Students For Academic Freedom

Conservative Activist Says CMU Paper Censored His Ad · 03 January 2005

The Associated Press--12/27/04

A college newspaper refused to run an ad about a group headed by a conservative activist and about his book on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"It's outrageous, but not surprising in today's collegiate environment, that a newspaper would censor an ad that they disagreed with," said David Horowitz, a conservative activist who's pushing for measures to protect the religious and political freedoms of college students and professors.

Mark Egerman, executive officer and acting editor of Carnegie Mellon University's The Tartan, said he was concerned about the ad's content _ but that his decision to not run it last month was also influenced by a controversy spawned by an April Fool's edition of the paper, which contained a comic strip considered racist by some.

"When I first saw the ad, I got very concerned. It was respectful enough to be published, but controversial enough to be worrisome," Egerman told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for Monday's editions. Egerman said he would have been "much more likely" to run the ad if not for April's controversy.

Horowitz, who wrote "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left," said 93 college or university newspapers have run the ad, but several have not, including Purdue University, Texas A&M, San Francisco State, the University of Florida, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

The ad's headline says "Israel is the canary in the mine."

"The war between Arabs and Jews is not the cause of the war on terror, as apologists for Muslim radicals claim; it is the war on terror," the ad states. The ad encourages people to visit Horowitz's Web site and to buy his "Unholy Alliance" book.

Egerman said 40 people contacted him after he spiked the ad last month, and some called for his resignation. Egerman paid $425 of his own money to reimburse the paper for money it lost by his refusal to run the ad, he said.

Although Horowitz said he's considering lawsuits against some of the other schools that refused his ad, he won't sue Carnegie Mellon because the newspaper receives no government money.

Horowitz is pushing the state Legislature to pass what he calls an academic bill of rights. The measure would make sure that professors aren't denied tenure because of their political and religious beliefs, and that students' grades aren't affected by their beliefs.

Horowitz founded the group Students for Academic Freedom, with chapters on 135 campuses. A one-time liberal campus activist turned conservative commentator, Horowitz and his group fight against what they allege are episodes of grading bias and unbalanced, anti-American propaganda by professors.

Critics of the group say the conservative students are trying to dictate policy and curriculum and are hurting academic freedom.
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On the Net:
Horowitz's Web site: http://www.frontpagemag.com
Students for Academic Freedom: http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/

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