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Infighting and Pressure From Above: Inside Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative | News | The Harvard Crimson
The $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative is meant to redress the University’s historic ties to slavery. But over the last two years, the project has been hampered by internal tension, alleged pushback over its scope, and leadership turnover.
Infighting and Pressure From Above: Inside Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative
The $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative is meant to redress the University’s historic ties to slavery. But over the last two years, the project has been hampered by internal tension, alleged pushback over its scope, and leadership turnover.
A $100 million University initiative intended to make amends for Harvard’s ties to slavery has been hamstrung by infighting, high staff turnover, and senior University officials seeking to limit the project’s scope, multiple current and former staff members told The Crimson.Even as Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich, who leads the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative, underscored the University’s commitment to redressing historic wrongs, Bleich and other top administrators pushed for public relations victories and fostered an environment where affiliates felt pressured to speed up their work, the current and former staffers said.
Two high-profile departures occurred in late May when English professor Tracy K. Smith ’94 and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Director Dan I. Byers resigned as co-chairs of the initiative’s memorial project committee, issuing a scathing resignation letter to top University leadership.
The internal friction continued through the summer as Roeshana Moore-Evans, formerly the initiative’s executive director and Bleich’s top deputy, left the University in June.
And Richard J. Cellini, the director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, said in a statement to The Crimson that he was explicitly instructed by Bleich to limit the number of descendants of enslaved individuals identified by his research team.
“I have been repeatedly and emphatically told by Dr. Sara Bleich ‘not to find too many descendants’ and that ‘the HSRP shouldn’t do its job too well,’” Cellini wrote.
University spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly disputed Cellini’s statement, saying that no such instruction had ever been issued.
“There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work,” she wrote.
This account is based on interviews conducted over the past four months with 18 people familiar with Harvard’s efforts to redress its ties to slavery, including eight people directly involved in the Legacy of Slavery initiative, and dozens of documents and email communications reviewed by The Crimson.
Many of the current affiliates interviewed for this article were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the Legacy of Slavery initiative and discuss sensitive personnel issues.
Though almost everyone interviewed for this article said they were proud of their work to support the Legacy of Slavery initiative, several affiliates said the pressure to swiftly produce public-facing progress reports led them to question the authenticity of Harvard’s dedication to the mission.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 reiterated the University’s commitment to its goal of reckoning with its past and threw his support behind Bleich in a statement on Thursday.
“We are dedicated to the success of this endeavor,” Garber wrote. “I am confident that Vice Provost Sara Bleich will continue to lead our efforts with vision and commitment.”
