The cartoon controversy hits home: the uproar over the Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad has come to American college campuses, pitting free speech against cultural sensitivity.

• Author: Davey, Monica

By the time the University of Illinois student newspaper republished cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad on February 9, the images had already provoked a worldwide fury marked by violent protests in several countries. On the university's Champaign campus, the response to the cartoons' publication in The Daily Illini was both immediate and sharply divided.

Muslim students and others held a protest, saying they were stunned and hurt. Some members of The Daily Illini staff said they were furious, and the publisher announced that the editor in chief and opinions-page editor had been suspended, pending an investigation.

"This has gotten crazy," says Acton H. Gorton, 25, the suspended editor in chief who decided to run 6 of the 12 Muhammad cartoons even though he says he found them "bigoted and insensitive."

Gorton received calls for his resignation but a deluge of praise as well: "We did this to raise a healthy dialogue about an important issue that is in the news and so that people would learn more about Islam. Now, I'm basically fired."

The publication of the cartoons has set off a painful debate, in the U.S. and abroad, pitting freedom of speech against sensitivity to other cultures.

Islamic teachings forbid the depiction of the prophet, Muhammad, and in many parts of the Muslim world the cartoons have sparked outrage. In Nigeria, 100 people died in three days of rioting over the cartoons. There were also deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Lebanon, where the Danish and Norwegian embassies were set on fire by angry mobs in early February.

REACTION ON CAMPUS

Most major American newspapers, including The New York Times, have not run the cartoons, which were first published to little notice in a Danish newspaper last September. It wasn't until they were reprinted by Norwegian papers in January, and then in several other European countries, that the controversy in the Muslim world really ignited.

But on college campuses, student journalists are still grappling with the issue, saying the choice of most of the nation's newspapers not to publish makes theirs even more crucial. In addition to the University of Illinois, student publications at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, Northern Illinois University, and Illinois State University have published some of the cartoons. Everywhere, the issue has prompted controversy.

At the University of Wisconsin, The Badger Herald ran one of the cartoons that portrayed Muhammad with a turban...