The Brown debacle: free speech vs. censorship

Fight ideas with better ones, not theft.

BY NED ANDREWS

Last week, an organized group of Brown University students stole an entire production run of the Brown Daily Herald in retribution for an advertisement printed the previous day. In the advertisement, conservative thinker David Horowitz stated 10 arguments against payment of reparations to all American citizens of African heritage. After stealing every issue distributed across campus, the student coalition then stormed the Daily Herald office in an effort to seize and destroy the 100 copies kept within the office. This advertisement had been run in several campus newspapers, including those of UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Student reaction varied from campus to campus, with some UC students even calling for censorship. However, the reaction at Brown was premeditated and organized, and therefore it is to Brown that I direct my attention.

EUGENE WONG/YH

The most immediate observation is that the student coalition ignored an excellent opportunity to voice its own cause. Rather than immediately resorting to brute force, it should instead have welcomed the opportunity for Horowitz to air his claims. For if Horowitz's arguments are indeed as unsound as the offended students claim, they should have nothing to worry about—what better way to expose an idea's flaws than by publishing it for the entire campus to critique? Besides, their actions set a precedent: publish controversial material, and we will silence you. This action and threat harmed the student body's capacity for inquiry both for the moment (with the loss of an issue) and for the future (with its possible effects on the publication of further material). The student coalition thus deprived itself of the most effective way of making its case: the process of ferreting out and publicly refuting false beliefs.

Not only was the student coalition's action imprudent, it was entirely unjustified. First of all, it violated the Daily Herald's property rights by disregarding the conditions on which the newspaper was given away—that all students would have access to its content. But more importantly for the discussion at hand, its members acted in a manner antithetical to their role as university students. By their actions they stated that force should triumph over thought, that veneration of the moment's majority opinion should prevail over efforts to test and improve that opinion. The coalition members sought not to open students' minds but to close them to all ideas except the ones the coalition selected. Granted, this is Brown we're talking about, but even so, its members should not be ideologues, but students and investigators, searching for the truth rather than defending their opinions whether or not those opinions are right.

One fights an idea not with force but with a better idea. Brown students should have taken Horowitz's ad as a challenge and an opportunity. By responding with their own thoughts, they would not only make their message known but would also gain practice in articulating and refining their positions. They could write letters to the editor, submit columns, or even take out advertisements themselves. Yet the coalition took none of this into account. Instead, the immediate resort to force draws into question whether it even belongs at an institution dedicated to the development and perfection of ideas.

A college newspaper is an arm of a university, and it should share the university's mission. Its highest goal is the search for truth both in an accurate reporting of events and in the pursuit of ideas. Thus a college newspaper should not possess a "conscience" on any particular issue. Instead, it should employ its reputation and resources for an impartial forum for reporting the opinions of individuals. Horowitz's advertisement was entirely in keeping with these considerations: as if his name on the article weren't enough, Horowitz even employed a layout setting it apart from the newspaper's main text and clearly denoting it as an advertisement.

While most readers know where I stand on the issue Horowitz's advertisement addressed, my position on the question is irrelevant. My response would be the same if Brown's College Republicans (yes, they do exist) had stolen a newspaper bearing an advertisement favoring racial preferences. The Daily Herald owes the Brown student coalition no apology and no compensation. If anything, the as-yet-unrepentant coalition should be required to compensate the Daily Herald and its advertisers for the materials and readership they lost. Yet the damage done goes beyond that: students have been deprived of an opportunity to face the arguments of others and improve their own beliefs. The Daily Herald, the Brown student body, and the university as a whole owe them nothing but disgust and dismay. 

Ned Andrews is a sophomore in Saybrook.

Paper theft was an appropriate protest.

BY MICHAEL SOSKIS

The Brown Daily Herald has found itself in the midst of a scandal, the ramifications of which have extended way beyond the newspaper itself. In universities across America, there has been an uproar over a particularly conservative advertisement written and paid for by right-wing scholar David Horowitz. The advertisement argued (in the words of The New York Times) that "blacks do not deserve redress because white Christians ended slavery, and that rather than getting compensation, black Americans owe the country for the freedom and prosperity they now enjoy." In response to this article, liberal students at Brown protested by stealing almost all of the copies of the Daily Herald out of university bins and disposing of them. The merit of Horowitz's statement itself is irrelevant. It is the actions of the Brown students that deserve attention and, in fact, praise.

There is absolutely no legal justification for the students' actions. They are culpable for breaking the law. However, what these students did was a legitimate form of political expression, and their actions will benefit the campus as a whole. Life in college is like a bubble, with its own internal customs and politics, and that internal system is better off due to the theft of the Daily Herald issues.

The reason for this rests in the nature of collegiate media. Any school would ideally have many sources of trustworthy reporting (i.e., for every Light and Truth there should be an Aurora), and those sources should more or less represent the interests of the community. From what I have heard from several Brown students, this is not necessarily the case at their school. The Herald—Brown's only daily newspaper—is reportedly a bit to the right of Brown's largely left-wing student body. In cases where there is only one prominent newspaper it is twice as important that that newspaper be fair and accurate without any noticeable political tilt. Yet this is clearly not the case at Brown. The Daily Herald deliberately sought to stir up controversy by printing an incendiary diatribe by a notorious and controversial right-wing activist.

The Daily Herald had every right to print the Horowitz article—it in fact had a positive effect by sparking a relevant political debate on the subject of slave reparations. Yet just as the Herald has the right to publish such an article, Brown students have every right to protest it.

The most legitimate way to protest the Horowitz ad would be to publish a counter-argument against the advertisement. Yet there is no guarantee that the Herald would print the argument, or if it did, there is no guarantee that the counter-argument would be given as prominent a position as the article it was protesting. Only if there were a competing newspaper of equal prominence, without any vested interest in the issue would this be an effective form of protest. Yet this option is not available.

The goal of the student protesters was not simply to reject the argument made by Horowitz. The real protest was against the fact that the newspaper agreed to print the offensive ad in the first place. Freedom of speech ought to be bounded by common sense and temperament, and the editors of the Herald must have known (from incidents that had already occurred at other universities) that the Horowitz ad would make people upset and angry. Yet they decided to run it anyway. The Brown protesters, through their actions, were seeking to punish the paper for this decision in the hopes of deterring the paper from publishing blatantly offensive material in the future. Only by such actions would the newspaper stop producing biased or incendiary views and become more answerable to its readership.

This seemingly reprehensible act of theft was the only way to create a fair system of campus reporting. Every powerful institution needs checks. Since the Herald has a monopoly on the daily newspaper coverage on campus, it had a responsibility to reflect the views and needs of the whole student body. It failed in this responsibility by printing the Horowitz ad and paid for it through the actions of the student protesters. Without an adequately competent internal system of regulation (i.e., the Daily Herald editorial board) or adequate market competition (i.e., another daily newspaper), stealing papers was the only way that the Brown students could fully reach their ends. Their actions were situationally justified by the need to punish the Daily Herald for its ill-advised and deliberately incendiary decision to run the offensive ad.

Michael Soskis is a junior in Timothy Dwight.

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