Christopher Newman remembers seeing campus police officers as he walked into a human resources office at Harvard University, but he didn’t imagine that they were there for him.
It was July 2024, and Newman had just turned in the results of a two-month-long internship with the Harvard University Archives: an annotated bibliography for the landmark 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative report, which detailed the university’s ties to slavery across three centuries. He completed his project on Friday, 26 July, and on Monday, he said he received an email that HR wanted to meet with him.
After that meeting, the officers escorted Newman out of the building, told him he was banned from campus and denied his request to collect his belongings from his office, he told the Guardian. He said he was told that a flight back home was booked for that afternoon. “I was asking too many questions,” Newman said, “veering off of the proverbial beaten path.”
Newman knew he had ruffled some feathers during his internship. At an event at a local history museum, he had met members of the Lloyd family – descendants of people enslaved by a Harvard benefactor and trafficked from Antigua to Cambridge, Massachusetts – and struck up an acquaintance. Over the course of several meetings with library staff and other interns after meeting the Lloyds, Newman said he brought up the island of Antigua multiple times.
“There is an absolute direct connection from Antigua and what was going on there to the slave trade at Harvard,” he said he told the group. “We should really start looking into this Antigua thing, because there’s some teeth here.” But he was met with radio silence. “It seemed like nobody was really trying to hear that,” he said.
In its 2022 report, the university had broadly delineated its historical ties to the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Haiti, Cuba and Jamaica, among others, mainly by tracing the actions of key alumni who were merchants and planters. What Newman was suggesting, though, was that the university look to the present and consider its current-day responsibilities to nations such as Antigua and Barbuda.
Harvard, founded in 1636 in Cambridge, is widely considered the most prestigious university in the US, and has an endowment of over $50bn, which makes it the wealthiest university in the world. The revenue from the endowment, supplemented by donations, income from student tuition and sponsorships, is used to fund the university’s operations. Yet because the money is invested and meant to grow over time, the university maintains that its ability to draw from the endowment is limited.