Students Protest Anti-Reparations Ad

About 140 students, many weeping, joined a silent procession to the Duke president's office Thursday morning to present 261 individually-signed petitions asking the university to issue a progress report on earlier minority student demands and to formally protest an advertisement in the March 19 Chronicle about "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea and Racist Too." The petition calls on the university to withdraw advertising from the independent student paper to show "exclusion from a newspaper that does not support the ideals of Duke University." Before joining university officials to discuss the students' demands, President Nannerl O. Keohane said the students, many representing minority groups, had offered a "thoughtful response" to the controversy in a way that was "very appropriate and quite moving." In a letter to the editor that appeared in the March 21 Chronicle, Keohane said the ad raises issues that deserve serious discussion, even though it "includes some questionable and controversial historical claims" and "will be hurtful to a number of members of our community." "The best recourse on a university campus," Keohane said, "is to use free speech to deal with speech that is offensive and in many respects, I would argue, deeply misguided." Students continued their protest at the Bryan Center Thursday afternoon, handing out a letter to passers-by that calls on The Chronicle to run a full-page apology and to give concerned African Americans a second page to "refute and rebut" the arguments made by David Horowitz, a conservative author in Los Angeles. The students planned a forum for prospective students on the issue for 9 p.m. Thursday at the Bryan Center. The petition also calls for a student panel to review The Chronicle's ad policy with an eye toward ensuring that offensive material not be published outside the editorial page. It also requests "a system of checks and balances of power within The Chronicle, such that any single individual is not allowed to make committee decisions." Samantha Tweedy, a junior, said the students plan to occupy the student center until their demands are met. She said protesters want to be visible over the weekend as prospective students visit the campus during what is a traditional recruitment weekend. Students stood to either side of the lobby of the Bryan Center this morning with signs that read, "We Too Are Part of the Duke Community," "Make the Chronicle Responsible,' and "It's Not About Reparations, It's About Respect," among other messages. Carl James, a sophomore, said "the university talks about the importance of diversity but the day-to-day reality doesn't reflect that at all." The Chronicle was one of nine student newspapers across the country to run the ad Monday. Three school papers, including the one at the University of California at Berkeley, later apologized as protests grew louder. Twenty-one other newspapers that received the ad refused to publish it, according to The Charlotte Observer. Chronicle Editor Greg Pessin wrote a column in the March 22 issue of the paper about his decision to run the ad. "In its advertising practices just as in its news reporting and editorial pages, The Chronicle strives to be as open and free to as many ideas as possible," he wrote. "The Chronicle has always been committed to running advertisements regardless of their political content."