Horowitz Speech Sparks Campus Ire

Members of Black Student Alliance are demanding an apology from College Republicans and a political science professor almost two weeks after conservative political activist David Horowitz spoke on campus.

Since the Oct. 9 speech, the controversy has been fueled by a string of public e-mails that began with a message on Oct. 11 from BSA President Candace Bacchus and continued with responses from Horowitz in the form of an e-mail to Emory administrators and a column last week in his online magazine at www.FrontPageMag.com.

The salvo of e-mails has heightened emotions among black students who stop short of calling Horowitz's speech racist but say it was intentionally inflammatory. Though members of College Republicans maintain Horowitz said things some students simply did not want to hear, the College Council is considering changing the rules that govern how it will financially support student groups who bring outside speakers.

In his remarks, Horowitz addressed a number of topics, including slave reparations and the likely war in Iraq. Bacchus said most students were offended by the question and answer session after the speech, in which Horowitz called a black student "half-educated" after she questioned the statistics in his claim that 75 percent of blacks are middle class.

Bacchus maintained in her public e-mail that College Republicans, which sponsored the speech, should apologize because students left the talk offended "on racial lines."

"It's not an apology for what Horowitz said. It's not an apology for an opinion," Bacchus said in an interview with the Wheel. "It's an apology from the College Republicans to the Black Student Alliance and its members because students left that program angry ... on racial lines, not political lines."

Bacchus said the College Republicans did not take the time to fully understand the repercussions of Horowitz's comments. She said BSA would never get away with inviting a speaker as controversial as Horowitz.

"If we were to ... bring someone to campus who would incite or outrage another student population here, or a student organization, we would not be funded to bring him and we would be reprimanded for trying to bring him here," Bacchus said.

Over fall break, the leaders of BSA, College Republicans and Student Government Association signed a joint statement that condemned attacks against students from within or outside Emory. Bacchus said the statement was made after she received threatening e-mails and Dan Hauck, president of College Republicans, received a harassing phone call.

But Bacchus stuck to her demand for an apology, which was forwarded to the Wheel. In her initial open letter to the community, she wrote that Horowitz had violated the terms of his contract with Emory by straying from the topic of his speech: political bias on college campuses.

Bacchus also wrote that a number of black students who attended the speech were subject to special security measures for the Horowitz speech.

"[T]he moment that African American students express an interest in observing a controversial speaker not of their own invitation, these University policies are doubly enforced to tame us," Bacchus wrote.

The message also demands an apology from Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History Harvey Klehr, who moderated the event. In the e-mail, Bacchus partially blames Klehr for allowing the talk lose focus.

Klehr, an adviser to College Republicans, said he was an old friend of Horowitz and insisted he did his job as moderator and that the event was a success.

"I did not think myself or College Republicans should apologize for anything," Klehr said. "If Bacchus didn't want her name around the country, she shouldn't have engaged in a political debate."

Hauck said BSA has a perfect right to criticize Horowitz and his ideas, but said his group objects to efforts to penalize and punish the students who bring controversial groups to Emory. He said he would not apologize.

"The grounds that he spoke off topic is clearly something that no other student organization is accountable to," Hauck said.

In his online column, Horowitz wrote that Bacchus' letter was meant to prevent a conservative voice on campus and to silence opposition to BSA and its political agendas.

"It displayed the intellectual thuggery of the campus left in all its glory -- wave the bloody shirt, whine about victimization, stigmatize your opponents and demand subservience to the party line," Horowitz wrote.

College Council President Purvi Patel said that the Council could not revoke the $5,000 it had paid to help bring Horowitz to campus even if it wanted to, since the check had already been sent to Horowitz.

Patel said the Council was looking to "solidify" a new protocol that would require organizations to provide more background on the speakers they intend to bring to campus with Council funds.

Currently, when students apply for funding, they must complete a speaker's report that includes some background information. But Patel said they might demand more information in the future.

"College Council is really interested in making sure that all viewpoints of students are represented on campus," Patel said. "But we do realize that we take the proper precautions to make sure not that speakers aren't controversial but that they're not offensive."

On Friday the Wheel rejected two full-page ads proposed by Horowitz's California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The proposed ads included Horowitz's e-mail response to Bacchus' complaint and the column that appeared on his Web site.

Editor in Chief Christopher Wang said the ads were rejected partly because they were personal attacks against an individual student. Wang also said the ads gave too much attention to the controversy.

"Running it as two full-page ads would simply blow the subject of the letter out of proportion," Wang said.

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Ad Censored By Emory Left
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 22, 2002

On October 9, I spoke at the Glenn Memorial Auditorium at the invitation of Emory College Republicans. My topic was "Political Bias in the University" and when my remarks were concluded there was a question period. The entire evening was refreshingly civil. The day after, however, Candace Bacchus, the president of the Black Student Alliance sent a letter to university president William Chace and other campus authorities protesting my appearance.

Ms. Bacchus accused the university of making security arrangements that targeted African Americans in order "to tame us." She blamed the College Republicans because I had apparently strayed from the topic she had approved ("Horowitz confirmed our fear of his appearance by offering unsolicited commentary on the issue of reparations and the state of Black America.") She further accused me of "public insult, mockery, and humiliation" of African American, Arab and Latin American students because I criticized reparations, condemned suicide bombings and spoke disparagingly of Fidel Castro’s repressive regime in Cuba. Finally, she demanded an apology to these groups from the College Republicans and a refund of the money I had been paid for my speech.

This is my reply:

I should begin by noting that I am not in the habit of agreeing to confine myself to politically acceptable topics when I come to a college campus. When I organized a conference at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, in the years when Poland was ruled by a Communist dictatorship, I did not submit my proposed remarks for approval by the authorities of the police state. It did not occur to me therefore to seek Ms. Bacchus' approval before delivering my remarks at Emory.

