Historic But Halfhearted: Behind a University’s Fraught Efforts to Rid Itself of Toxic Donations

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In December, Tufts University announced it would remove the Sackler name from buildings and programs, establish a $3 million endowment to create a new source of funding aimed at the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and addiction, and create an exhibit educating community members about the school’s relationship with the Sackler family.

At the time, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University, said universities needn’t worry about imposing similar ethical litmus tests on other donors. The Sacklers, he said, are “in their own category, similar to a drug cartel. The argument that this would open up a can of worms, where would it end—it just doesn’t make sense to me.” (Kolodny has been a paid expert witness in opioid lawsuits.)

But recent history seems to indicate otherwise. The growing roster of “toxic donors” includes Jeffrey Epstein, one college trustee who dressed up as a Nazi 40 years ago, and a longtime university employee whose name was removed from the journalism school he founded after students and faculty objected to his offensive personal Facebook posts.

The can of worms, in other words, is very much open—and could become an even bigger problem in a historic recession. Professor David Rapach of Saint Louis University told me that cash-strapped schools “will face even stronger temptations to accept tainted donations” due to the pandemic.

Tufts’ decision to scrub the Sackler name is worth revisiting, given these looming temptations. The school’s efforts might provide universities with a playbook—albeit a flawed one—for addressing money from donors who turn out to be radioactive. Tufts’ ordeal should also incentivize administrators to take the initiative and, to Kolody’s point, adopt “ethical litmus tests” so they can authoritatively say no if and when a potentially toxic donor comes knocking.

Scrubbing the Name, Keeping the Cash

Tufts’ break from the Sackler clan was not a clean one. While the school scrubbed the Sackler name, it announced it would not return the $15 million in Sackler donations—some of which was still liquid—that it had received since 1980. According to the New York Times, something less than half of this total remained “unspent in the form of endowed funds, which are used to finance research in cancer and epilepsy, officials said. That money will not be returned.” 

Political Science Professor Evan Gerstmann called Tufts’ decision hypocritical. Noting that Spelman College returned Bill Cosby’s donations, Gerstmann wrote in Forbes, “moral redemption doesn’t come for free…Tufts has made it abundantly clear that all this is about appearances and politics, not morality.” 

Spelman isn’t the only school that’s decided to give up tainted donations. Last September, Brown University said it would steer unspent Sackler donations to Rhode Island nonprofit groups that treat opioid addiction. Ohio State recently announced it will return the full amount of $336,000 in Epstein donations to the Ohio attorney general’s sex trafficking initiative. And Harvard just announced it would donate $200,000 in unspent Epstein donations to groups focusing on victims of sex trafficking and assault.

Using the Money “to Benefit the Public Good”

Tufts could have followed Gerstmann’s advice and returned the money, but in the school’s defense, I can see why administrators balked. Cutting a check to the Sackler family is also not a great option. School administrators have also made the case that returning the money would hurt students.

The University of Connecticut’s UConn Foundation froze spending on about $200,000 of liquid assets generated by interest from endowment accounts set up by Raymond and Beverly Sackler, who gave the school $4.5 million between 1985 and 2014. The school announced plans to redirect the funds toward addiction research and education initiatives on campus.

“Returning the money to the Sacklers would not undo the damage of the opioid crisis or punish the family or the company they are associated with,” said spokeswoman Stephanie Reitz. “Rather, it would hamper the work of UConn students, researchers and others who have no connection to the issues at hand, have done nothing wrong, and are using the donated money to benefit the public good.”

This implies that schools like UConn and Tufts would be forced to make cuts, which is hardly the case. Tufts, for instance, sits on a $2 billion endowment. At the time of Tuft’s announcement, it was two years into a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign, amid a pre-COVID-19 climate in which U.S. schools raised a record $49.6 billion in 2019. Nothing was stopping administrators from donating the toxic cash and raising a manageable $3 million to continue treatment and research work, free from the lingering residue of all things Sackler.

Under “Particular Pressure”

The larger backstory leading up to Tufts’ decision is also important here, as it suggests that administrators on the receiving end of toxic donations just don’t want to upset the apple cart.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma paid $635 million in fines after executives pleaded guilty to charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about Oxycontin’s risk of addiction. Co-owners Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their family members were not charged. Ten years later, pieces in the New Yorker and Esquire exposed Purdue Pharma’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic that has now claimed over 200,000 lives. 

In response, Tufts students called on the school to sever ties with the Sacklers. While Tufts has “taken it upon itself to promote resources on the opioid crisis,” the Daily Tufts editorial stated, “Tufts administration still has not openly acknowledged the Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. In light of the recent exposés, Tufts should publicly recognize its own complicity in receiving money tainted by the epidemic, resolving to take an active stance against it.”

