Campus Project

“No subject enrages the Thought Police on campus more than Holocaust revisionism. Students are encouraged to debate every other great historical question as a matter of course, but influential pressure groups with private agendas have made the Jewish Holocaust story and exception. I believe students should be encouraged to investigate the Holocaust controversy the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical controversy. This isn't a radical point of view. The premises for it were worked out a while back during a little something called the Enlightenment.”

Bradley R. Smith, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, p. 99

Starting in the late 1980's, Bradley Smith began a campaign to publish advertisements in college newspapers. The intention was to foster open debate on the Holocaust story throughout the country. What follows is a partial list of those advertisements, reactions to them by students, professors, pressure groups and the media, as well as additional information which has been collected over the years. A few of the ads offered financial compensation for promoting the controversy in a national forum. The terms of these ads have expired and are presented here for historical and research purposes only.

What became known as the “Campus Campaign” was discussed in some detail, albeit a very biased account, in a chapter entitled “The Battle for the Campus” in Deborah Lipstadt's highly subjective book Denying the Holocaust. While Smith argued directly for intellectual freedom and open debate on campus, Lipstadt, a professor, took the opposing view — that ideas, especially dissident ideas regarding the Holocaust story, were not worthy of discussion in America's colleges and universities.