November 12, 2003

STOLEN JUSTICE: In a repeat

STOLEN JUSTICE: In a repeat of the sort of anti-First Amendment garbage that's become all-too-common on college campuses in recent years, the entire press run of the latest issue of the Justice was stolen on Tuesday night. (Hat tip to Jawsblog)
It's uncertain why or by whom, and I'm sure we can look forward to a thorough investigation from Reinharz and Co. We don't know if this has anything to do with the Passner brouhaha, although it's worth noting that there was no such theft of the issue in which the original Passner quote appeared.
One possibility- in a front-page article about a forum the BBSO held last week, the "n-word" actually appears in the Justice, which it did not in Passner's offending article. This week, the word comes up in the context of Randall Kennedy's best-selling book "Nigger," which was discussed at the forum. Kennedy, a Harvard professor who is black, wrote the book as a history and study of the word; the comedian Dick Gregory gave the same title to his autobiography, he said, so he could tell his children that anyone who called them by the word was merely promoting his book.
The inclusion of the word in the article is in perfect context and thus is completely defensible, as any reasonable person can see; then again, we know we can't count on college activists to be reasonable. There's similar trouble on campus now because a group called the "Brandeis Coalition For Tolerance" is getting ready to not tolerate an upcoming speech by conservative Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes.
A similar campus media theft incident at Brandeis happened five years ago, when hundreds of copies of the right-wing journal Freedom Magazine were tossed in a dumpster by a member of the student senate who never apologized, and was not forced to resign his Senate seat. Freedom was later defunded after several bordering-on-illegal stunts which included publishing the home address and phone number of the Student Union President. Several senators memorably lambasted the magazine as "racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-Senate," and another challenged the magazine's publisher to a fight.

Posted by Stephen Silver at November 12, 2003 04:58 AM
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