A Letter To Crimson Readers

In yesterday’s newspaper, The Crimson ran an advertisement that questioned whether the Holocaust occurred and which unsurprisingly angered many members of the Harvard community. We did not intend to run the ad—a decision we made over the summer when it was initially submitted. Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks.

Yesterday’s advertisement was the result of that miscommunication. And while running the ad was not our intent, we accept responsibility for our failure to carry out the planned cancellation. We recognize how sensitive a subject this is for our community and appreciate all the e-mails and letters we have received about it from concerned members of the University. We have made sure that the rest of the ad’s planned run has been terminated, and any money that has changed hands in exchange for the ad to date will be returned.

We want to stress that we do not endorse the views put forth in any advertisement that runs in The Crimson, and this case was no different. That said, we do recognize that in our role as distributors we are responsible for the content that runs in our newspaper. And though we did seek to intervene in this case, we failed to see the process through to its conclusion. We will work hard to avoid such lapses in communication in the future, and hope our readers will accept that yesterday’s error was a logistical failure and not a philosophical one.


Sincerely,


Maxwell L. Child
President
The Harvard Crimson