An unnamed student sent an e-mail Tuesday to Northwestern administrators to explain the intent of the poster featuring a swastika he hung in the entrance of South Mid-Quads Hall on Monday.

The poster’s creator reworded a “No Place for Hate” poster made by the university.

The poster read “One Place for Hate?” and had a swastika in the “O” and flames surrounding “hate.”

The message, the author said, was neither an act of hate nor vandalism.

“There was no hate involved,” he said in the e-mail. “The statement is the same as the original poster, that hate shouldn’t be accepted.”

The e-mail’s author, who identified himself to The Daily only as an SMQ resident, said he put up the poster on the bulletin board Monday at 7 a.m. A resident assistant spotted the poster around 3 p.m., and by late afternoon it had been confiscated by University Police.

“I don’t think any students actually saw the poster,” said Chris Bruss, South Mid-Quads president and a Communication sophomore.

SMQ residents expressed surprise at a dorm meeting Monday, said Myles Vander Weele, a resident assistant at SMQ and a Communication senior. The poster’s creator said he was at the meeting.

He said he doesn’t want to be named because he fears being the “face on the object of people’s collective anger.”

In the e-mail to administrators, he wrote, “I’d like to leave my name, but I’m afraid you’re on a witch hunt and you’d like to see if I float.”

Mary Desler, associate vice president for student affairs, said the student’s anonymity is “cowardly.”

Desler said NU reserves punishment for students involved in hate crimes until individual circumstances have been evaluated. UP is continuing an investigation into the intentions of the SMQ poster’s creator.

The student said he did not include the swastika and flames to intimidate any minority groups.

“(They) are evocative images, and I meant it as an evocative question,” he said. “They draw attention to the question and in most cases draw a stronger response.”

Students for Israel President Jonathan Powell, a Weinberg sophomore, said the swastika and flames must be viewed as hate symbols because they are images of the Holocaust.

“Any time you put a swastika on anything, it’s an attack on entire groups of people: Jews, gays, gypsies,” Powell said.

The poster’s creator said the his message simply reinforced the university’s campaign.

“I don’t think that simply telling people is a sufficiently deep level of discussion,” he said. “As it stands, we have these clichՀ