Winthrop House Unveils Plaque After Harvard Drops ‘John’ From House Name

Administrators from Harvard College’s Winthrop House unveiled a new plaque on Thursday marking the residence’s renamed identity, the first public event following the University’s decision to shorten the House’s name from John Winthrop House to Winthrop House.

The change, announced last July after a multiyear review, was intended to distance the residence from former Harvard professor and acting president John Winthrop, whom historians believe enslaved people.

The review was prompted by a 2023 student petition that was circulated after Harvard’s 2022 report on the University’s ties to slavery identified members of the Winthrop family as having connections to the institution.

Thursday’s ceremony marked the first public milestone tied to the renaming, though the House had already begun implementing related changes, including an exhibition explaining the history of the Winthrop name and the denaming efforts.

Winthrop House Faculty Deans Stephen Chong and Kiran Gajwani thanked students and administrators involved in the process and emphasized the importance of making the House welcoming to its residence.

“The report also importantly emphasized the need to contextualize the history of our house and to make this a place where everyone feels they truly belong,” Gajwani said, referring to the renaming committee’s report.

Chong also pointed to ongoing efforts to contextualize the House’s history, including the exhibition and a planned project to add captions to all the portraits displayed in the House.

Clyve Lawrence ’25-’27, a student co-lead of Dename Winthrop campaign, described the new plaque as both a symbol of past organizing and a signal for future work.

“We want to be clear that a step like this is fundamentally symbolic, not just of the work we have done, but of the work we still have to do,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence — a former Crimson Editorial editor — was part of a group of students who researched the Winthrop family after its name appeared in Harvard’s 2022 Legacy of Slavery report.

In an interview after the event, he said the renaming was part of a broader effort to confront the University’s history.

“I think this is a step toward reckoning with the legacy of the Winthrop family at Harvard, not just at this house, but on campus in general,” he said.

He described the plaque as both the culmination of students’ organizing and “a call for us to continue that work,” particularly through continued contextualization efforts.

The decision to shorten the House’s name followed months of deliberation by a University denaming committee, which ultimately stopped short of removing the Winthrop name entirely.

Student activities had pushed for the House to be fully denamed. After the committee announced its decision last July, members of Dename Winthrop wrote in a statement that it was “not the outcome we hoped for.”

The committee said it opted to retain the surname because of its mandate to approach history “through a lens of reckoning and not forgetting.”

Gajwani acknowledged at the Thursday ceremony that the compromise had divided opinion among students.

“We appreciate that for some in our community, changing the name of our house from John Winthrop House to Winthrop House is not enough to address the association of this home with the atrocity of slavery,” she said.

“We also appreciate that for others, changing the name at all feels like undermining tradition and legacy, and yet, here we live together under the same roof in the same home,” Gajwani added.

The ceremony led to renewed scrutiny from critics, including several top Republican politicians.

New York Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) — a former resident of Winthrop House who has since emerged as one of Harvard’s most adamant critics — panned the decision as an “unnecessary travesty and erasure of history” in a Thursday night post on X.

United States Senator Eric Schmitt (R-M.O.) also criticized the decision on X, quoting colonial-era governor John Winthrop — the great-great-grandfather of the Harvard professor.

“Harvard is removing his name at a “ceremony” today. What a joke,” he wrote.

While the governor was once thought to have also been a namesake for the House, the denaming committee later found that the House had only one official namesake: the younger John Winthrop.

Still, the possible association has drawn criticism from students who note that the governor is also believed to have owned enslaved people.

In its final report, the denaming committee declined to rule on whether the Winthrops’ actions alone justified removing the name, instead emphasizing the decision’s impact on students.

Lawrence said at the Thursday ceremony that the new plaque would have a cascading effect for future Winthrop House residents.

“A step here like this is new,” he said. “It connects the daily life of students living and working in this house to these symbols, and says we will not continue to honor them.”

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.