David Horowitz will speak today at The University of Michigan. As part of the university's preparations for his visit, someone chalked these words on the Diag, the main campus footpath: "Only niggers want affirmative action." The Michigan Daily's coverage of this ugly exercise of free expression attributes it to campus tension surrounding the controversial Horowitz's visit. UM's affirmative action policies have been the subject of two high-profile lawsuits in recent months; Horowitz strongly opposes affirmative action. Horowitz's speech, "How the Left Undermined America's Security," will be live on line at 8 pm Eastern time.

Horowitz's visit follows hard on the heels of his most incendiary book to date: Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery(December 2001). Among other things, the book recounts how Horowitz brought the academic world to its PC knees last year when he ran (or tried to run) an anti-reparations ad in several college newspapers. The Michigan Daily was one of the papers that refused to run Horowitz's ad. Salon.com, which ran an article-length version of the ad in May 2000, covered the uproar with its usual nonpartisan aplomb.

Earlier this month, Uncivil Wars received a vitriolic review in the Brown Daily Herald. The full text of Horowitz's outraged response to the review, which he finds slanderous, is reprinted in FrontPageMagazine.com, which he edits. (The Herald ran a bowdlerized 253 word version.) Worth noting: the Herald was one of the few campus newspapers to publish Horowitz's anti-reparations ad. Also worth noting: when "radical" students suppressed the ad by stealing the entire issue in which it appeared, sixty members of the Brown faculty wrote a letter to the University president applauding their blatantly felonious and unconstitutional behavior. They say a leopard never changes its spots--but apparently the Herald does.