Not surprisingly, Bond is a man of ferocious rhetoric. At the NAACP's annual meeting in February, for example, he blasted the Bush administration, likening its Cabinet nominees to Afghanistan's fanatical and murderous Taliban extremists.

Ho hum. Just the sort of speaker one expects at Macalester or almost any other American college or university. After all, our institutions of higher learning are temples of tolerance and diversity, right?

Not quite. The sad truth is that, on many campuses these days, leftist ideologues like Bond reign supreme, while ideas from the political right struggle to see the light of day. Far from being genuinely open to debate, our colleges and universities are among the most closed and intolerant institutions in America.

Need evidence? Consider the recent case of David Horowitz, a former left-wing activist turned conservative provocateur. Horowitz says that during February -- Black History Month -- he noticed that many colleges were promoting reparations for slavery as a self-evidently laudable idea.

To reach college students with his views, Horowitz prepared an ad titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too." His arguments ranged from the factual (only a small minority of white Americans ever owned slaves) to the controversial (affirmative action and welfare payments constitute a form of reparations). Horowitz submitted his ad to 50 major college newspapers.

Most of the papers flatly refused to run the ad, finding its political content unacceptable. Of the 12 papers that accepted the ad, a number came under assault from gangs of student brownshirts intent on exacting vengeance for the publication of ideas they deemed offensive.

At Berkeley -- home of the Free Speech movement -- protesters stormed the offices of the Daily Californian, threatening staff, scattering papers, and demanding that a censor be appointed "to review the paper for offensive racial content." (Next day, the editorial board published a groveling front-page apology.) At Brown, screaming protesters stole nearly every copy of the Daily Herald, and the paper's staff had to seek police protection to distribute a new press run. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, protesters raged outside the Badger Herald's offices, demanding the editor's resignation and tossing stacks of papers into garbage cans.

Unpublished policy

The Minnesota Daily chose not to rock the ideological boat at the University of Minnesota by running Horowitz's ad. Generally, the Daily is not squeamish about giving offense -- it routinely publishes ads for sex and strip clubs, for example. When I asked about the Horowitz ad, however, a spokesperson loftily informed me that the Daily chose "not to run advertisements that are propaganda." She also refused to let me see the paper's advertising policy, stating that the paper chose to "keep the policy internal, and not publish it to the public."

Apparently, Daily editors believe that they know propaganda when they see it, while ordinary "U" students do not. The Daily's idea of journalistic fairness is equally reprehensible: Refuse to run the ad containing your adversary's views, but then print a piece that strives to rebut them in detail. In an anti-Horowitz editorial, the Daily assured its readers that Horowitz's ideas (which readers had not been permitted to see) were "despicable." Just take it from us, guys, the editors intoned. Horowitz's views aren't worth your consideration, because they're "simplistic," "misleading" and "misguided."

Blatant one-sidedness is disturbing in any campus paper. It is especially disturbing in a paper that, like the Daily, is financed in part by student fees.

The Daily's editors seem not to have thought much about the kind of intellectual environment students need to acquire a truly liberal education. A liberal education, put simply, is one that liberates -- it is an education appropriate for free men and women. Young people cannot become informed, responsible citizens if they are shielded from "misguided arguments" by ideological guardians throughout their college years. Students must engage in the rough-and-tumble of political debate if they are to be equipped to decide for themselves what is propaganda, what is truth, and what has elements of both.

Most campus editors today fancy themselves oh-so-progressive. By and large, however, they have failed to learn a vital lesson, stated succinctly by the courageous editor of Brown University's Daily Herald: Where the Horowitz ad was concerned, the truly liberal thing to do was not to reject it, but to print it.

-- Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.