Horowitz's views are not new: he wrote the "ten reasons" in a slightly different form in a Salon.com article published May 30, 2000.

But now that nearly 30 college papers have received copies of Horowitz's ad, it has created dilemmas for newsrooms in campuses across the country--about whether student newspapers should publish controversial advertisements and about how tightly student newspapers monitor the ads they run.

"A newspaper has a responsibility to use the First Amendment responsibly," said Eleeza V. Agopian, editor-in-chief of the California Aggie at UC-Davis. "We don't run everything that comes across our desk. We have to be mindful of the community we live in."

Aggie policy calls for the editor-in-chief to approve any political or potentially controversial ads, Agopian said. In this case, she said, protocol broke down.

Calling the publication of Horowitz's ad a "mistake," Agopian said she had decided to run an apology in the next day's paper even before receiving angry letters and meeting with other editors at the paper.

Hernandez's apology in the Daily Californian was itself criticized by people who felt the papers had thrown their lot with censorship. Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley wrote on Monday that "what those editors did in California last week deserves no sympathy at all."

Hernandez said he stands by the apology but has second thoughts about its page-one status.

"In retrospect, we would have apologized, but less overtly," he said. "It had to do with the pressure of the immediate emotional situation."

Top editors at Columbia, where Horowitz spent his undergraduate years, decided not to run the ad in the first place and avoided the fierce controversy that the California papers faced.

According to Michael L. Mirer, the Columbia Daily Spectator's editor-in-chief, newspaper policy does not permit political advertising of any kind.

Though Horowitz's ad included a small promotion for his pamphlet, called "The Death of the Civil Rights Movement," Mirer said the ad was basically political.

"The content, no matter what we thought of it, wasn't the problem so much as the form of the original ad," Mirer said.

The Spectator received a second advertisement from Horowitz yesterday, titled "What Columbia Can't Read." The ad said, "only one side of this issue is now permissible at Columbia." Mirer said editors have rejected that ad, too, because it is "out-and-out inaccurate about what happened between us and them."

In an interview yesterday, Horowitz criticized the California papers for apologizing and said other papers' decisions not to run his ad amounted to "censorship."

"What it reflects is a situation on American campuses that's more repressive than the McCarthy era," said Horowitz, who said his parents were card-carrying Communists.