Dozens of Harvard University students staged a protest at the campus’ Arthur M. Sackler Museum yesterday, calling on the school to remove the Sackler name from the institution over the family’s role in the crisis of opioids. The students were supported by members of Nan Goldin’s activist group, PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).
Protesters threw fake medicine bottles and prescriptions into the museum’s atrium, while others held up signs with slogans like “Shame on Sackler” and “Take Down Their Name.” Many lay on the floor of the venue – a “die-in” meant to represent the number of lives lost to opioid addiction.
The event recalled PAIN’s previous demonstration at the museum in 2018 – an early activation in the band’s now years-long quest to hold the Sacklers, whose company Purdue Pharma produces and markets OxyContin, responsible.
Since then, major cultural institutions across Europe and America, including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Serpentine Gallery, have phased out the Sackler name. Tufts University in Boston, located minutes from Harvard, became one of the first institutions to disassociate itself from the Sacklers in 2019.
Harvard, however, has yet to follow suit, despite numerous pleas from students to do so. Four years ago, university president Lawrence Bacow said it would be ‘inappropriate’ for the school to rename its museum, since its namesake, Arthur M. Sackler, ‘died before drugs’ . [Oxycontin] was developed.”
Protesters hold a ‘die-in’ at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Photo: Ben Roberts. Courtesy of PAIN.
Goldin herself was not present at Thursday’s protest, although she appeared via Zoom the night before attending a Harvard-sponsored screening of Laura Poitras’ documentary nominated for an Oscar about the artist and his militant work, All the beauty and bloodshed.
In a statement shared after the event, Goldin said “to claim that Arthur Sackler is innocent is historically inaccurate – he engineered the corrupt pharmaceutical advertising system used by Purdue to flood America with Oxy, sparking the crisis of overdoses. He’s as responsible as any of the Sacklers.
“I demand that Sackler’s name be removed,” the artist concluded.
Representatives for Harvard University did not immediately return a request for comment. A school spokesperson said Hyperallergic that “the university has established a process for considering naming spaces, programs, or other entities. A proposal to name the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Building has been submitted and is currently under consideration. ”
A PAIN press release noted that the students behind the proposal “have yet to receive a response from the university’s name change committee.”
Photo: Dumedi Malaika Menakaya. Courtesy of PAIN.
The renewed call to rename Harvard’s Sackler buildings comes amid similar efforts by students to remove the Winthrop name from one of the school’s dorms. The name honors John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and known slave owner, and his great-great-grandson, also named John Winthrop, who himself reduced enslaved two people while he was acting president of the school in the mid-1700s.
At the protest, protesters pointed to the apparent hypocrisy of Harvard administrators who took so long to remove the names Sackler and Winthrop when they had just renamed the school’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after conservative billionaire Ken Griffin, who recently donated $300 million.
“If we can name buildings after billionaires, we can name buildings named after slave owners and corrupt families,” Harvard student Clyve Lawrence said in a statement shared by PAIN. “Make the process more transparent. Follow with a set schedule. We deserve to know who makes these decisions.
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