Unless common sense and uncommon decency prevail, this Saturday (Feb. 4, 1995) Penn State will slip from its status as a place of unusual harmony and descend into the spreading swamp of bigotry in which many universities already are mired.

It will make this descent by paying a substantial lecture fee to Minister Conrad Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. The invitation to him has been represented and defended reflexively as a free speech issue.

Really it is not -- unless under the guise of protecting free speech we mean that student organizations should be able to use Penn State's limited financial resources to provide a paid forum for a speaker who would seek to give some people the illusion that they are being raised up, if only because other people are being put down by vicious stereotyping.

The problem is not hypothetical. The hate-mongering is real, already has been done elsewhere by Conrad Muhammad, and is about to be visited on us here. What is about to be played out is billed as an innocent-sounding lecture: "Keys to Survive [sic] on a Predominantly White Campus." That sounds pretty positive, even if it is a bit ungrammatical. But the same Conrad Muhammad previously gave a talk with a similarly innocuous-sounding label at Hofstra University. At Hofstra his address was billed as "The Role of the Talented Tenth," and was supposed to focus on the responsibility of educated blacks to help those less fortunate.

What was the message of black self-help delivered at Hofstra? It included the wisdom that "...many in the Jewish community, particularly those in leadership, seek to control black people." And, reportedly, nearly half of Conrad Muhammad's lecture was devoted to alleging how Jews and others oppress blacks and denigrate the Nation of Islam.

Conrad Muhammad is a disciple and admirer of Louis Farrakhan, of whom he has said "Minister Farrakhan was the strongest black man there is... There is a criticism that I am too much like Farrakhan, but that is a criticism that I can live with. People want to be like their father."

This honored father Farrakhan is a leader of the Nation of Islam, whose official publication The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews charges that the Jews were "key operatives" in the historic crime of slavery, playing an "inordinate" and "disproportionate" role and "carving out for themselves a monumental culpability in slavery -- and the black holocaust."

According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard, this book has become the credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.

I have read extensively materials by and about Minister Conrad Muhammad as well as the Nation of Islam's leaders and associates he admires.

By all appearances Conrad Muhammad is a very agile thinker and persuasive speaker. But such gifts are wasted unless they are used for good, or at least not squandered in disseminating lies and hatred.

In this context I remember learning of a similar drama that was played out publicly in Victorian England at the time that Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was challenging conventional wisdom about creation, the fixity of species, and a hierarchy in the natural world that stereotyped certain human populations as naturally inferior to others. Darwin's defender was Thomas Henry Huxley, a man of great accomplishment who had worked his way up in the scientific world from the most humble origins. His antagonist then was a minister, the Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. At one point in a public debate on the subject of creation versus evolution, the following exchange took place.

Wilberforce asked Huxley: "Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he (Huxley) claimed his descent from a monkey?"

Huxley replied: "A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather.

If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man -- a man of restless and versatile intellect -- who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific question with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeal to religious prejudice."

Evidence that is readily available in published sources can leave little doubt that Minister Conrad Muhammad is also a man of versatile intellect who, like other prominent figures in the Nation of Islam, repeatedly has appealed rhetorically to prejudice against members of other groups, particularly Jews. To someone who has behaved in this way our united reply should be "We will give you neither a penny of our money nor a moment of our time."

Hate-filled speech is not free speech.

It is not free because such words do have a price, a price that in the past has been paid in the blood of those against whom it has been directed. Czarist pogroms were launched with anti-Semitic rhetoric, and Jews were beaten to death by aroused by mobs. The Nazis moved from beer hall speech-making to the Holocaust, and millions of Jews (and others) were martyred when hate-filled words greased the wheels of the death trains that carried them to the extermination camps" We now say "Never again." And we challenge African-American students, staff and faculty members, as well as all other decent people at Penn State to join us in saying "Never again!" to all racism and other words of hatred that would divide us.

We respectfully request that the student organizations who had considered bringing Conrad Muhammad to the University instead support our hopes for harmony by withdrawing their invitation that he speak on the Penn State campus.

Ordinary people make mistakes, and in attempting to justify them only appear to be weak and foolish. Great leaders also make errors, but by having the ability to admit them grow in wisdom and respect. To the responsible student leaders we say: earn the trust that your peers already have placed in you.

This is not the time for conciliation and compromise. It is an occasion for moral courage. Do the right thing.