Sara Russo

The editor-in-chief of the California Aggie, the main student newspaper at the University of California-Davis, has fired its sole conservative columnist in violation of a contract to run his column until June 2003. The paper’s editor-in-chief justified the writer’s dismissal by citing his “tendency to enrage members of the opposing causes.”

The conservative columnist, senior Igor Birman, was granted a contract in October to write a column, titled ‘The Right Stuff,’ on a weekly basis for the Aggie. Between October and January, the Aggie published seven of Birman’s columns on such topics as the possibility of going to war with Iraq, the California gubernatorial election, and the faulty logic behind slavery reparations. On New Year’s Day, 2003, he received an e-mail from the Aggie’s editor-in-chief, Fitzgerald Vo, notifying him that his column was being terminated, effective immediately.

Vo cited several reasons for Birman’s unexpected dismissal in his termination notice, including “increasingly tighter spaces in the Aggie” and the “dryness in your column’s tone.” “I have told you several times that I would like to hear more of your voice in your columns, but that seems to be muddled in a lot of similarly versed right-wing rhetoric that I have heard before,” Vo wrote to Birman. “Again, I would like a unique perspective, and you don’t seem to provide it.”

The editor-in-chief additionally claimed that Birman’s column was being cancelled because it had elicited little response from his fellow students. “Judging from the range of feedback I have received, your column does not seem to spark dialogue, but anger that only increases a tit-for-tat response.”

“I guess the reason why anyone is fired is you’re not satisfied with their work,” Vo told Campus Report, in an interview. “[Birman] claims that it’s me trying to squelch the conservative viewpoint, but in reality it’s that I’d like it to be better expressed and I replaced him with another conservative columnist.”

“I don’t doubt the fact that I was fired because of my conservative views,” the columnist, Igor Birman, told Campus Report. “You look at the amount of negative e-mails that I’ve gotten and the whole leftist community was up in arms because they were presented with these arguments that were making a lot more sense than their socialist dogma. I mean they’re there in the newspaper calling Bush a ‘murderous coward’ and I’m making a logical case for why war in Iraq is necessary. Obviously, they’re not going to like that.”

In direct contradiction to Vo’s claim that his column didn’t spark dialogue, Birman points out that the Aggie received between 20 and 30 letters-to-the-editor about his columns, though only one was printed. “He said that my columns were dry and at the same time said so many people read them and got upset,” Birman told Campus Report. “So that doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, people don’t read dry columns.”

“It wasn’t a unique perspective. It was on strict party lines….he didn’t offer any of his personal perspective into things,” Vo said, describing Birman’s writing to Campus Report. “If you read his column, ‘The Defeat of Liberalism,’ in my opinion, some things were baseless, like saying that liberals have no basic human decency. How can you substantiate that?…Another column that comes to mind is ‘The Case Against Slavery Reparations.’ It wasn’t a very unique case that he brought up because it seemed very similar to another advertisement [by David Horowitz] that was brought up several years ago. So, it was both unoriginal and rather a rehash of things I’ve heard before. And that’s the reason I released him.”

Contesting Vo’s charge that his columns relied upon “similarly versed right wing rhetoric,” Birman compares his writing with pieces written by the paper’s other columnists, all of whom he describes as liberals, which he feels rely on leftist dogma and insults to get their points across. “While Bush himself may be quite an idiot, the people he surrounds himself with aren’t,” student columnist Josh Green, the head of UC-Davis’ International Socialist Organization, opines in a column titled, “Bush is a Murderous Coward.” A second columnist, student Heath Druzin, begins one of his Daily Aggie pieces by proclaiming, “The Christian Right may just be one of the biggest closet cases since Joe McCarthy’s inner circle.”

By contrast, the line that Vo quoted from Birman’s column ‘The Defeat of Liberalism’ does not condemn the left unilaterally but rather refers to a particular instance of grievous misbehavior. In its entirety, the line reads: “Not only have [today’s Left] shown themselves to be utterly lacking basic human decency by turning late Senator Wellstone’s memorial rally into an orgy of tasteless politics, the Left has proven itself to be completely devoid of viable ideas and full of vitriolic hatred of conservatism.”

Additionally, Birman argues that if Vo found his columns so lacking, he had the ability to reject them at the time they were submitted. “I have in writing from Mr. Vo a statement that says that as editor-in-chief he has the prerogative not to publish bad columns, essentially. And he published every single one that I submitted,” Birman said. “I don’t think he thought they were bad when he read them, because if he did, he didn’t want to make any changes to them. Now after this controversy hit, he started changing his reasons because first he said he fired me because I upset the left, I enraged members of the opposing causes. And he’s been changing his story ever since.”

Birman notes that Vo’s actions since dismissing him as a columnist have also been inconsistent with the logic presented in his termination notice. “He keeps contradicting himself,” Birman told Campus Report. “He said that he needed more space in the Aggie, and then he hired a so-called replacement to do a conservative column and the guy’s a total liberal…he’s pro-choice, anti-death penalty, a so-called conservative who calls himself a progressive. It’s a real farce.”

No stranger to the hassles of being a conservative activist on a left-wing campus, Birman is on the board of directors of the UC-Davis College Republicans and is editor-in-chief of Liberty’s Flame, a conservative student newspaper.

“We have an administration that is hopelessly biased against conservatives,” he told Campus Report. “In my five years at Davis, they never brought a conservative speaker on campus. They brought everyone from Angela Davis to Cornell West to Bill Clinton to Janet Reno, and if we want to bring a conservative speaker we must pay for the speaker ourselves.”

Vo has refused to address the violation of Birman’s contract, and has continued to reiterate his position that as editor-in-chief of the California Aggie, he can fire anyone at any time and for any reason. “It’s an independent contract, but as with any agreement there’s also an implied agreement as well. He understands that if his writing isn’t up to snuff then I won’t publish it,” Vo told Campus Report.

Faced with little recourse, Birman has decided to file a suit against the Aggie in small claims court. “I’m filing for remittance of the contract,” Birman explained to Campus Report. “Since he fired me illegally I’m claiming the money under the contract that I would have been entitled to. And all the money is going into a conservative foundation.”

“When my family and I fled the former Soviet Union a decade ago, we left behind a nation where laws were systematically ignored and persecution ruled. In silencing the sole voice of dissent at the Aggie, Mr. Vo has committed the same kind of assault against the freedom of thought that my family would have faced in the USSR for speaking out against communism,” Birman said. “Mr. Vo has fired me illegally, and in this society, whose very essence is based on the rule of law, such grotesque disregard for the law should not stand.”

Birman also points to a double-standard regarding Vo’s tenure as editor-in-chief. “He ran what is called a spoof edition of the Aggie, which is supposed to be funny,” Birman recounted. “He took a picture of two little kids playing on campus, and he superimposed that on a digitally created photo of a male genitalia, and he ran that on the front page in full color.”

In spite of the possible criminality of his actions, Vo was allowed to retain his position as editor-in-chief. “It’s child pornography as far as I’m concerned,” Birman told Campus Report. “But here’s the deal. He didn’t get fired for that. He got reprimanded, but he never got fired. And here I am, I got fired for being a conservative.”