Diversity of campus thought lost in name of liberalism
By Daily Bruin Staff
May 2, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Ben Shapiro Shapiro is a first-year
philosophy student bringing reason to the masses. E-mail him at
[email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Ben Shapiro
A bilateral discussion of the issues. That’s all that
David Horowitz really wants. While the liberals of this country
proclaim Horowitz a racist and a self-promotional skunk, all he
wants to do is to counter the overwhelmingly dominant ideology on
campuses ““ that of victimology and purposeful division along
racial lines. And what this country needs is more people like
Horowitz.
With the leftists’ suppression of conservative ideas on
campuses everywhere, with the stigma attached to being a
“right-wing fanatic,” it’s no wonder that the
conservatives on this and most other college campuses are in
hiding. The violent, virulent and venomous feelings of the vast
majority of UCLA students against President George W. Bush, Ward
Connerly and Horowitz is another example of the dangers involved in
stating, however quietly, that you disagree with liberal
ideals.
So without people like Horowitz to take the heat for their
beliefs and make an issue out of the ideological subjugation of
conservatives on campus, we would be left without intellectual
diversity.
Forget racial diversity ““ what colleges lack is diversity
of thought.
Horowitz’s ad, titled “Ten Reasons Why Slavery
Reparations are a Bad Idea ““ and Racist Too,” ran in UC
Berkeley’s Daily Californian in January. Students at
Berkeley reacted violently, stealing and burning papers, and
invading the Californian’s offices. The editor of the Daily
Californian, Daniel Hernandez, ran an editorial apologizing for the
ad. Of the college newspapers that have received the ad, 40 have
rejected it and 28 have printed it ““ 20 of those without
incident. The Daily Bruin was one of those that rejected the
ad.
Believe it or not, Horowitz’s actual intent for his ad was
quite straightforward and reasonable. “I was responding to a
bunch of conferences that were organized for Black History Month,
and there was only one side represented,” said Horowitz in a
recent phone interview from his home in Los
Angeles. “The ad is not about David Horowitz, it’s
about ideas about reparations. The publicity was made by those
students who stole papers and those editors who apologized for
printing it.”
When asked if he had placed the ad merely to cause a violent
reaction among liberals and African Americans, Horowitz said,
“It’s ridiculous. I forced them to be violent? Come
on.” And, as he quite rightly pointed out, “No
one’s been able to show that any of the claim’s in it
are actually false.”
 Illustration by CASEY CROWE/Daily Bruin One of the main
arguments constantly made by black leaders like Jesse Jackson, Al
Sharpton and Maxine Waters has been that slavery spawned a legacy
of racial subjugation which exists even today. The problem with
this theory is that there are so many black figures who are
prosperous. If racism plays such a large part in everyday life, how
could people such as Colin Powell and Johnny Cochran do so well?
Why is it that Oprah Winfrey could make it to the top if the black
community experiences constant setbacks as a result of slavery?
An oft-quoted line from Horowitz’s ad reads,
“Trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to
African Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial
preferences.” When I asked him about this, he responded that
he recognized how this could have been misperceived, but he also
stated that it was no excuse for calling him a racist.
“Whoever calls it racist is somebody who is brainless and
needs a label to conceal the fact that they are
brainless. There has been a net transfer of wealth toward
blacks through means such as welfare payments, over 40 years or so
… of $1.2 to $1.6 trillion (a statistic he quoted from a study he
commissioned from The Heritage Foundation). And now, 47 percent of
welfare recipients are black and only 13 percent of the taxpaying
base for welfare is black and therefore there is a continuing net
transfer.”
If it is slavery that has kept the black community down, then a
continuing transfer of cash toward the black community should be
seen as reparations. Racial preferences cannot be seen as anything
other than reparations for slavery ““ they essentially state
that the black community has been subjugated for so long that they
need a hand to get up.
Another controversial line from Horowitz’s ad states that
blacks owe a debt to America. In truth, this comment should not be
controversial in the least! Every human being living under the
star-spangled banner owes a debt to the founders of the country, if
only for their promulgation of the idea of freedom. As Horowitz
states, “It’s not like achieving a democracy is as easy
as falling off a log.” The concepts of equality, personal
freedom and opportunity for all were revolutionary in their time,
and still are today.
Horowitz also states that blacks owe a debt to America in simple
economic terms, as “any black in America is 20 to 50 times
richer than any black in Africa. That didn’t happen by
accident.”
According to Horowitz, racial profiling doesn’t exist,
because no study which establishes it records the race of the
officer, and “until there’s a study that finds that
white cops stop more blacks than black cops do, I think it’s
a completely phony issue.”
So, if the blame for societal inequality doesn’t lie with
slavery or racial subjugation, where does it lie? Horowitz says
that the reasons for inequality are threefold: the glut of black
families without fathers in the home; the widespread idea that
studying hard isn’t a part of black culture; and the
victimology being forced on the black community by the left. The
liberals continuously tell the black community that they are set
upon, that they experience racism every day, in everything they do.
How can they succeed if they feel the weight of the world on their
shoulders?
Nothing that Horowitz says is racist fiction without basis in
fact. So what is the lingering message from this situation? The
domineering and overbearing nature of the left.
The liberals on campus have metaphorically beaten the
conservatives into submission, removing them from the faculties and
frightening others into silence.
After my column on the March 14 rally, I received a letter from
an administrator at UCLA praising the article. I asked him if I
could forward it to my editor for publication, but he said no.
“I’m afraid I could not handle the potential damage my
express thoughts would do to my career as an administrator here.
The Chancellor reads The Bruin. The only way The Bruin could print
my little piece of encouragement is to run it as by
“˜administrator ““ name withheld for fear of professional
retaliation by the politically correct.’ Sadly, for those of
us who earn our living here as staff, it’s professional
suicide to engage in free expression.” Diversity of thought,
indeed.
Horowitz stands by his statement of campus suppression of
conservative thought. “This is what this is about. I have
exposed the campus totalitarians, both the tenured ones and the
wet-behind-the-ears student ones.”
Perhaps by exposing the dominance of the left, discrimination
based on opinion can be mitigated. Only when both sides are
heard can UCLA truly be a place of diversity.
