Journalists Are Right on CSUN Debate

The students have it about right, I figure, concerning former Grand Wizard David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan and whether he should be allowed to speak at Cal State Northridge. I don’t mean the Student Senate that invited him and agreed to pay a $4,000 fee for the listening privilege. Rather, the student journalists who editorialized that the decision was “expensive and short-sighted.”

Duke--a Louisiana ex-legislator and underdog Republican candidate in a U.S. Senate primary Saturday--is slated to argue the case against affirmative action on campus Sept. 25. He’ll be up against Joe Hicks, a Los Angeles civil rights activist. Hicks initially agreed to a $1,000 fee, but the Student Senate now has decided that’s unfair and will also pay him $4,000.

The Cal State Northridge Daily Sundial, after a 6-3 vote by the editors, opined that the Student Senate’s 12-11 vote was “irresponsible” and signaled “that CSUN welcomes hatred, ignorance and racism.” Duke’s visit, the editorial continued, “could further divide ethnic groups on campus [and is] dangerous.”

But the paragraph that especially is right on was this one:

“It’s difficult to believe that [the Senate] couldn’t find a person who felt just as strong about this issue and was willing to appear for a smaller fee or, better yet, free. With a university which claims that it doesn’t have enough funds for this or that, it’s interesting that CSUN can scrounge up enough money for a bigoted Southern politician to espouse his views on affirmative action.”

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CSUN still is a wreck from the 1994 earthquake--temporary buildings clutter parking lots, half the library is blocked off, major classrooms are closed, cafeterias are shut down. Not that a bigot’s $4,000 paycheck (plus expenses) would make much difference, but there is a principle here. And the principle is not 1st Amendment rights.

“This is not an issue of freedom of speech,” Sundial Editor in Chief Lily Maximo told me. “This is an issue of student fees. They’re being mishandled--given to someone whose views are based on hatred and prejudice and ignorance.”

Student body fees at Northridge are $120 a year. One inclination is to say that what the students’ elected representatives do with that money is their business. Well, yes and no.

California taxpayers, who foot three-fourths of the bill for the state university system, have a right to ask whether students who have $4,000 to give a racist could not afford a little higher tuition.

The governor and Legislature, after all, did kick in an additional $30 million this year to spare CSU students a 10% increase in tuition, keeping it relatively low at $1,584. That state money could have been spent for community colleges or police or parks--or tax cuts.

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There won’t be anybody in this affirmative action “debate” to root for if you’re a supporter of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that would ban racial and gender preferences in public hiring, contracting and university admissions.

You’ll be embarrassed by the longtime white supremacist, who only last week on California talk radio accused minority men of raping white women “by the thousands.” He’s described this way by the 1996 Almanac of American Politics:

“Duke had been an overt Nazi sympathizer since college and sold Nazi literature in his office up to 1989 . . . a propagator of racist and anti-Semitic messages. Except for his unpersuasive claims of having changed his mind, there was no reason to think that he had retreated from those views. Unlike most other racist nuts, however, he did have a knack for speaking to mainstream political issues in attractive political language.”

Attractive enough, some anti-209 student senators perhaps thought, that voters might become confused and equate the ballot prop with the hatemonger.

You can just hear the avian analogies from the anti-209 spinners: birds of a feather . . . if it quacks like a duck. . . .

Student Senate President Vladimir Cerna, 22, denies he was trying to help the anti-209 side when he cast the tie-breaking vote to invite Duke. But he clearly relates 209 with bigotry and, therefore, considers the ex-klansman a fair spokesman.

I.e., people against racial discrimination in reverse must be racists.

“That’s the problem,” says editor Maximo, 20, a Los Angeles-born Latina who, incidentally, opposes 209. “I don’t think everyone who wants to get rid of affirmative action is a white racist. And I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring David Duke onto campus to represent that view. It’s a shame.”

Leave it to some student journalists to get it right, even if the campus politicians they cover don’t.