I think this goes quite a bit further than a simple “oops.” Prior to the Saturday night football game between Michigan and Michigan State, the usual displays of advertisements and team videos were playing on the stadium’s huge video screens. But those displays were briefly interrupted by something that I doubt anyone expected to see. An image of Adolph Hitler flashed on the screen. It disappeared pretty quickly, but not before people noticed. The display was completely out of context unless people were paying close attention and no explanation was offered at the time. However, the team has now suspended the unnamed person responsible for operating the equipment pending an investigation. The university’s athletic director also offered a heartfelt apology. (AP)

Michigan State athletic director Alan Haller said he has suspended an employee involved in allowing Adolf Hitler’s image to be shown on videoboards before playing No. 2 Michigan.

The employee, who was not named, will be paid pending an investigation that will help to determine potential action in the future. Haller said no one in the department viewed the entire video, exposing a failure in its process.

“Antisemitism must be denounced,” Haller said in a statement Sunday Night. “The image displayed prior to Saturday night’s game is not representative of who we are and the culture we embody. Nevertheless, we must own our failures and accept responsibility.

This does seem to have been an innocent (if preventable) error and not some attempt to slip in some pro-Nazi, antisemitic rhetoric to influence the crowd. It turns out that the stadium was streaming a quiz show from a YouTube channel roughly an hour before the game began. One of the trivia questions asked where Hitler was born, briefly showing an image of him before showing a picture of a map of Austria as the answer.

According to the channel’s creator, the university did not ask permission to stream his video nor was he paid for their use of the content. He defended his inclusion of the question as “absolutely normal.” And I honestly can’t say that I disagree. As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and Hitler’s face is iconic, if only in a horrible but historic way. In the context of a quiz game without any endorsement of Nazism or antisemitism, it’s really not all that alarming.

But as a background video playing in a noisy stadium that was filling up with fans, it was probably fairly jarring to anyone who hadn’t been paying close attention to the video and just happened to glance up at that moment. In terms of making sure nothing like this happens again, there are clearly a couple of things the university could do. First of all, they shouldn’t be streaming other people’s content without permission or seeing if a payment was required to use it. That should go without saying.

And second, all images and video they want to use should be stored locally and reviewed in advance. Live-streaming anything in front of a festive crowd is risky on the best of days. Honestly, I’m shocked that such precautions and policies weren’t already in place. Spartan Stadium was built way back in 1923 and they’ve had that digital display screen in place since at least 1994 based on their archival pictures. Given that it’s an area surrounded by college age young people, some of whom no doubt have a dubious sense of humor, it’s kind of amazing that something like this hadn’t happened already.

Even though it appears to have been a simple mistake, it’s still admirable that the athletic director and the rest of the university’s leadership moved to quickly to offer a complete and sincere apology to the audience and the entire community. They are promising to reach out to the public and Jewish groups in particular to answer any questions they might have and offer support to anyone who felt impacted. That’s how you do it. (I’m talking to all of you politicians out there with that last bit.)