It’s about time…

In October 2022, a group of woke Harvard students—aren’t they all?— submitted a 23-page “denaming” proposal for various university buildings. One on the hit list was the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, one of the three art museums on the college campus. The students argued that Arthur Sackler, the progenitor of the family that created Purdue Pharma, was complicit in the opioid addiction disaster because he developed the Machiavellian marketing techniques that were later used by his family to spread death and addiction across the land.

True, that Sackler died nine years before OxyContin’s release, but his name was dirty, his money was dirty, so his art collection must be dirty too. Or something. To give the students their due, Sackler’s family earned its status as the face of the opioid epidemic. In 2020, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to charges related to its marketing of OxyContin, though the belief that the Sackler family has never been punished to the extent it should have been is widespread and, I believe, valid.

A committee charged with reviewing the denaming demand announced earlier this month that it did not recommend removing Arthur’s name from the Sackler Museum and another university building, and the Harvard Corporation accepted the committee’s recommendation, which was accompanied by an opinion concluding that the students’ argument was unpersuasive.

“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.

That’s right, but it ducks the real issue, which is that the student case was essentially more statue-toppling. If every building at Harvard carrying the name of a donor with skeletons in his metaphorical closet had to be renamed—probably to honor civil rights workers and suffragettes?—Harvard would be airblasting until the Rapture, and eventually the new names would be found to be unjustly honored because of uncovered evidence that their bearers once used the word “fag.”

Statues, buildings, school, museums and other memorials should be regarded as celebrating the good things prominent individuals accomplished in life, what they were admired for in their time even if attitudes have changed, and their place in our complex and multifaceted history. Gifts of fine art to universities should count.

Amazingly, Harvard made the right call.

Too bad that building is so ugly.