Harvard University last week laid off the staff of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, who were tasked with identifying the direct descendants of those enslaved by Harvard-affiliated administrators, faculty and staff, The Boston Globe reported.
The work, which was part of the university’s $100 million Legacy of Slavery initiative, will now fall entirely to American Ancestors, a national genealogical nonprofit that Harvard was already partnering with, according to a news release.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs to the Globe.
The Harvard Crimson first reported the news, noting that the HSRP staff were terminated without warning Jan. 23.
Protesting the move, Harvard history professor Vincent Brown resigned from the Legacy of Slavery Memorial Project Committee, which was assigned the task of designing a memorial to those enslaved by members of the Harvard community.
Brown wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared with Inside Higher Ed, that he had recently returned from a productive research trip to Antigua and Barbuda when he “learned that the entire [HSRP] team had been laid off in sudden telephone calls with an officer in Harvard’s human resources department.” He called the terminations “vindictive as well as wasteful.”
“I hope and expect that the H&LS initiative will weather this latest controversy,” Brown wrote. “I only regret that I cannot formally be a part of that effort.”
Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative has repeatedly come under fire since it was announced in 2022. Critics assailed its lack of progress last year. The two professors who co-chaired the memorial committee resigned last May, citing frustration with administrators; the executive director of the initiative, Roeshana Moore-Evans, followed them out the door. Then HSRP founding director Richard Cellini told the Crimson last fall that vice provost Sara Bleich had instructed him “‘not to find too many descendants.’”
A university spokesperson denied that charge, telling the Crimson, “There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work.”
Cellini was among those fired from the HSRP last week.
