Just the way he once romanticized black outlaws -- as so many white leftists do, accounting for Panther worship in the '70s and the creepy Mumia cult today -- Horowitz now inflates black leaders' moral and political flaws. And much the way he glorified the long-suffering black community's capacity for both redemption and radicalism, he now exaggerates its problems and pathologies. When he sent the reparations ad out as part of a direct-mail fundraising package, it was accompanied by a letter warning darkly about a couple of recent murders of whites by blacks, which he likes to call "hate crimes," as though it's open season on white folks and our only defense is giving money to his nonprofit. Horowitz is frankly obsessed with blacks, to what seems an unhealthy degree, and as a colleague I've been tempted to ask him to give it a rest.

But while I don't agree with everything in his reparations ad, it is actually one of his more persuasive arguments. Typically, Horowitz overreaches, calling welfare benefits a form of reparations to blacks, even though most welfare recipients are white. But he also makes an excellent point that his detractors refuse to grant: Slavery was a worldwide phenomenon, and Americans deserve some credit for a multiracial movement to end it. And by refusing to acknowledge that complicated history, reparations advocates risk cultivating a sense of alienation, isolation and victimhood among African-Americans that's ultimately self-destructive.

In my reading, the ad is not racist. Provocative, sure. Offensive to some, probably. Unfit to grace the ad pages of a college newspaper? Give me a break.

Of course, like virtually everybody else writing about this mess, I'm a grown-up college journalist myself, and the controversy just happens to be hottest right now at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. There, a conservative student newspaper, the Badger Herald, ran the Horowitz ad, and has since been subject to attacks and demonstrations against its "racist propaganda" by student activists. Meanwhile, the official UW paper, the Daily Cardinal -- where I was campus editor in 1978 -- ran an ad purchased by the Multicultural Students Coalition attacking the Horowitz ad. Ironically, the Badger Herald refused the coalition's ad, proving that intellectual intolerance can be found on the right as well as the left. But the Cardinal ran the students' ad "because we felt that as a newspaper it's our position to provide our pages for anybody to purchase," sophomore Eric Storck, the paper's business manager, told the Wisconsin State Journal.

That's my Cardinal, I thought proudly -- still representing the proud tradition of free-speech absolutism. I came of age when the paper was unabashedly left-wing -- it's more centrist now -- and I remember interminable staff meetings devoted to arguing about taking ads from politically incorrect advertisers. But in the end, we always took them. At the time, our free-speech commitment was articulated with a macho lefty swagger: You take the money of advertisers you disagree with, and then you screw them with it, printing stories and editorials decrying whatever cause the advertiser represents.

Alongside an ad from South Africa-based De Beers diamonds, for instance, we ran a long, tortured exposé of conditions for blacks in De Beers' mining camps written by yours truly. We were ham-handed and self-righteous and close-minded in our way, but we were willing to let ideas clash. Certainly we had enemies on the left, who opposed what they saw as our bourgeois free-speech fetish. But I admit we never faced the fashionable multi-culti marauders who descend on college papers and try to punish those who publish anything that offends their sense of racial purity. Though I'd like to think we'd have stood up to them, I really don't know.

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