Brown papers stolen in wake of controversy

A controversial newspaper advertisement urging against the payment of reparations to African Americans for slavery has been making waves on college campuses nationwide over the past few weeks. The full-page advertisement, written by conservative commentator David Horowitz, was sent to over 40 student newspapers across the country. The majority of the newspapers who received the ad titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too" decided not to run it, including The Daily Pennsylvanian. But the ad has elicited strong responses from students at the schools where it appeared in print. Nine newspapers printed the advertisement, and three quickly issued apologies for doing so. The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper at Brown University, printed the ad last Tuesday, and has not apologized for its decision. In reaction, a student coalition at Brown stole 4,000 copies -- almost the entire press run -- of the Herald on Friday. The theft followed a Thursday night meeting between the coalition and Herald staffers, during which the coalition demanded that the newspaper donate the money received for running the advertisement to campus minority organizations and give the coalition a free page of ad space for a counter-argument to the controversial ad. The Herald rejected both of the demands. "One of the people at the meeting said 'If you don't meet our demands then people won't read your paper'.... We took that as a threat," said Katherine Boas, a Brown junior and one of three editors-in-chief at the Herald. On Friday, the protesters replaced the stolen newspapers with fliers of their own, stating in part that "we are using this action as an opportunity to show our community at Brown that our newspaper is not accountable to its supposed constituents." "This is not an issue about free speech, it's about paid speech and hate speech," said Anzetse Were, a Brown sophomore and spokeswoman for the coalition. "The paper is setting a precedent that it is willing to become a forum for hate speech." The Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin at Madison also printed the ad and declined to issue an apology. Activists at Madison rallied outside of The Badger Herald and called for the resignation of its editor-in-chief, Julie Bosman. "I believe what Horowitz was saying in the ad was within the bounds of political and social discourse," Bosman, a senior, said in defense of the paper's decision to print it. "I didn't find the ad to be libelous or in poor taste, or else we wouldn't have run it." Protests in Madison did not reach the same level as those at Brown, Bosman said, but several thousand copies of The Badger Herald were stolen in the days following the advertisement's publication. Boas stood behind the decision. "As a newspaper it is not our responsibility to run or not run an ad even if it may offend a portion of our readership," Boas said. But Michael Vondriska, executive editor of the DP, defended his newspaper's decision not to run the ad. "I think we have an obligation to stimulate discussion and dialogue across the campus, no matter what the issue, on the editorial page, but not in our advertising space," the Wharton junior said. Vondriska said he contemplated the issue for a few days before making a final decision. "It was a tough decision," he said. "Nine schools ran it, and there's a valid argument for that, but the majority chose not to and that's valid too." Horowitz wrote in a column in the conservative FrontPage Magazine explaining that his surprise at newspapers choosing not to run his ad prompted him to expand his campaign to get it printed. "I never dreamed the ad would be turned down at places like Columbia and Harvard or that the editor of the Daily Cal at Berkeley would apologize for printing it after the fact," he wrote. "It was this gauntlet that convinced me to send the ad to as many college papers as my resources permitted." Although the DP did not print Horowitz's ad, the paper has been the object of angry student protests in the past. Around 14,000 copies of the DP were stolen in 1993 in reaction to a column printed in the newspaper. Then-University President Sheldon Hackney's lack of immediate response to the newspaper theft was widely criticized. But both Boas and Bosman said they feel their schools' administrations have handled the issue well and stood by the papers' decisions to run the ad. "The administration is trying to help in whatever way it can," Boas said.