In January 2019, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey brought a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma that explored the Sackler family’s “intense relationship” with Tufts, including their efforts to promote Purdue’s products and Purdue’s funding of a master’s program. Healey’s lawsuit, as Ellen Barry wrote for the Times, put the school under “particular pressure.”

Officials announced Tufts had started an internal review of the allegations. Students and alumni, including a group called Sack Sackler, reiterated calls for the school to sever ties with the family. In March, the university tapped Donald K. Stern, a former U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, to formally review Tufts’ relationship to the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.

“Doing the Right Thing”

In December, Stern delivered his report. The prognosis was mixed, if not contradictory. While Stern did not find any evidence that Purdue or Sackler funding undermined “academic integrity or altered programs or research,” his report nonetheless detailed an agreement that gave Purdue the opportunity to influence the master’s program it funded. Purdue, the report said, was “successful in exercising influence, whether directly or indirectly” at Tufts. 

For instance, in 2015 and 2016, a medical school committee decided not to include Dreamland by Sam Quinones on incoming medical and public health students’ reading list. The book provides a devastating account of Purdue Pharma’s role in fueling the opioid crisis. The committee’s choice, lawyers wrote, “was due, in significant part, to the existence of the donor relationship with the Sacklers and Purdue and the desire to avoid controversy regarding that relationship.”

The report found that administrators did not grapple with whether they should continue receiving Sackler cash until 2017, and that, astonishingly, Tufts officials were soliciting donations from the family through 2018. 

Tufts removed Arthur Sackler’s name from the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Medical Education, though noting that he died years before Oxycontin was developed and sold. “The Sackler name is a problem, whether it’s the Arthur Sackler name, or all the Sackler names,” said Tufts Medical School Dean Dr. Harris A. Berman. Activist Nan Goldin, who has led the charge to get institutions to strip the Sackler name from buildings and argues that Purdue Pharma’s overzealous sale of Oxycontin “would not have happened without Arthur Sackler,” called Tufts’ decision “commendable.”

“After almost a year of sustained pressure, Tufts University is finally doing the right thing,” Sack Sackler wrote in a Facebook post after the school’s announcement. “Tufts, to our knowledge, is the first academic institution in the United States to fully cut ties with the Sackler family. That said, we don’t know of any other university so closely tied to the Sacklers’ campaign of deadly medical misinformation. Still, we’ll take it. This is a big deal.” 

“We Should Have Considered More Due Diligence”

Berman called the school’s decision to remove the Sackler name “an important symbolic move.” But Tufts administrators still left millions of dollars and one critically important “symbol” very much intact.

In October of 2017, in response to the New Yorker and Esquire bombshells, the Daily Tufts’ editorial board called on the university to revoke the 2013 honorary degree conferred on Raymond Sackler. It seemed like a reasonable demand. After all, Tufts revoked Bill Cosby’s honorary degree in 2015. Surely, the school would revoke an honorary degree from the man who, as co-owner of Purdue Pharma, financially benefited from the sale of Oxycontin from the mid-1990s until his death in 2017. 

Tufts administrators did not accede to the editorial board’s demands in 2017, nor did they do so two years later. In announcing the banishment of the Sackler name from campus, the school said it chose not to revoke Raymond’s honorary degree. The Sackler name may be scrubbed from Tufts’ buildings, but not its website.

“I feel that Raymond was deserving of that honorary degree,” Monaco said last December. “On reflection, we should have considered with more diligence” the association between the Sacklers and Purdue and the opioid epidemic. The Daily Tufts immediately reiterated its call for the school to revoke Raymond’s honorary degree.

Bottom line? Administrators deserve credit for eventually coming around and conducting the transparent, discomforting, and revealing inquiry they did. And in February, as promised, the university launched the Tufts Initiative on Substance Abuse and Action, a campus program aimed at preventing and treating addiction and substance abuse. The deadline for calls for proposals was April 30; funds will be distributed on a per-project basis on July 1, August 1 and September 1, 2020.

That said, with the school’s decision to keep millions in Sackler donations, and its apparent hesitance to make a clean break, the family name continues to linger at this prestigious campus. In addition, it’s hard to imagine Tufts would have acted without ongoing pressure from the state attorney general and concerned students and faculty. That’s the kind of reluctance that could prevent a university from proactively avoiding such scandal in the future. As we enter a much more challenging fundraising environment, other institutions can learn from Tufts’ experience and put stricter policies in place to prevent such turmoil before it’s too late.