Last month, Harvard University fired all 12 staff members from their Slavery Remembrance Program the day after the announcement of a federal executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The firings raised questions about the future of the program and the university’s willingness to fulfill its promise of supporting the descendants of those enslaved by its leaders, faculty and staff.
Dr. Richard Cellini, who served as the director of the Slavery Remembrance Program, said in an interview with The Hilltop that on Jan. 22, he and his team were all fired the following morning “with no cause or sorry, with no reason and notice.”
Harvard is not the only university adhering to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending DEI, as many universities are following suit.
The order aims to “end illegal discrimination and restore merit-based opportunity.” It argued that these practices break federal civil rights laws, create division and harm national unity. The order also stated that DEI initiatives go against American values like hard work, excellence and individual achievement, replacing them with an unfair system that gives advantages based on identity.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, a news organization focused on covering colleges and universities, tracks 240 universities that are adhering to the executive order.
For example, North Carolina’s public universities no longer require students to take classes related to diversity, equity and inclusion to graduate, and The University of Akron will no longer host its “Rethinking Race” forum that it held annually for more than two decades.
The Slavery Remembrance program is a part of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative. The initiative was created in 2022 after Harvard unanimously adopted seven recommendations from its Harvard and Legacy of Slavery report. The program was funded by a $100 million endowment from Harvard for its implementation.
“Recommendation four created the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program and gave us the mission of finding people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty and staff and identifying their direct living descendants. It also says that Harvard will provide those direct living descendants with educational support,” Cellini said.
Cellini said the program had tremendous support from the university, except from the office of the president.
He shared that nearly all the opposition they faced while leading the Harvard Slavery Remembrance program came from Dr. Sara Bleich, Vice Provost for Special Projects and head of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.
“As far as I can tell, they wanted control because they didn’t want us to find too many slaves and too many descendants affiliated with Harvard,” Cellini said.
When the team started in September 2022, they inherited a list of 70 enslaved people and zero direct descendants living or deceased. “By the time we were all fired, we had found 913 Harvard slaves and 403 living,” Cellini said.
Cellini said that since Bleich took office in January 2023, she and her team have yet to contact a single living direct descendant.
University spokesperson Sarah Kennedy-O’Reilly denied Cellini’s allegations of an intentional effort to stymie the organization’s work.
“There is no directive to limit the number of direct descendants to be identified through this work,” she said.
According to the fourth recommendation, the living descendants are explicitly owed educational support from the university. While it is unclear what that entails, Cellini said it means something.
“It’s up to Sarah Bleich and the university to determine what it means. But this report was adopted almost three years ago. And no progress has been made, as far as I’m aware of, to contact direct descendants and or to define what educational support is,” Cellini said.
The Hilltop reached out for a comment on the current status of the initiative. Bleich responded via email that there are “three core priority areas where the initiative will focus our efforts.” The program also recently announced an expansion of their partnership with American Ancestors, and said they will now “take a lead role in advancing the descendant research.”
The first core priority area Bleich stated that they intend to focus on is memorialization and education through the Memorial Project Committee, whose mission is to create a campus memorial that acknowledges and commemorates the contributions of enslaved people to Harvard’s establishment and development.
Advancing partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by “building and deepening partnerships with research-intensive HBCUs and… [providing] opportunities for students, faculty and leadership at HBCUs and Harvard to learn from one another,” is the second core priority area, Bleich said.
The final core priority area is The Reparative Grant Program which seeks to uplift descendant communities, particularly in Greater Boston and nearby tribal communities, while also continuing essential research to identify living direct descendants of individuals enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty and staff. In 2024, the program began the disbursement of $2.3 million in grants to non-profits and Harvard faculty for various projects.
However, according to Cellini, “identification and repair are two different things.”
Folly A. Kouevi-Setekpo, a Howard alumnus and graduate student at Harvard in the School of Education, echoed that sentiment.
“There’s only so far identifying can go, right? How do we go about this cycle of reconciliation? Now that you have acknowledged it, and you have funded this research, what is the research going to actually do in terms of educating and expanding?” Kouevi-Setekpo said.
As Harvard moves forward with these decisions, students are calling into question what responsibility the university holds in truly addressing its legacy of slavery and combating the current changes in our educational landscape.
“I think Harvard, one with this name and the influence that it has, has to champion itself and seize the role that it plays in education in order to combat this sort of attack on education that is for everyone,” Kouevi-Setekpo said.
Sophia Young, a first-year psychology major at Harvard and Cambridge native, remembers when the program began in 2022. She said she feels disappointed in their choice to fire all the staff, attributing it to an “allegiance to their donors and their pockets rather than their students.”
“It would be a really good time for Harvard to show its support for its Black student body, and [to] amplify the Legacy of Slavery initiative,” Young said.
Copy edited by Anijah Franklin