I did request security because -- as I indicated in my speech -- I have been the target of a national hate campaign by campus leftists. This campaign dates from the spring of 2001, when I attempted to place ads opposing reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact. That semester, left-wing protesters demonstrated during my appearances at more than a dozen universities. Most of these demonstrations were led by the International Socialist Organization and the Spartacist League, whose members happen to be predominantly white. At each of these universities, administrators familiar with the antics of these groups thought them dangerous enough to require campus security personnel to protect me and those who came to listen to what I had to say. At the University of Michigan where I spoke last spring to 1,000 students, the university administration assigned 12 armed guards and a German Shepherd to protect the safety of those who came to hear me speak. This was a disgrace to the university community, but it was the protesting radicals who bore responsibility for the outrage not those who came because they wanted to hear another point of view.

On my arrival in Atlanta, I was gratified to discover that Emory has a more civilized campus than many universities I am familiar with, and that the security I requested proved to be unnecessary. This is a credit to President Chace and his administration, one of whose deans was a cordial host at my appearance.

It is disturbing that Ms. Bacchus should arrogate to her group the right to control (and suppress) ideas which an invited speaker might want to discuss, but she is absolutely wrong that I strayed from my topic that evening by referring to reparations and related issues. My topic was political bias in the university. In the spring of 2001, there was a nationwide effort to suppress my views on this subject by 1) refusing to print my reparations ad; 2) obstructing my campus appearances; 3) stealing copies of college papers that did print the ad; and 4) intimidating the editors who printed the ad and supported my free speech rights. This campaign – which Ms. Bacchus evidently is intent on continuing -- obviously constitutes a prime example of the political bias that exists on college campuses and the intimidation (by name-calling and physical threats) that goes with it. I have a written a book about these events called Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery. It would be impossible for me to speak about political bias on campus without discussing the controversy.

Nor is this view of the matter peculiar to me. There were 400 press articles on the reparations episode, including editorials and commentaries in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsweek and The Chicago Tribune. It is safe to say that every one of them addressed the free speech issue and deplored the tactics of would-be campus censors.

As at other schools, the tactic of the intolerant Emory radicals is not to attack me but to go after their vulnerable peers who provided me with a platform. Ms. Bacchus' letter is not in fact addressed to me, but is bristling with accusations towards the students who invited me and who had absolutely nothing to do with what I had to say. For the record, I did not inform them beforehand what my remarks would be, and if they asked me, I would have refused to tell them. It is very basic to a free society and to a university worthy of the name that ideas not be screened beforehand or censored by self-appointed watch-dogs.

As she notes in her letter Ms. Bacchus sent out an email before my appearance, which was an invitation to her minions to monitor my speech. She claims to be upset because my remarks allegedly "disrupt[ed] the already fragile social environment" on campus. But what really upsets her is that she was unsuccessful in her efforts to control the contents of a speech whose ideas challenged hers. Since she presumed (wrongly) that my remarks would not cover topics she did not want discussed, there was, as she puts it, "no plausible reason" for the Black Student Alliance "to call for protest." Obviously, if I had proposed reparations as my topic, she would have fought tooth and nail to prevent me from being invited to campus and would have organized a protest to dissuade people from listening to what I had to say.

I believe my speech was recorded, so that the charge that I publicly insulted, humiliated and mocked any ethnic group can be seen for what it is: a malicious fabrication. The professor of Latin American studies who was present at my talk and is himself Hispanic actually came up to the platform afterwards to thank me specifically for my remarks about Castro – the only remarks I made that had any reference to Latin America). Of course, there are ideologically obsessed individuals who will regard any dissent from their political pieties as racial slurs, but that is their problem, or at least should be.

The problem facing the Emory community now is Ms. Bacchus' outrageous demands that the College Republicans – who had no responsibility for my remarks – apologize to her and to the specified ethnic groups. In other words she wants them to confess to a crime they didn’t commit, so that she can have an excuse to deny them the freedom to invite conservative speakers like myself in the future. Interestingly, Ms. Bacchus had a microphone that evening and did not demand an apology from me. But I will take the opportunity of this letter to demand one from her.

This is not about hurt feelings. It is about the political control of public speech, and thus about the funds available to pay for public speakers at Emory. As a result of political bias in the administration of student funds, I am the first stand-alone conservative to be invited to Emory since 1998. In that year, Ward Connerly came to speak and was virtually driven off the stage by Ms. Bacchus' predecessors. In the interim, a sizeable cohort of radical speakers has been invited to campus and paid handsomely for their divisive remarks. Aaron McGruder who is notorious for opinions offensive to most Americans was invited to attack this country on the anniversary of 9/11. This hardly indicates sensitivity on the part of those who invited him to the allegedly fragile social environment of the Emory community. Where was Ms. Bacchus' outrage then?

Ms. Bacchus' thinly veiled accusation that my talk was racist (or as she ever so diplomatically puts it, "ventured into the sensitive area of racism") is the familiar racial McCarthyism of campus radicals. "Racist" is a smear word -- a verbal intimidation that is regularly used to silence opposition to radical agendas – in this case the view that speakers they disagree with need to practice self-censorship. If they do not, their hosts must be punished.

It is apparent to me that Ms. Bacchus's Emory education has been deficient in the area of tolerance for viewpoints she disagrees with but may not be ready to dispute. I hope that members of the Emory community to whom her letter is addressed will ignore it. I further hope that they will address the problem of intellectual diversity at Emory by taking steps to see that speaker funds are divided more equitably in the future and more conservatives are invited to campus. Perhaps if this happens, Ms. Bacchus and her followers will get used to the fact that we live in a democracy where there are other points of view that need to be respected.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

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