Harvard Will Not Remove Sackler Name From Art Museum and Campus Building

Updated August 7, 2024, at 9:19 p.m.

Harvard will not remove the Sackler name from one of three University art museums and another campus building, ending a yearslong campaign by student activists for Harvard to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.

A committee tasked with reviewing a request to remove Arthur M. Sackler’s name from the two buildings announced in a report on Wednesday that it did not recommend denaming. The Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s recommendation last month.

Sackler’s family, which owned the company that became Purdue Pharma, has been considered by some activists to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin — a drug credited with fueling the opioid crisis.

In October 2022, a group of students submitted a 23-page denaming proposal for the buildings, arguing that Arthur Sackler’s association with Purdue Pharma justified denaming on its own. And, though Arthur Sackler died nine years before OxyContin’s release, the proposal said he advanced marketing practices that contributed to the drug’s rise.

But the committee tasked with reviewing the denaming request — which was chaired by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 during his tenure as provost — said that it did not find the arguments in the proposal to be convincing.

“The committee was not persuaded by the proposal’s arguments that denaming is appropriate because Arthur Sackler’s name is tainted by association with other members of the Sackler family or because Arthur Sackler shares responsibility for the opioid crisis due to his having developed aggressive pharmaceutical marketing techniques that others misused after his death,” the report read.

The committee was largely composed of Harvard’s most senior officials. The committee’s membership, which had not been made public prior to the decision to keep the Sackler name, notably included more administrators than rank-and-file faculty members.

In a 15-page report, the committee wrote that it believed Sackler’s personal connection to the epidemic was too tenuous to warrant denaming.

“Arthur Sackler’s legacy is complex, ambiguous, and debatable,” the report stated.

The report’s outcome was not a surprise. Both Garber and former University President Lawrence S. Bacow indicated in interviews with The Crimson in 2019 that they believed the two buildings should not be denamed.

The committee shot down the argument from student activists that the two buildings should be renamed regardless of Arthur Sackler’s role in the opioid crisis due to the association that his name has with others who did.

“The denaming decision should be based only on the actions, inactions or words of Arthur Sackler,” the report stated. “Respect for one’s individual identity is a fundamental tenet and part of the ethos of our society.”

The committee also rejected the notion that Sackler’s marketing techniques made him culpable for later “promotional abuses” during the opioid epidemic, contending that Sackler would not necessarily have employed the same aggressive tactics to promote OxyContin if he knew of its “fatally addictive” potential.

“The committee was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation, developed in a particular time and context, is later misused by others in ways that may not have been foreseen originally,” the report stated.

And even if the committee had deemed activists’ arguments credible, the University might have hit a legal barrier to denaming: the gift agreement that bound Harvard to certain conditions when it accepted Sackler’s 1982 donation.

In considering the denaming proposal, the committee instead “decided not to assume that the gift agreement completely forecloses the possibility of denaming” due to “broad community interest,” the severity of the opioid crisis, and “interpretive issues” in the gift agreement, which is not publicly available.

Harvard’s decision stands in contrast to Tufts’ 2019 decision to strip the Sackler name entirely from its campus programs and facilities, including the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Medical Education. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also removed the Sackler name from seven exhibition spaces but retained its Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

The denial of the denaming request will likely infuriate many of the student activists who have pushed Harvard’s administration for years to remove Sackler’s name.

Clyve Lawrence ’25, who has led the effort to dename Winthrop House over John Winthrop’s ties to slavery, expressed disappointment in an interview about the University’s decision, noting that the two denaming efforts had collaborated in the past.

Lawrence said he was concerned that though the report said the review committee considered feedback and objections to the Sackler name beyond the single student submission, they did not share any details of the additional concerns or viewpoints they encountered.

“We don’t know exactly what the opinions said in the first place,” Lawrence said. “They said that they received opinions from affiliates, from museum leaders, but we don’t quite know what those opinions are or how they are representative of the student body.”

Lawrence said he hoped the committee reviewing the Winthrop denaming proposal would take a different approach to writing its report — one that paid more attention to student perspectives.

“Those are where you hear the most support for denaming, when people are tying the feelings that they have around having this name to their personal lives and their backgrounds and how they approach living at Harvard,” he said.

Despite their decision, the committee made explicit that they had not deemed Sackler’s actions innocent or meritorious. Rather, they recommended that the University display explanations of Sackler’s life and legacy to visitors of the two buildings.

“Through such contextualization, people will be allowed to form their own judgments about Arthur Sackler and the naming,” the report stated.

Clarification: August 8, 2024

This article has been updated to clarify that the were more administrators than rank-and-file faculty among the members of the committee tasked with reviewing the Arthur M. Sackler denaming request.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.

—Staff writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.