Oxford University removes Sackler name from buildings

Oxford University had a Sackler Library, two Sackler Galleries, a Sackler Officer and a Sackler Keeper of Antiquities.

But after the family’s name — an acknowledgment of the dynasty’s generous donations — came under scrutiny for some members’ ties to the United States’ opioid crisis, Oxford announced Monday that it would remove its mention in several of its buildings would fall. and staff positions.

Oxford “has decided that the university buildings, rooms and staff functions using the Sackler name will no longer do so,” it said in a statement.

Oxford said it had received donations from the Sacklers and related trusts since 1993 that ranged from 10 to 15 million pounds (about $12 million to $19 million).

Britain’s elite university has become the latest in a long line of institutions to publicly distance itself from the family, a philanthropic giant whose members ran Purdue Pharma, the now-bankrupt company that made OxyContin. The drug sparked an opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States.

In 2019, the Louvre in Paris became the first major museum to remove the family’s name from its walls. London’s Tate museums decided they would no longer accept gifts from the family, and Britain’s National Portrait Gallery canceled a planned $1.3 million donation.

In the United States, institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the American Museum of Natural History also distanced themselves from the family.

Last year George Osborne, the chair of the British Museum in London, said the Sackler name would be removed from the galleries, rooms and endowments the family supported. But last February an investigation by The Financial Times revealed that Oxford continued to invite a member of Sackler’s family over the past two years.

The university said it came to the decision to remove the family’s name after reviewing its relationship with the Sacklers and their trusts, “including how their donations to the university are recognized.”

The Sackler Library will be renamed the Bodleian Art, Archeology and Ancient World Library, the university said.

A spokesman for the family of Dr. Mortimer Sackler, one of the founders of Purdue Pharma, was not immediately available for comment.

In the statement, Oxford said it would keep the donations it received from the Sackler family and their trusts “for their intended educational purposes” and that no new donations have been received from the family since January 2019.

Oxford University said Sackler’s name will be preserved on the Clarendon Arch, a slate tablet at the entrance to the Bodleian Library, and on the Ashmolean Museum’s donor board displayed for “the purposes of historical record of donations to the University. “