Harvard Didn’t Just Kill Its Slavery Research Team. It Flunked History of Slavery 101.

When I became Director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program in Fall 2022, I told the Harvard Gazette: “The hard part of identifying Harvard slaves and their direct descendants isn’t the finding. It’s the looking. There are a million reasons not to look.”

This wasn’t a bromide. It was a warning.

The Harvard and Legacy of Slavery report entrusted the HSRP with the sacred duty of identifying people enslaved on Harvard’s campus or by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff, and tracing their direct descendants.

The HSRP hired a staff of 12 full-time and part-time professionals inspired by the scholarship of Skip Gates, including: six members with PhDs or other terminal degrees; two pre-doctoral candidates; one globally-acclaimed journalist; one self-taught wizard of New England slave genealogy; one Harvard undergraduate; and one high school intern from Texas. All told, Harvard spent over $1.7 million on the HSRP’s research mission between July 1, 2023 and December 31, 2024.

Over just 18 months, the HSRP conclusively identified 913 Harvard-affiliated enslaved people, and located 403 living direct descendants. That’s just $1,897 per enslaved person identified. But the per capita cost of research would have fallen dramatically with time. I estimate that Harvard leaders enslaved thousands more during the period 1636-1900.

Despite the HSRP’s success, Harvard recently fired the entire HRSP research team without reason or notice, and outsourced its work to a highly-regarded Boston-based genealogy society. Not even the high school student was spared. Harvard professor Vincent A. Brown has described this action as “vindictive and wasteful.”

Our databases and research files are enormous. Even if these files have been opened, they wouldn’t mean much unless someone from the HSRP spent hours or days walking our successors through it all. Yet, despite being the founding director of the HSRP, I have not been contacted to discuss work in progress or near-term future directions and opportunities.

With this act of academic vandalism and self-mutilation, Harvard flunked History of Slavery 101. The HSRP offered independent scholarship; the University wanted research-for-hire. Harvard didn’t make a mistake. It made a choice.

Harvard’s leaders have effectively destroyed their credibility in this area for a generation to come. This work will resume one day, because history and justice demand it. When that time comes, three lessons will stand out from the present era.

First, as the 2022 Harvard Slavery Report expressly states: “[T]he University [should] endeavor to identify the direct descendants of enslaved individuals who labored on Harvard’s campus and of those who were enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, or staff.” Some things simply must be done by, for, and through Harvard. What kind of institution outsources its duty of remembrance to third parties on a work-for-hire basis? What’s next, ChatGPT?

Second (quoting again from the 2022 report): “It is critical that researchers center enslaved people” and not the institution that enslaved them. This means that Harvard leaders must listen to descendant needs and requests, and not to their own fears, anxieties, and preconceived notions.

Finally, responsibility for this research must be vested with academics, protected by academic freedom. This work simply cannot be heavily influenced by the Office of the Provost. In many cases, Harvard slaveholding ran directly through the President’s Office or Harvard’s governing boards. HSRP shouldn’t report directly to anyone in central administration — it should be in an academic unit with academic protection.

As time has dragged on, the Harvard & Legacy of Slavery Initiative increasingly resembles a poorly designed fireworks display — grand initial gestures followed by heaps of collateral damage.

Many people are shocked and saddened at how badly Harvard has stumbled in its efforts to reveal and repair the legacy of slavery at Harvard. These stumbles may in fact be the most eloquent expression of the “legacy of slavery at Harvard” — a legacy driven by fear, denial, willful ignorance, institutional arrogance, and financial self-interest.

Richard J. Cellini was the founding director of the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program.