, despite expression of commitment for it. Both cases, though, might be related to Brown having a smaller endowment than its peers in the Ivy League.

Josephson, the music professor, sees racism on campus mostly in blatant self-segregation, and he believes Brown encourages this with the 33-year-old Third World Transition Program (TWTP) orientation program. This program invites incoming freshman of color to campus for a week of bonding before regular freshman orientation. "They create what the university hopes would be communities of color before white students arrive -- and they do," Josephson says. "It's been a cause of complaint and ugliness ever since it started -- [TWTP] is scandalous."

Rogeriee Thompson, a black 1973 Brown graduate who is a Superior Court judge, says the college was self-segregating then, too. "In hindsight, I think it was very unfortunate," she says. "But I think it's the nature of people to be comfortable with people with whom they have something in common, and race happens to be one of those things that makes people comfortable, for better or for worse."

In response to a longstanding debate about TWTP, says Paul Armstrong, Brown's new dean of the college, the university is launching a new program, the Diversity Orientation Program, which will attempt to explicitly mix minority students and some minority orientation exercises into the regular freshman orientation. "We want to give students a chance to find a community of like folks," Armstrong says, "but then we don't want these communities to sit idly side by side."

If these issues of race can be discussed with some amount of comfort, one event indicating great racial discomfort at Brown took place only a year ago. Ebony Thompson, a black senior, was entering her dorm at around 1:30 a.m. on a Monday night in February when a dispute broke out with the three drunk white men behind her. After the dispute -- which turned on whether she held the door for them and why -- turned physical, Thompson called the police, and two of the three men were arrested.

Three days later, the university had made no announcement regarding the incident, and the men were back in their dorm, which was shared by Thompson. A protest took place in heavy rain, with students circling the College Green, chanting, "If she was white and they were black, Brown never would have let them back," and "Ho ho, hey hey, kick them out today," the BDH reported. Within a month, one of the men was expelled, one suspended for a year, and the third "sanctioned," meaning a note was made in his record.

Criticism of the university's handling of the Thompson case focused on the rapid assumption of guilt for the men, an unequal opportunity for them to defend themselves, and uncertainty about who actually started the fight -- Thompson or the men. The investigation by the Providence police ended last summer in lieu of a civil settlement (reportedly $5000 per suspect). Ironically enough, interim Brown President Sheila Blumstein announced on March 15, two days after the publication of the Horowitz ad, that a year-long examination of the disciplinary code has started, partially in response to the Thompson case.

Another irony is that in February, Blumstein released a paper strategizing Brown's new approach to diversity. "I think what became clear last year [in the case of Ebony Thompson] was that there is a fair amount of tension across ethnic lines at this institution," Blumstein told the Herald. "I think probably, relative to the rest of the world, it's far less. But for Brown, it's not good enough."

THE RANGE of events and principles characterizing the Horowitz controversy may be predicated on the recent history of race relations at Brown, and the university's famous leftist bent, but, says Armstrong, another highly relevant factor is what he sees as a "contradictory imperative" that makes the university environment "very delicate." "On the one hand," Armstrong says, "universities are places where free expression is paramount," noting that tenure is meant to encourage free, even radical expression. "And on the other hand, there is an imperative that seminars and classes are places in which we must trust each other, respect each other, and listen to each other. `Shut up, stupid,' is not OK." Both the Herald staff and the coalition, Armstrong says, favor free expression; and both, in this situation, could've listened better and more respectfully to the other.

Indeed, one thing that jumps out to an outsider studying events during that bruising week in mid-March is the degree of hostility present from the get-go. The coalition felt so hostile that they arrived on Wednesday night in a group of 60, with petition signatures purportedly from more than 200 students, and two demands: that the BDH donate ad space to rebut Horowitz's ad, or donate the $525 received from Horowitz to the Third World Center, or some other African-American campus group, according to Tung.

Given that only three of four Herald editors were present when the coalition arrived, a meeting was scheduled for the next night. The editors anticipated approximately 16 coalition members, but around 60 arrived. After trying to reduce the size of the group for an easier discussion, Herald editors "told [the coalition] from the start that we wouldn't meet their demands," King says, "because we didn't want to string them along."

Whoever started the hostility, the BDH's posture at that point seems as antagonistic as the coalition's. The meeting ended after less than 30 minutes, with the coalition telling the editors, King says, that if they didn't meet one of two demands within a week, the Herald would not be seen. As it turned out, the Herald disappeared the next day.

Harvey Silverglate, a Boston lawyer, co-author of The Shadow University, about civil liberties at American universities today, and occasional Phoenix contributor, condemned the coalition's taking of the newspapers, but he says Brown's history of over-reaching anti-harassment codes and unfair disciplinary tribunals made such an action wholly unsurprising. Although former Brown president Vartan Gregorian was a noted free speech advocate, Silverglate asserts that the codes guiding and defining harassment and free speech at Brown contradict Gregorian's legacy. Thus, says Silverglate, "The Brown administration shouldn't be surprised that students feel the right to squelch newspapers because the administration has been squelching student speech for 15 years."

