Harvard Will Not Remove Sackler Name from University Art Museum and Campus Building

Harvard University will not remove the name Arthur M. Sackler from one of its three art museums and another campus building.

Recommendations in a recent report concluded an extended campaign by student activists aimed at distancing the Ivy League college from the family which owned Purdue Pharma.

In October 2022, the group Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students submitted a 23-page proposal requesting the removal of Sackler’s name. A committee comprised primarily of university administrators were not persuaded by the included arguments, according to The Harvard Crimson, which first reported the news.

“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 committee’s report said.

Last month, the Harvard Corporation, the college’s highest governing body, accepted the committee’s finding that it did not recommend the removal of Arthur M. Sackler’s name.

Arthur M. Sackler donated $10.7 million to Harvard University in 1985, which enabled the opening of the namesake museum dedicated to works from Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean on the college campus. The building was designed by British architect James Sterling.

Sackler died in 1987, nine years before the family’s pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma started selling OxyContin, a prescription painkiller with addictive properties. Some activists have considered the company and the drug to be synonymous with the opioid epidemic, prompting protests at museums and cultural institutions bearing the Sackler name from significant donations.

The name removal proposal from Harvard College Overdose Prevention and Education Students also said that while Arthur died before the production and sale of OxyContin, he advanced marketing practices that contributed to the drug’s rise.

In 2023, photographer Nan Goldin and the anti-Sackler protest group PAIN led a die-in protest in the atrium of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard.

The committee’s 15-page report concluded that Sackler’s personal connection to the opioid epidemic was too weak to warrant the removal of his name from the namesake art museum and the other building on Harvard’s campus.

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

The committee also wrote in the report that it wanted to emphasize its recommendation shouldn’t be interpreted as an exoneration or an endorsement of Sackler’s actions, noting his alleged roles in medical scandals. It also recommend the university make efforts to communicate Arthur Sackler’s “complex life and legacy”, suggesting explanatory text on the art museum’s website and posted in prominent locations within the buildings named after him.

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

Even if the committee had agreed with the 2022 proposal, the university is tied to specific conditions laid out in a gift agreement when it accepted Sackler’s donation of funds in 1982, which the Harvard Crimson noted is not publicly available.

Harvard University’s decision to retain Arthur M. Sackler’s name on one of its three art museums and a campus building is notable for how Tufts University decided to remove the family’s name from its programs and facilities in 2019.

Among art institutions, the Smithsonian Institution rebranded the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art to the National Museum of Asian Art in 2019 but said the name change was not related to protests against the Sackler family. In 2021, the Serpentine Galleries took the Sackler name off one of its venues, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art also announced it would remove the family’s name from its galleries, including massive space housing the Temple of Dendur.