The Chronicle’s acceptance of the ad and the editor’s defense of having done so elicited two reactions. Bradley Smith, quite predictably, praised Heimberger’s column as “fantastic” and an example of sound reasoning.{81} A less laudatory response came from the Duke History Department, which, in a unanimously adopted statement, asserted that the ad aimed to “hurt Jews and to demean and demonize them.” It was particularly vehement about Heimberger’s contention that the ad was nothing more than a reinterpretation of history. The department observed that the “scholarly pretensions” of the ad were effective enough to deceive Heimberger so that she believed the ad’s claims were part of the “range of normal historical inquiry.” The statement continued:
That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events is not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather it concerns their historical interpretation—their causes and consequences generally.{82}
If the ad convinced Heimberger, one can only imagine its impact on individuals who have had less exposure to history and critical thinking.
There were, of course, those college newspapers that had no problem evaluating the ad’s intellectual value. The Harvard Crimson repudiated the idea that the ad was a “controversial argument based on questionable facts.” In one of the most unequivocal evaluations of the ad, the Crimson declared it “vicious propaganda based on utter bullshit that has been discredited time and time again.” More than “moronic and false,” it was an attempt to “propagate hatred against Jews.”{83} The editorial board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian argued that “running an ad with factual errors that fostered hate” was not in the best interests of the paper.{84}
The MIT Tech simply decided that it would not accept an ad that it knew “did not tell the truth.”{85} For the Brown Daily Herald the ad was “a pack of vicious, antisemitic lies” parading as “history and scholarship.”{86} The Daily Nexus, the publication of the University of California at Santa Barbara, refused the ad because of its “blatant distortions of truth and its offensive nature.” The paper described receiving the ad itself and the more than one thousand dollars to print it as “chilling.”{87} The Dartmouth Review, no stranger to controversy, also rejected the ad. It acknowledged that by so doing it was denying “someone a forum through which to speak to the paper’s readership” but explained that it had a “bond of trust” with the public, which expected it to abide by “standards of accuracy and decency.” Accepting an ad “motivated by hatred and informed by total disregard to the truth” would be to violate that trust.{88} The Chicago Maroon saw no reason why it should run an ad whose “only objective is to offend and incite hatred.”{89} The Yale Daily News “simply” let Smith know that it found the ad “offensive.”{90}
Some of the papers that ran the ad did so on the basis of what may be called the light-of-day, defense, a corollary of the free-speech argument: In the light of day, truth always prevails over lies. Neeraj Khemlani of the Cornell Sun believed that by running the ad he had done the Jewish people a favor—reminding them that there were a “lot of people out to get [them],” which was something they needed to know.{91} This attitude is reminiscent of the concept of “saving the Jews (or women, African Americans, or any other potentially vulnerable group) despite themselves. Michael Gaviser, business manager of the Daily Pennsylvanian, decided to run the ad because of his belief that Smith was a “dangerous neo-Nazi” of whom the public had to be aware. (His decision was reversed by the editorial board.){92}
A number of the nation’s most prominent national papers echoed the light-of-day position. A Washington Post editorial rejected the freedom-of-the-press argument but accepted the light-of-day rationale. Acknowledging that college newspapers had no obligation to accept the ads, it argued that it was “bad strategy” automatically to “suppress” them. What the ad needed was the “bracing blast of refutation.” The Post did not seem to consider the possibility that an article fully analyzing the ad would have served the same purpose.{93} In an archetypal deniers’ move Smith cited the Post’s editorial as proof that the paper believed it both “ethical and permissible” to debate the “Holocaust story.”{94} He made the same claim about a New York Times editorial that left it up to each newspaper to decide whether to publish Smith’s “pseudo-scholarly” and “intellectualy barren” tract.{95}
The Rutgers Daily Targum contended that publication of the ad constituted a means of defeating Smith. The editors argued that “you cannot fight the devil you cannot see.”{96} Exposing Smith’s views through publication of his ad could thwart his objectives.{97} The Targum correctly understood that the First Amendment did not apply—(“CODOH was wrapped itself so tightly in the First Amendment it borders on suffocation.”)—and the claim to be engaged in historical investigation was dismissed as “a sham.” Nonetheless it chose to reprint Smith’s ad in full on the editorial page, surrounding it with three op-ed pieces and an editorial, all of which attacked the ad’s contents. In addition, an editors’ note introducing the column noted that the ad had originally been rejected by the paper’s business section because of “its false content and antisemitic nature.” The editorial board argued that despite all this it was necessary to print the advertisement in full because, “more than anything else, [it] makes it painfully obvious that a clear and present danger exists.”{98} Reiterating this point in a letter to the New York Times, Targum editor Joshua Rolnick argued that publishing the ad in its entirety was the best way of “mobilizing the community in opposition to its hateful ideas.”{99}