Armstrong says he's seen no evidence of any administration attempt to squelch speech at Brown. On the contrary, "We have very outspoken students and very outspoken faculty. Brown is a very outspoken place," he says.

HOWSOEVER USEFUL Armstrong's "contradictory imperative" analysis is in going forward, it seems unlikely that either group would alter their actions were the situation to transpire again. This entrenchment is based in differing perceptions of the ad itself -- on the one hand, as unpopular, controversial speech provided for in the BDH's advertising guidelines; and on the other, as speech so hurtful and damaging that its protest led some bigot to send a photo of a mutilated black child to a student.

The Herald's guidelines for advertising submissions include: a right to refuse anything based on illegality, obscenity, egregious offense, and libel. The question, of course, is whether Horowitz's ad was "egregiously offensive." King says no. "It's provocative, but eight of 10 points were arguable points -- maybe we don't agree with them, but it's not hate speech," he says.

The first eight points argue that no single American group today could accurately be held responsible for slavery, nor could a specific group today be deemed to have directly benefited from slavery, such that most Americans' connection to slavery today is indirect at best. Similarly, Horowitz asserts, given the time that has passed since slavery ended, it is impossible to target one group directly affected by it and thus deserving of reparations -- and to direct reparations to all African-Americans generally, perpetuates victimhood.

Horowitz's final three points are the most provocative. The eighth argues that affirmative action and welfare comprise reparations totaling at least a trillion dollars and reams of legal code; the ninth and tenth argue that white Americans are responsible for the end of slavery and that black Americans, today, enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world -- and should thus be grateful to this country.

Forrest, Tung, and others infer from these last points that Horowitz says black Americans should be grateful for slavery. "The misconception is that people were harmed by the ad because of its stance against reparations," Tung says. "Not all of us are for reparations -- but this ad . . . by telling African-American students that they should be thankful for slavery . . . destroys the very conditions that would've enabled dialogue."

On one level, it's clear why the coalition and other students, faculty, and community members felt assaulted by Horowitz's words; it is complicated, however, why blame for the assault was placed on the Brown Daily Herald, rather than Horowitz. Somewhere along the way, sensibilities were offended not merely by Horowitz, but by the admission of Horowitz's sensibility within the confines of Brown. But no, coalition students insist, this is wrong. It's how he was invited in. "The Horowitz ad gave [the Herald] some real opportunities for dialogue, research, and education -- there were some real historical inaccuracies . . . which showed the effect of revisionist history," says Mobley, who deems the Herald's printing the advertisement with no comment whatsoever "irresponsible."

There were certainly other ways to run Horowitz's ad -- the BDH could've written its own editorial in response the ad; they also could've solicited an op-ed from African-American students to run the same day as the ad. Finally, as pointed out by Lewis Gordon, director of the Afro-American Studies Program, the ad might have been better received as an op-ed, because then the BDH would not have been in a position of receiving money from Horowitz.

But King maintains that each of these is problematic. For starters, alerting readers about a forthcoming ad, even a controversial one, would set a curious precedent. Soliciting an op-ed would suggest only the black community is concerned with reparations, and King isn't sure that such a move would've tempered students' outrage anyway. The paper itself editorializing against the ad, King says, would have set another bad precedent. The choice, then, was simply to run the ad or not to, and the paper's policy held that the ad should be run. If he could have done anything different, King says, "I would consider running an editorial with the ad, stating the basic principles of our newspaper . . . regarding freedom of expression."

TO THE EXTENT that the publication of the Horowitz ad gives any snapshot of life at Brown, the snapshot reveals both that the community is neither infallible nor all that different from the larger world. Racism exists at Brown, even though it may uniquely pain some students and faculty to realize it, given the campus's tradition of political correctness, plus, of course, the imminent arrival from Smith of a formidable black academic leader in Simmons.

But somehow, part of this pain and part of the campus' earnest attempt to right this pain, means the role of its campus newspaper has been distorted to that of a good, helpful neighbor, who might be voted off the island if its behavior isn't agreeable. Perhaps the Brown Daily Herald could've done something when publishing the Horowitz ad that would've tempered the furious response without violating reasonable journalistic ethics. But probably not. Incidentally, 10 students randomly surveyed on campus this week unanimously supported the paper. "It's not a matter of whether you agree with what he [Horowitz] says, as much as he has a right to say it," says Courtney Oliva, a senior from Hawaii.

This isn't to say that the paper shouldn't work harder to recruit minorities or take a lesson from the Providence Journal's community-relations exercises.

Amirault emphasizes that the BDH editors and the coalition members are students and adults, if barely. As such, Brown faculty and administration bear some responsibility for leading the campus out of this morass. The first step took place Wednesday, April 4, with a faculty forum on the history of race and race relations at Brown. Several more will follow.

What also needs to be considered, Armstrong says, is the dominant mode for dialogue in society at large."CNN Crossfire has become the model for political conservation, and it's not a dialogue of ideas in the public sphere -- it's headliners and ad hominem attacks; it's entertainment," he says. "The danger to the university of something like the Horowitz controversy is that it brings CNN Crossfire into a place where we really should be fostering dialogue."

Kathleen Hughes can be reached at khughes[a]phx.com.