A conservative magazine at Harvard University was suspended by its board of directors Sunday amid scrutiny over an article published in September that closely resembled the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
In its September print issue, the Harvard Salient published an article by student David F.X. Army that read “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” echoing the words Hitler used in a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag in which he forecasted that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews.
The Harvard Salient piece also argued that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and called for a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” (The phrase “blood and soil” also echoes a Nazi idea that the inherent features of a people are its land and race.)
In a statement to the school’s newspaper, the Salient’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers, claimed that Army “did not intentionally quote Adolf Hitler, nor did any member of our editorial staff recognize the resemblance prior to publication.”
Rodgers continued, “The article was a meditation on how nations and cultures preserve coherence in an age of rootless cosmopolitanism and global homogenization. To confuse a defense of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer.”
The print edition of the article was placed in undergraduate dormitories last month. Harvard installed Salient distribution boxes in dorms in February after the publication, which is independent from the university, complained that students could not easily access its work.
The uproar comes as politicians and other public figures on the right have faced allegations that their rhetoric echoes that of the Nazis. It also comes as Harvard and other universities face pressure from the Trump administration to show that they are not clamping down on conservative voices.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had illegally frozen more than $2.6 billion in federal funding to the school as a “smokescreen” for advancing its political agenda. The Trump administration had frozen the funds over allegations that Harvard was persecuting conservative ideology on its campus as well as fostering a climate of antisemitism.
The school’s mainstream student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, published three opinion pieces criticizing the rhetoric used in the Salient piece, to which Rodgers published his own article last week lamenting that “ordinary conservative thought is one headline away from criminality.”
“Together, the coverage forms a coherent script. The conservative scholar becomes the reactionary theorist. The traditionalist student becomes the bigot,” wrote Rogers. “‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.”
On Sunday, the Salient’s board of directors brought the debate over the Salient to a close and announced that it would suspend its operations pending a review.
“The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material—material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands,” read the statement from the board, whose ex officio members include the prominent Jewish literature scholar Ruth Wisse.
“The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization. It is our fiduciary responsibility to investigate these matters fully and take appropriate action to address them,” the statement continued. “We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review.”
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