Yale Police Department Chief Ronnell Higgins does not and will not endorse any Yale College Council candidates.
This was his message in a series of emails and calls to the News Monday afternoon following a Cross Campus item about an ad for Katie Donley’s ’13 events director campaign featuring Higgins. In the ad, Higgins poses with Donley. Text underneath the image reads “Ronnell wants more fun with Katie.”
The photo was snapped during Saturday’s Freshman Olympics.
[ydn-legacy-photo-inline id=”1451″ ]
“Photos taken of me on Saturday at the Freshman Olympics were not intended to be an endorsement of any kind,” Higgins said in an e-mail to the News. “I had no idea any caption would be added. I thought the logo she was holding was representative of her [residential college] team.”
Donley said she had explicitly told Higgins that she was running for a YCC position, but she apologized for the apparent miscommunication during the hullabaloo of the events.
Higgins called the campaign advertisement “embarrassing,” but clarified that he was not mad at Donley. He just wanted to set the record straight that he would never endorse a candidate, he said.
Donley never considered the Higgins photo as an endorsement, she said, but rather a comical addition to her campaign’s Facebook page.
“I feel terrible about the situation,” she said. “I thought we were on the same page.”
The photo was removed from Donley’s Facebook page when she was notified by the News of Higgins’s displeasure. She suggested instead that interested students look for an online replacement picture of a 10 week-old golden retriever lab holding her “more” logo in its mouth.