The Harvard Law School Seal: What Should Be Done?

Yesterday, Vox posted a short article about the controversy surrounding the Harvard Law School shield, which is based on the family seal of the Royalls, major slaveowners who bequeathed land and money to Harvard, laying some of the groundwork for the creation of the Law School.  The Harvard Crimson published a more detailed piece.

The seal is unobjectionable on its face.  It is has the word “Veritas” – truth, Harvard’s slogan – over three sheaves of wheat.  But the wheat comes from the Royalls’ family crest and symbolizes the source of the family wealth – wealth that was predicated on the massive use of slaves in Antigua and in Massachusetts.

Law School Alums were recently sent an e-mail from the Law School's Dean Minnow agreeing with a Harvard Committee recommendation that the shield be eliminated. When I went there in the early 1970s, no one was aware of the origins of the seal -- at least not that I know of. Indeed, I was oblivious to the seal's existence.  Apparently, this did not become a topic of wider knowledge and conversation until about fifteen years ago. My initial reaction to Dean Minnow’s e-mail was to agree fully with her recommendation. After reading the Committee's majority and dissenting reports (wisely provided by Dean Minnow in her e-mail), I am not so sure.

Last summer, I wrote about this general subject in the context of discussion of a Confederate Soldier Memorial Statue outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Rockville, arguing that that statue should be removed. 

The Harvard Law School seal issue is it not as clear-cut as the Confederate Soldier Memorial issue.  The symbol is not offensive on its face.  But it does represent the sordid side of our country’s origins (and the origins of its most prestigious institutions).  The report of the Harvard Committee recommending that the seal be dropped is useful, because it provides a reasonable framework to analyze such questions. http://today.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Shield-Committee-Report.pdf 

But the dissenting view of Committee member Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, an African-American scholar who has written extensively on the history and legacy of slavery, digs deeper into the issues and concludes that this particular symbol should remain, so that the Law School community always remember, rather than paper over, the evil past.  Here is part of what Professor Gordon-Reed writes:

Thanks to historians, we have “new knowledge” that we are joined in history to a group of people entrapped in the tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade. This also joins us to the larger American story of slavery. We should take this knowledge and run with it, not away from it. I end where I began: the larger purpose outside of our own personal feelings is to marry the memory of the injustice done to the people enslaved on the Royall plantation to Harvard Law School’s modern commitment to justice and equality through a well-known symbol that connects both.  

While I appreciate the highly-charged (and perfectly legitimate) emotions and intellectual points surrounding the origins of the seal and the accompanying desire to remove it, Professor Gordon-Reed may well have the better of the argument.  I would ask that no one agree or disagree on this point without first reading both the majority and dissenting reports. They are both worth considering as we face up to our history and try to figure out which symbols we should keep and which symbols we should drop.