Last week, a university governing board declared that the time-honored seal of Harvard Law School must be retired because it is tied to that of a slave-holding family that funded the school’s first professorship more than 200 years ago.
With that decision, Harvard is about to slide down what lawyers like to call the “slippery slope,” which could produce a wave of both comic and dangerous results. I say this having steeped myself in the university’s archives over the past decade, focusing on issues of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other expressions of prejudice. I fear that if the university is bent on expunging all major remnants of what is today seen as morally repugnant, nothing will be left of Harvard as we know it. House names, professorships, busts and portraits will have to be removed, for if Harvard has been home to many great minds, it has also been home to many closed ones — like other American institutions. If this is followed to its logical conclusion, Harvard will undergo nothing short of total self-renunciation. Consider this much-abbreviated litany of offenses:
The Dudleian Lecture is given annually at the Harvard School of Divinity, but its roots are darkened by virulent anti-Catholicism. Paul Dudley, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in 1750 bequeathed funds for a series of four rotating lecture topics. One of those was to be an attack on the pope and Catholicism, representing widespread suspicions of the church at that time. That oration was for the purpose of “exposing the idolatry of the Romish Church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions.”