Closed minds at University of Michigan?

Former left-wing activist and author David Horowitz was invited by several campus conservative groups to speak to a standing-room-only audience last week at the University of Michigan. He tossed aside his planned text and spoke instead on the issue of racial reparations, a subject about which he recently wrote a book titled Uncivil Wars.

Why, Horowitz asks, should a struggling immigrant family from Mexico be taxed to pay reparations to multimillionaires like Johnnie Cochran for an institution that ended -- amidst considerable bloodshed by Michiganians, among others -- 137 years ago?

No doubt there were many in the audience willing to hear such things even if they disagreed. But so ugly did the shouting, taunting and thinly-veiled threats from a large segment of the audience in the Michigan Union become, according to the Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, that public safety director Diane Brown said that either the sponsors needed to end the event, or she would.

It was reminiscent of the even uglier scene three years ago when Ward Connerly -- a University of California regent who opposes race preferences in admissions and employment -- was chased from the stage within minutes.

Now, one can understand that there are strong feelings at play in matters of race. The University of Michigan is locked in a high-stakes battle over the use of racial preferences -- or, if you will, affirmative action -- which is destined for the Supreme Court. But it's still hard to avoid the conclusion that, on certain issues at least, the famous Free Speech movement that began at Berkeley in the 1960s has degenerated into a No Speech movement, not just at the University of Michigan but on campuses across the country. In the name of diversity, no diversity must be allowed.

In the days preceding the Horowitz appearance, somebody painted a racist graffiti using the N-word in the middle of the Michigan campus, complete with a Nazi swastika. Black student activists were quick to connect the incident with Horowitz and call for a boycott of his talk (though the leader of the boycott popped up from the audience to debate Horowitz and make a pitch for her election as student council president). The press bit hard.

But I couldn't help wondering if there weren't something fishy going on: why would anybody connected to Horowitz, a Jew and ardent supporter of Israel, use a swastika to illustrate his supposed hatred? And why would a sympathizer, knowing that Horowitz's daughter-in-law is African-American, think he could win favor by using the N-word? I scanned the papers for explanations to these fairly obvious questions, but to no avail.

But don't blame only the activist wannabes for trying to exploit the situation or shut down debate. There are more important people from whom an accounting is long past due, starting with university officials and faculty who have gone AWOL on the issues of civility and fair play that they are so quick to invoke in other situations.

Besides, the kids have to get their ideas from somewhere. Horowitz himself cites a Luntz poll showing that 64 percent of Ivy League professors consider themselves liberal or somewhat liberal, while a mere 3 percent consider themselves as conservative or somewhat conservative. When academic tenure is used to enforce a Stalinist conformity on taxpayer-supported institutions whose whole purpose is free and open inquiry, Horowitz points out, arguments about the need to let academia do its thing have a tinny ring.

"I went to Columbia University in the McCarthy era," he lamented the next day. "This is worse."

One hesitates to invite government to start mucking around in our universities. But if academia won't clean up its act, it won't be long before some politician is calling for hearings to find out why people of legitimate but differing views get treated so shabbily -- and how it is that the university employment process seems to produce such lop-sided results. Maybe some affirmative action is needed to ensure that students get a more balanced view of the world.

Thomas Bray

Thomas Bray is a Detroit News columnist who is published on Sunday and Wednesday. He can be contacted at (313) 222-2544 and at letters [at] detnews.com.