To the Editor:

The editors of The Parthenon, the student newspaper of Marshall University, printed for a second time on November 20 the paid advertisement from the Committee for the Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) which contains patently offensive material to the Jewish community. We are well aware of The Parthenon's devotion to protecting First Amendment rights based on their published editorial October 9. Current actions would indicate, we believe that The Parthenon editorship is not protecting the student press' rights, instead are only concerned with the protection of a constant source of advertising fees paid by groups with anti-Semitic beliefs. Unlike the private press, The Parthenon has a higher duty to consider the content that they offer for public consumption, because it is a state funded/supported organization. According to the book Educational Policy and the Law, citing the case Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc.: "While the government may not generally curtail individual speech, except in carefully delineated circumstances, it has no obligations to provide or pay for a printing press to allow an individual to reach a broader audience." This legal finding runs contrary to the Parthenon staff's October 9, 1998 editorial statement which states that by publishing the CODOH advertisement they are merely exercising their First Amendment rights, despite their assertion that they find CODOH's ideas "ridiculous and that its denial of the Holocaust is an insult to every reasonable person." Based on this, the advertisement should have never been run in the first place. The publishing of the advertisement a second time suggests other motives. As mentioned in our previous letter to The Parthenon editorship, as new Marshall faculty and staff, we feel threatened by the publishing of CODOH's opinions under the guise of an advertisement. The Parthenon even confirms that we should feel threatened by this ad, but does not acknowledge its own complicity in fostering a hostile work environment by continually running the CODOH advertisement. The Chronicle of Higher Education had previously written about CODOH and identified that this organization has requested advertising space in student newspapers since 1991. Each proposed advertisement is forwarded along with checks ranging from $400 to $1,500 to pay for publication of the ads. In an article published in The Editor and Publisher, Bradley R. Smith, the founder of CODOH, reportedly targets college campuses because students are more likely to listen to his argument despite it being without merit. We are certain that The Parthenon's editors are aware of the controversy generated at other campuses (e.g., Cornell University, Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Brown Universi-ty) which resulted when the student newspapers published CODOH's advertisements. In several other instances, the university newspapers refused to print the advertisement even once for not wanting to offend members of their university community. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that CODOH's director Bradley Smith sends with each ad a form letter asking the campus editors to stand up for the First Amendment and to make a decision to print the ad based on their conscience. We believe that The Parthenon has used these materials to shield itself within the First Amendment (which we believe may not apply here), but, unwittingly, it has also set itself up for a set of dangerous precedents, which the Parthenon would be hard to defend itself against. These precedent could include: 1) the perceived obligation to publish advertisements of other revisionist groups with more hateful purposes thus adding to the hostile work environment it already is promoting, 2) the pulling of donated money as threatened at the University of Miami, and 3) the further erosion of The Parthenon's integrity. We hope that The Parthenon will refrain from needless further legitimization of groups such as CODOH by continuously publishing their advertisements and taking their money, and begin to represent the diversified, multicultural population of Marshall Uni-versity. ­ Stanley B. Shulfer, School of Medicine - DITMI and Donna L. Pasternak, English Department