IF A "PARTING SHOT" is a "last word," these, then, might well be termed my "closing remarks." With my impending absence from The Crimson, (and only, I think, with it), I am authorized to stake out a personal position, to acknowledge a subjective presence. Journalists share with academics a professional injunction against being too personal--an injunction that comes not without the warning that we must also be personal enough, enough to warrant notice, to occupy our readers' preoccupation.

So with the promise of closure, my personal opinions may now encounter, in retrospect, the presumably objective "news" that never appears on this page. Newspapers carefully monitor the placement of what is on the one hand called "opinion" and on the other, "news." I, too, have been so disciplined.

We find, from time to time, that this boundary is slippery indeed. And it is often in these moments, when we are most confounded by our "objective" and "subjective" choices, that we are forced to face a recurring anxiety: our personal voices and opinions may be just what defines and mobilizes the insistently "impersonal." What I am presumably opening today in the guise--and with the promise--of "closing remarks" may have been an open secret all along.

The notion that I might ever have separated myself or my politics from my efforts here seems impossible, if not entirely unappealing. Yet despite my own personal investment, I have remained for the most part silent in it.

For journalists, and for editors in particular, the moment that we acknowledge our individual identities is often the same moment that we threaten to destabilize our position as journalists. Insisting that our individual differences make a difference, we, like the scholars we "cover," risk violating veritas, which our institutions often claim as an apolitical, universal term.

Thus, for us, uncovering, whether exposing ourselves or our investment in our subjects, is most dangerous, even though--and indeed because--it is precisely what we, as journalists, claim to do.

WHEN THE CRIMSON received an advertisement this fall from a group claiming that the Holocaust never happened, we wondered whether it made a difference that most of us making a decision about whether it should run are Jewish. We wondered, additionally, whether our personal distaste for the ad could be grounds for refusing it.

We examined the text and the layout of the advertisement closely: it was a full page designed to look like a news article, proposing to "reopen" debate about a topic that had been, its author argued, unfairly closed. Much like this fall's 56-page Peninsula issue, the the Holocaust ad cloaked its aggressive position by carefully appealing to "free speech" sensibilities--an appeal that often finds its greatest supporters among the journalism community. Such a tactic offers, as Professor of English and Comparative Literature Barbara E. Johnson noted in yesterday's Boston Globe, "a grammar of reason with a rhetoric of hostility." Peninsula attacked homosexuality and homosexuals, but did so with what its authors termed "charity" and "concern;" thus, the assault was made more powerful by the extent to which it also refused the refutation.

It may well say something precisely about the personal politics of The Crimson itself that while we acknowledged, in a staff editorial, the rhetorical strategies of the Holocaust ad, and the extent to which those strategies cloaked an aggressive purpose, we refused at another time to view Peninsula's tactics in the same light. In an unsigned editorial, we, as editor Ira E. Stoll `94 wrote in a dissenting opinion, accepted Peninsula "on Peninsula's terms," allowing that their arguments were fair arguments indeed, that they were "weak" but not hateful.

We eventually refused to print the Holocaust advertisement for several reasons. The "easier" reason, the reason that allowed us to maintain our "objectivity," was that its appearance was deceptive. With such an excuse we avoided the personal and political implications that mere "distaste" (or, more accurately, disgust) would invoke. We could avoid the "freedom of speech" question if the ad were deemed simply fraudulent.

Some of us felt that the very nature of the advertisement transaction--that is, its financial nature--required our collusion in a way that transcended the apolitical requirements of eRTLrial objectivity. The advertisement demanded that we participate in its "reopening" of debate; it required that we accept $700 into our coffers, which we were unprepared to do.

I chose the money argument myself, while others were more persuaded by the false advertising concern. None of us felt we could refuse the advertisement publicly without playing by the "objectivity" rules to some extent. In private, we admitted to one another that our motivations were intensely personal and political, journalism aside. But to say such a thing in public we might risk being marked as "political" or, as I have suggested earlier, "too personal."

What if the advertisement had not attacked Jews but another, less well-represented group at The Crimson or on campus, such as gay men and lesbians, as Peninsula did? What if we had held that ad? We might be called by some, or by someone, "a paragon of P.C.."

INDEED, RECENTLY, ENOUGH, The Crimson has been called "a paragon of P.C." for different, although not unrelated reasons. For to be derisively termed "politically correct" often suggests that one has dared to correct someone politically, or too personally, where the personal is not welcome.

In this month's Harper's magazine, Winthrop Professor of History Stephan Thernstrom must take the credit for this description of The Crimson. According to Thernstrom, this newspaper has played, and presumably continues to play, a major role in the "leftist" attack on academic freedom on campus. Several years ago, for instance, we allowed accusations of "racial insensitivity" made against Thernstrom to leave the private chambers of the classroom and enter, willy-nilly, into the brash and undisciplined spectacle of public discourse. In doing so, we participated in a "smear campaign" against this poor, defenseless, white male tenured professor that so traumatized him that he has refused to teach his course, "The Peopling of America," ever since.