I can honestly say I expected the unusual number of phone calls, phone messages, letters, faxes and e-mail addressed to the editor I received yesterday regarding the pro-life advertisement inserted in each issue of the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

After all, abortion is not an issue people take lightly, by any means. Although we have categorized abortion views into "pro-life" and "pro-choice," it is actually more complicated than that. For that very reason, I chose not to write a staff editorial on the subject of the ad, but rather a personal viewpoint - the issue is just too complicated to form a "royal we" opinion.

That is why I thought it unfortunate that readers associated the ad with an official Wildcat stance € unfortunate, but not unexpected. The Human Life Alliance of Minnesota Inc. went through the same channels any other advertiser would, be it Bike Shack, C urves Cabaret or the Tucson Women's Clinic, three advertisers whose ads also appeared in yesterday's edition. To assume this newspaper is pro-life would be to also assume it supports the beliefs of every group, company, restaurant, clinic or program that has an ad printed within its pages.

While speaking with one caller, I told her I knew it was unavoidable that readers would associate the ad with the Wildcat taking a pro-life stance. "If you knew that," she said, "why run it?"

"Why run any ad?" I answered. Any one person could take offense at any one ad € some just take more offense to certain ads than others.

As editor in chief, it was my decision the insert was included. Wildcat policy states any potentially controversial ad must be approved by the editor before publication.

My reasons for approving it had nothing to do with my personal stance on the issue. For the record, I do not agree with the pro-life view. But the logic I followed was that abortion is a subject open to debate; a duty of a newspaper is to serve as a forum for such debate; and if we had received an equally provocative pro-choice ad, I would have chosen to run it.

I am not naive enough to think no one would be offended by the insert. In fact, all the phone calls I received yesterday were from women who questioned the level of responsibility in running it, expressed how offensive they thought it was, and, in one cas e, told me it was "propaganda" and "bullshit."

They also asked how I could ever find something like this acceptable to run in a college newspaper. Granted, the photos and articles contained in the insert no doubt evoked a strong emotional reaction from those who merely may have glanced at it, but by c ommunity standards, I did not deem the material pornographic nor obscene.

But the question of what exactly was acceptable to run in a college paper still bothered me. What if the ad were the other extreme? Of course, that question is moot, since few images are more stirring than photos of unborn fetuses, therefore limiting how provocative a pro-choice group could be in illustrating its views.

It seems many people think it is appropriate for college newspapers to run controversial ads as long as they are more extreme in the liberal sense. After all, the campus has traditionally been considered to be more left than right. When an idea goes too f ar to the right, as some suggested this insert had, then something is wrong.

Personally, I am more liberal than not. Personally, I did not want to run this insert. But the function of this newspaper is not to serve as a vehicle for the editor's personal agenda; on the contrary, the function is to foster healthy debate. If the spar k for that debate is deemed conservative, so be it.

As long as the debate remains healthy, I am all for it. That is, after all, what a university is all about.

Monty Phan is editor in chief of the Arizona Daily Wildcat and a journalism senior.

Monty Phan
Editor in Chief