Stand for Free Speech

To the editors:

The Brown Daily Herald printed David Horowitz's provocative advertisement arguing against reparations for slavery and then stood up against the fools who tried to punish it for doing so. We noted with surprise that you rejected the ad (News, "Ad Kindles Outrage," March 7): surprise because we thought The Crimson stood for freedom of the press and courage in exercising that right.

We understand that a newspaper is not compelled to print all advertising submitted. It is entitled to its own judgment on the suitability of the ad for its audience. But in this case the judgment appears to have been that the audience was too tender to deal with what to many would have been an offensive political argument. We think that notion is false to the ideals of The Crimson and of free speech. If Harvard students cannot stand hearing an unpopular political argument, we are in a bad way. But we are utterly confident that they are capable of doing so.

You missed an opportunity--an easy opportunity--to show what freedom of speech is all about. And Horowitz would not have got off unscathed. We suppose you might have run an editorial explaining why you printed a provocative ad by someone whose intention it was to provoke. As it is, Horowitz is using the rejection of his ad by The Crimson and other college newspapers to argue, as he put it in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, that "moral and physical intimidation" by "the political left that is fully in control of the campus public square is able to censor views that it finds objectionable."

Anthony Lewis '48

David Halberstam '55

March 20, 2001