Harvard has officially ruled out removing the Sackler name from three university art museums and another campus building, a decision that ended a long campaign by student activists for the university to distance itself from the family and its role in the opioid epidemic.
A committee charged with considering a request to strip the name of Arthur M. Sackler from the two buildings released a report Wednesday saying it did not recommend renaming. Harvard Corporation, the University’s governing body, voted last month to accept the recommendation. Members of the Sackler family, which owned the company that later became Purdue Pharma, have been sued for their role in the opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma was found to have pled guilty to charges related to the aggressive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a drug linked to fueling the opioid crisis. This renaming of the buildings proposal follows the submission of a 23-page renaming proposal by a group of students in October 2022, which focused on Arthur Sackler’s association with Purdue Pharma as necessary for denaming.
The proposal cited Sackler’s role in promoting marketing practices that helped create demand for the drug, even though he had died nine years before the release of OxyContin. In its report, the committee, headed during its tenure by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, then provost, reported that it was not convinced by the case for renaming advanced in the proposal. Administrators outnumbered rank-and-file faculty on the committee, which was heavy with Harvard’s most senior officials.
In a 15-page report, the committee believed Sackler’s connection to the epidemic was too tenuous to warrant renaming, deeming his legacy “complex, ambiguous, and debatable.” It similarly rejected the idea that Sackler’s aggressive marketing practices made him guilty of later “promotional abuses” during the opioid epidemic, claiming Sackler could not be charged with promoting OxyContin in an aggressively deceptive manner if he did not know it was “fatally addictive.”. Even if the committee’s finding had been against the activists’ arguments, the university would have had to meet legal barriers toward changing the name because the gift agreement that Harvard had entered when it accepted Sackler’s 1982 donation bound the institution to certain conditions.
However, citing “broad community interest,” the “severe” nature of the opioid crisis and “interpretive issues” with the gift agreement, which are not publicly available, the committee voted not to assume that the gift agreement fully closes off renaming. The decision by Harvard contrasts with Tufts’ 2019 decision to remove the Sackler name entirely from its campus programs and facilities, including the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Medical Education. Also, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Louvre, Guggenheim, and The V&A removed the Sackler name from exhibition spaces. Dismissal of this request would disappoint those numerous student activists who urged Harvard’s administration for years to take the Sackler name away.
In 2020, Purdue Pharma entered into a multibillion-dollar settlement with the US Department of Justice. It has since come under attack for allegedly downplaying the addictive qualities of the drug, exaggerating its benefits, and thereby causing its egregious abuse and addiction. The family of Sacklers, since many of them were deeply integrated into the internal workings of Purdue Pharma, were faulted as major contributors to this crisis, which created public outrage, several legal battles, and a significant amount of media scrutiny. Many institutions and people called for removing the Sackler name from various philanthropic and cultural establishments on moral grounds, stating that the family is connected with a scandal that has triggered debates about accountability, corporate responsibility, and pharmaceutical companies’ influence on public health crises.
It has also raised questions about the morality of accepting donations from questionable benefactors. The Sackler scandal remains to this date a subject of public interest, legal action, and ethical deliberation as it faces its wide-ranging implications.
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