“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.
By Melissa Hankins, Ryan Cormier ∙ December 7, 1999
It seemed as if an all-out war had broken out on campus two years ago. Faculty members and students condemned The Review for running a column and an ad by a known Holocaust revisionist on December 5, 1997, and the paper in turn defended itself. But what happened at Delaware was really only a battle…
By Melissa Hankins, Ryan Cormier ∙ December 3, 1999
For someone who wants an “open debate” over the particulars of the Holocaust, Bradley R. Smith sure does avoid having an open conversation. The Holocaust revisionist will only be interviewed by the print press through e-mail. “It is very rare that a reporter understands what the story is,” he says, over e-mail, of course. And…
By Melissa Hankins, Ryan Cormier ∙ November 23, 1999
Bradley R Smith, the Holocaust revisionist famous for spouting his views through advertisements in college newspapers, is making waves at Hofstra University. The full-time gadfly has submitted a 24-page booklet portraying death camps as far-fetched sob stories to college newspapers across the country. While Liz Johnson, editor in chief of The Review, refused to publish…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ December 20, 1999
Friend: The Campus Project has had a fine fall season. There was a strong, ongoing story at Hofstra U that pulled in national media. The Boise State Arbiter was not far behind. The second issue of The Revisionist is hot off the press, has a new wrap on front and back covers, and a content…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ November 1, 1999
U Massachusetts Molly Sherman, advertising director at the Daily Collegian at U Massachusetts (Amherst) accepted our Holocaust Studies ad. When editorial saw the text, it was decided it would be a good idea to run it past the faculty advisor. The editor rang me up and we chatted for a few minutes. He volunteered his…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ November 1, 1999
Let’s agree that one ideal of the university is to promote intellectual freedom, and one ideal of the professorial class is to teach students to honor it Yet this is not true in Holocaust Studies. There, if students express doubt about “eyewitness” testimony, for example, even if it is demonstrably false, dishonorable or both, they…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ November 1, 1999
Friend: The Campus Project kicked off good in October. Smith’s Report has a facelift. We have a new bi-monthly publication, The Revisionist—which you should have received a couple weeks ago. TR has been distributed via the student newspaper at Hofstra University in Hempsted, New York (see story below). And the stats for CODOHWeb demonstrate that…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ June 1, 1999
During the academic year just ended the $250K ad challenging the ADL to debate CODOH on national television has appeared in a record ninety-one student newspapers from coast to coast. We’ve never before reached such a broad base of students and faculty in one academic year. As noted here before, it is ever more evident…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1999
As a regular reader of Smith's Report, you probably have a few questions you’d like to ask me. Like: Where is that wonderful 16-page tabloid that we were going to submit to the Ivy League universities and elsewhere? What happened to the February issue of Smith’s Report? Now that this issue of SR is numbered…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1999
The Stanford Review is an independent conservative student newspaper. Its editor, Mike Toth, writes that there is little interest in the discussion of ideas among Stanford students. He ridicules the intellectual content of the Stanford Daily, the primary student newspaper at Stanford, by noting that the “big issue on campus now [at the Daily] is…
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