Harvard urged expert in $100 MILLION reparations scheme not to find 'too many slavery descendants' or university would be bankrupt: report

Harvard’s $100 million reparations program has fallen apart after the university allegedly told their expert in “reparations” that giving out money to too many slave descendants would “bankrupt the university.”

In 2022, Harvard announced that it would establish a $100 million reparations initiative after the school reported that it had been involved in the slave trade for centuries as an institution.

Harvard then hired Richard J. Cellini, 62, to identify descendants of slaves that were impacted by the university. Cellini had previously done similar work for Georgetown University in 2015.

However, by 2023, Harvard realized how many people Cellini was finding, and told him not to identify “too many descendants,” according to a filing that he submitted to the Harvard Office of the General Counsel, per The Free Press.

He was reportedly told that “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.

“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 added in the piece at the paper. “Modern-day Harvard is warming itself by a fire it did not build, and drinking from a well it did not dig. We have a moral responsibility to identify the enslaved people who built that fire and dug that well.”

Sara Bleich, who is a professor of public health policy at the school and then promoted to provost, has denied the claims made by Cellini. During his time working for Harvard, Cellini said that he found 1,000 slaves that had been impacted by Harvard as well as 1,400 of their descendants. However, he estimated that the true number of descendants was around 30,000.

The $100 million reparations fund, if split between 30,000 people would amount to $3,333. Harvard later fired Cellini and his team in 2024, and the project was outsourced to the American Ancestors, a nonprofit organization.