As a former Gravity editor in chief, I couldn't help but tune in to the coverage of "BlackJerryGate." Gravity always walked a fine line in terms of taste (one of our fundraisers involved selling enemas in the middle of campus) and BlackJerry clearly crossed that line between levity and offense. At the same time, another matter no one should take lightly is journalistic freedom.If I left any lasting achievement on campus beyond causing traumatic memories for grossed-out enema recipients, it was my work in forming the Brandeis Media Coalition as an advocacy group for the rights of campus media. We won for campus publications that spiffy office in the Shapiro Campus Center (and before it, a spiffless office in a disused Usdan hallway). Previously no publication besides the Justice and the now defunct Watch had official workspace.

In those primitive ages, we also faced a media controversy: A publication named Freedom Magazine, funded largely by off-campus right-wing political groups, published material that offended many on campus, including me. At that time as well, the Student Union Senate was talking censures and dechartering. Many cheered the chance to toll the death knell for Freedom's ring on campus. It is at times like this when our commitment to the free press is tested most. I and the other heads of the 15 existing campus publications came before the Senate and demanded Freedom Magazine retain its charter.

I will invoke now what I invoked then, Louis Brandeis' admonition that "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." Our lobbying persuaded the Senate to let Freedom off with a wrist-slap, and as far as I know, the magazine imploded on its own a few years later.

Gravity, by contrast, is no flash-in-the-pan publication; it has a nearly 20-year tradition of entertaining the campus, often taking on important issues such as, in my day, the outsourcing of dining services, corruption in the housing lottery and University President Jehuda Reinharz's ever-more-lavish houses (we even got Reinharz to pose in a Wellesley sweatshirt for the cover). Sometimes, humor is the only way to keep the spirit of protest alive: For years, only Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert could take on President Bush while the rest of the media lay quiet.

Sadly, for every Jon Stewart, there is a Michael Richards. BlackJerry should never have been run, just as I once nixed a piece that would have portrayed a Brandeis professor wearing a Nazi uniform. Some "humor" is just too offensive for a healthy community, and it deserves community outcry but not a call for future censorship.

I urge the parties involved to engage in dialogue and not resort to dechartering or defunding. Only through dialogue can racism be transcended, and the best forum for that dialogue is media. Reforming media is an ongoing challenge-silencing it is always a mistake.



The writer was the editor in chief of Gravity from 1997 through 1999 and a member of the Class of 1999.