Harvard University's $100million reparation program fell apart after it allegedly told its hired expert not to find too many slave descendants over fears it could bankrupt the Ivy League school.
In 2022, Harvard announced it had established a $100million reparation initiative after releasing a report that the school had been involved in the slave trade for two centuries.
As part of the recommendations released by those working on the initiative, the school was supposed to identify direct descendants of the slaves affected by Harvard.
Harvard hired Richard J Cellini, 62, for the job. He had previously mapped out more than 10,000 descendants of the 272 enslaved people affected by Georgetown University in 2015. Although Georgetown did not commission Cellini for the work, it did use his work to make changes.
By July 2023, Harvard had realized how invested Cellini, a former Wall Street lawyer, was to his work and told him not to identify 'too many descendants,' a complaint he filed with the Harvard Office of the General Counsel stated, according to The Free Press.
He said he was told the elite institution feared 'if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university.'
'As a member of the New York Bar, I am sworn never to make baseless allegations,' he wrote in The Harvard Crimson, a student paper.
Sara Bleich, a public health policy professor at the school that was promoted to vice provost for special projects to oversee the initiative, denied Cellini's claims.
Harvard hired Richard J Cellini, 62, to find slaves and their direct descendants. Cellini estimated there could be 30,000 descendants
In a complaint filed by Cellini, he claimed the school told him not to find 'too many descendants' in 2023, as it was worried it could bankrupt the school
Despite that, Cellini pushed to expand the list of eligible recipients to include beneficiaries of slaves who were owned by Harvard's governing boards. It was a category the school had debated adding and eventually did.
Cellini also took a research trip to Antigua and had discussed with the country's leaders about a partnership with the school to help the descendants of the hundreds of slaves connected to Harvard found there, which would only add to the school's financial burden.
Antigua had been asking the Ivy League school for reparations for years.
Shortly after the trip, Cellini and his team were fired by the school in 2024. The reparations project was then outsourced to American Ancestors, a nonprofit.
The nonprofit has denied it was given constraints by the school, The Free Press reported.
Throughout Cellini's time at Harvard, he found more than 1,000 slaves connected to Harvard and more than 1,400 of their direct descendants – with around 500 still living.
He estimated, however, that the real number of descendants could be around 30,000, he told The Free Press.
When asked about the financial implications of paying 30,000 descendants, he told The Free Press: 'You know, it’s like my 16-year-old son sometimes says: "Daddy, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem, not a ‘me’ problem."'
Sara Bleich, who oversaw the initiative, denied Cellini's claims
Cellini said he had accepted the position in 2022 because he believed the prestigious school was 'committed to doing this work properly,' he wrote in an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson in October 2024.
'I did not come to Harvard to compromise Harvard’s principles or tarnish Harvard’s name – or my own for that matter,' he wrote. 'Historical truth doesn’t have a boss, documented facts don’t need a supervisor.
'No matter what path of reparations Harvard chooses, it can’t ignore the facts. Though the university is very old and very rich, it can’t outrun history.'
Cellini accused the school of going into the initiative with a pleasant fantasy of finding a slave that was happily working for the school and their descendants have gone on to live good lives.
He said they were hoping to 'find an old enslaved woman named Mary who worked in the College Bake House. She loved the students and the students loved her and when she died after 50 years, the students got together and paid for her funeral. Now her great-great-granddaughter from California is studying computer science at Harvard.'
If the school were to find 30,000 living descendants, the $100million fund would equate to roughly $3,333 per person – far less than $400,000 a student might spend on four years of tuition at the school.
The school has an endowment fund of $50billion, making it the wealthiest university in the world.
The school also allegedly fired intern, Christopher Newman, who was working with the school's archives, after he connected with a family that were descendants of slaves and brought up Antigua on multiple occasions, he told The Guardian.
The school fired Cellini and his team in 2024 and outsourced the initiative to a nonprofit
'It seemed like nobody was really trying to hear that,' he said of Antigua.
Newman, 45, a graduate student at a different school, was hired by the school in 2024 to create an annotated bibliography, but due to the school's wider research into slavery, he thought it would be okay to look into it.
The school allegedly accused him of misrepresenting himself as an archivist and going outside of his scope of duties, as Cellini's team were the only ones authorized to reach out to descendants.
The Daily Mail has reached out to Harvard for comment.