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The Harvard Salient’s board of directors announced on Sunday that it would suspend the conservative student magazine’s operations after it published material the board deemed “reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning.”
The 10-member board, which includes high-profile alumni and four ex officio advisers, wrote in a brief online statement that the material in question was “wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands.” They added that they had 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 read. “We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review.”
Salient president Julia G. Grinstead ’27 and editor-in-chief Richard Y. Rodgers ’28 did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday evening.
The statement did not refer to specific articles or provide details about the complaints, and several board members declined to comment on the suspension. But a series of recent Salient stories have provoked controversy on campus.
The magazine published an article in its September issue that included a line — “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — closely mirroring the words Adolf Hitler used in a 1939 speech to Reichstag delegates.
The Salient’s student leadership stood by the piece after its publication. In a statement to The Crimson this month, Rodgers wrote that the article’s author and editors did not intentionally quote Hitler and did not recognize the resemblance to the speech. He defended the line as “a generic nationalist formulation that has appeared countless times across centuries of political rhetoric.”
“To confuse a defense of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer,” he wrote in the statement.
The article containing the phrase, written by David F.X. Army ’28, argued that ethnic groups have rights to their ancestral homelands and should limit migration to maintain cultural unity. It also argued that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” that migration from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia threatens Western Europe’s stability, and that population change through migration represents the result of “the deliberate remaking of nations through demographic engineering.”
The article also urged a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” The phrase “blood and soil” was a Nazi slogan used to promote the importance of ethnic purity and territorial expansion.
Army’s piece in the Salient prompted three opinion articles in The Crimson condemning the use of Nazi language. On Oct. 22, the Salient doubled down on its defense of Army’s article, publishing a piece responding to criticism and accusing The Crimson of having a liberal slant.
The Salient’s September edition, which was distributed door-to-door in dormitories last month, also included an article calling on Harvard to reestablish separate schools for men and women, harking back to the times before the long merger of Harvard and Radcliffe College that began in 1969.
When the Salient was founded in 1981, its editors described itself as “moderate to conservative.” And when students revived the publication in 2021, they said they would solicit opinions from across the political spectrum.
But the publication has consistently tacked to the right. One Salient story, published online following the early September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, described the left as “our enemies.”
“Let us be unsentimental about the nature of the enemy,” the article’s authors, Army and Rodgers, wrote. “Leftism is not merely a rival policy set or an alternate party program. Leftism is a mental illness.”
The response from the Salient’s board comes in contrast to the decision by Harvard officials to remain silent on the publication’s recent articles.
Administrators have walked a fine line between denouncing students’ controversial rhetoric as offensive and defending it as free speech. Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and former College Dean Rakesh Khurana condemned an antisemitic cartoon posted on Instagram by two pro-Palestine student organizations in 2024. Garber said last December that Harvard should continue to condemn hate speech under its new institutional neutrality policy.
But in an early October interview, College Dean David J. Deming said he would not review or comment on Army’s piece.
“If a student violates a College rule, then that’s something I want to know about, because they should face disciplinary proceedings — or certainly if they violate the law,” Deming said in the interview. “But beyond that, students have a right to express themselves, and students have a right to be outraged at the expressions that others give.”
A College spokesperson declined to comment on Sunday regarding whether the College had received complaints about the Salient, but wrote that the Salient is a “fiscally and editorially independent student organization.”
—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
