Conservative author David Horowitz spoke Tuesday as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series to counter attacks made toward him and his arguments against slavery reparations, which were printed in multiple campus newspapers around the country last spring.
Having been attacked as a racist because of his provocative anti-slavery reparation advertisement that was printed in The Badger Herald last spring, Horowitz criticized UW-Madison for attempts made by certain campus organizations to hinder his freedom of speech.
\I am the target of a nationwide hate campaign and in particular a campaign to silence me on this campus,"" Horowitz said. ""You can't get a good education if you are only hearing one side of the story.""
Horowitz criticized UW-Madison as an environment where freedom of speech is a right too dangerous for the faculty to use and where a lack of intellectual diversity affects the quality of education on campus.
""You won't hear [my opinion] from your professors because they will be intimidated because of what happened to me,"" he said.
Addressing the more controversial points of his article, Horowitz said slavery reparations would be more of an obstacle to social equality in the United States than a benefit to black Americans.
""I believe that the mentality of slave reparations is an obstacle,"" Horowitz said. ""How do we keep a multi-ethnic society if one piece is standing on the heads of another piece along race-divided lines?""
Horowitz argued that because their ancestors were brought to America, blacks here are better off than blacks currently are in any other country in the world.
""Black people in America are 20 to 50 percent richer than blacks in West Africa, and if you add up the incomes of all black people in America, it amounts to the 10th-richest country in the world,"" Horowitz said.
He added, however, that although slavery was by no means a good thing, current African Americans have benefited from the position that it put them in.
""People criticize me for saying we should be thankful for slavery but that's not the point,"" he said. ""Whatever happened in the past happened in the past, and there is nothing you can do about it.""
When a UW-Madison student and audience member asked Horowitz what, if not slavery reparations, he would do to solve the problem of education in America, he cited statistics for problems such as family formation that need to be addressed to solve the problems in our educational system.
""In the '60s, two-thirds of those born in the inner city were born in two-parent families,"" Horowitz said. ""Today, 80 percent of blacks and Hispanics in the inner city are born out of wedlock.""
As a solution, Horowitz advocated a more active promotion of family forming. Criticizing teachers unions as not motivating teachers to improve their educational tactics, he said giving ""scholarships"" to parents so they can send their children to better schools would challenge teachers in their districts to improve.
Condemning the slave reparations movement as being destructive to American social diversity, Horowitz said America is a successful example of an ethnically diverse nation.
""I want you to think about our country,"" he said. ""We are the only large successful multi-ethnic society in the history of the world.\