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Updated July 17, 2025, at 6:04 p.m.
Harvard College’s John Winthrop House will keep its last name but lose its first after yearslong calls to distance the undergraduate residence from its namesake, whom historians believe was a slaveowner.
The decision — announced Thursday afternoon — was the culmination of a review process that began after a 2023 student petition, signed by more than 1,000 Harvard affiliates, called on the University to dename Winthrop House.
The solution, which came nearly two years after a review committee was convened, splits the difference between demands to stop honoring slaveowners and impulses to retain a familiar name at the heart of Harvard’s undergraduate culture. It also is designed to honor later Winthrop descendants, like Robert Charles Winthrop, class of 1828, a staunch supporter of the Union in the Civil War.
The House was long thought to be named after two men, both by the name of John Winthrop: one, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a Harvard Overseer; and the other, his great-great-grandson, a professor at Harvard College.
Both were figures whose legacies drew the ire of students. The first John Winthrop enslaved at least seven people and sold 17 prisoners as slaves in the Pequot War between the Pequot tribe and English colonists. His descendant, who served twice as the interim president of Harvard, “likely” owned two enslaved individuals, according to a 35-page report released by the committee that reviewed the denaming petition.
But the committee’s report found that the elder John Winthrop was not an official namesake for the House — though the Winthrop House website states that the House is named for two John Winthrops.
Though the report detailed the two men’s involvement in what are now regarded as some of the greatest stains on American history — the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and the system of chattel slavery — the committee ultimately declined to rule on whether their actions were “sufficient to recommend denaming.”
Instead, its members wrote that the decision to remove the name John from the House was “driven more by context than by principle” and could respond to Black and Indigenous students who feel alienated by a name they see as honoring the two John Winthrops.
While members acknowledged that both Winthrops likely engaged in practices “we now regard as abhorrent,” they determined that “the degree to which those beliefs and behaviors are a significant component of the life and legacy of both John Winthrops is a question that invites reasonable disagreement.”
“We could not agree that the overall legacy of these two men demanded removing their names from the House,” they wrote. “Professor Winthrop’s place in the naming of the House and his contributions to Harvard and to the scientific community have long been obscured. Because of this, the moral complications in their legacies seemed a more decisive factor.”
The committee argued that completely stripping the Winthrop name could further obscure aspects of Harvard’s past only recently brought to light.
“Bearing in mind its charge to approach history ‘through a lens of reckoning and not forgetting,’ the committee agreed that to completely dename Winthrop House would reduce the likelihood that the broader Harvard Community might be afforded the opportunity to reckon with the institution’s history in a similarly profound way,” the report stated.
It also noted that Winthrop House was the only undergraduate House to be named with a first and last name, writing that removing “John” would bring it in line with all of Harvard’s other Houses and allow for reflections on the entire Winthrop family.
The committee was chaired by Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean D. Kelly and included Harvard Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick ’90, Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth P. Kamali ’97, Anthropology Professor Matthew J. Liebmann, and FAS Chief Campus Curator Brenda D. Tindal.
Over the course of the review process, the committee convened 22 times and held more than 35 conversations with relevant parties, including the petitioners, Winthrop residents and alumni, descendants of the Winthrop family, and members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The committee also engaged a Ph.D. researcher and the New England Historical Genealogical Society — the group, now known as American Ancestors, that has taken over Harvard’s efforts to identify the descendants of people enslaved by University affiliates.
The committee’s central recommendations — which also included seeking out “creative opportunities” for Winthrop residents to learn more about the House’s history — were accepted by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra.
Dename Winthrop, the student coalition that submitted the denaming request, expressed disappointment with Harvard’s decision in a Thursday press release.
“This is not the outcome we hoped for,” they wrote. “Still, we are deeply grateful to the over 50 student leaders, the 1,000 affiliates who signed our denaming petition, the twenty student and alumni organizations, and the 50 descendants of Governor John Winthrop who spent two years researching, mobilizing, and advocating for denaming.”
The group wrote that it would continue to collaborate with the Generational African American Students Association and Natives at Harvard College — two key student groups that helped craft the initial report and collect signatures — in fostering opportunities for affiliates to reckon with the legacy of the Winthrop family.
The decision on Winthrop House’s name is a new milestone in how Harvard approaches demands to reckon with racism in its history. Calls to dename Winthrop became prominent after a landmark 2022 report probed Harvard’s ties to slavery.
The Winthrop fight was part of a much larger debate that played out at Harvard and nationwide: Should universities continue to honor individuals with ties to racism or injustice? How should universities weigh their crimes against their achievements? Did it matter if long-dead figures’ actions, now seen as moral enormities, were not deemed so by their peers?
At Harvard, students, faculty, and activists have called for the denaming of Mather House, named for a slaveowner; the denaming of buildings honoring a member of the Sackler family, tied to the opioid crisis; and the retirement of the Harvard Law School seal, which incorporated the crest of the slaveholding Royall family. Mather and the Sackler building have kept their names, but the Royall seal was removed.
Denaming requests became so central in campus politics that former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow convened a committee to develop a renaming process. After the committee, led by former University President Drew G. Faust, released its report in 2021, the FAS established its own renaming guidelines.
Even as the Winthrop committee pursued its work, the political landscape shifted under its feet. When the committee was convened on Oct. 1, 2023, the Black Lives Matter movement still seemed ascendant, and universities nationwide had removed the names of slaveholders, Confederates, and eugenicists from campus landmarks.
But a backlash was already taking hold, and when Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January, he began an all-out campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. His administration scrubbed references to Black history from federal websites and restored the names of memorials once dedicated to Confederate leaders — and pressured universities to cease acknowledging race on campus.
In recent weeks, Harvard’s diversity offices have lost their websites and been replaced by offices with names that invoke “community,” “culture,” and “campus life.”
The Winthrop committee acknowledged that the University’s contemporary crisis — fury and campus divides over the war in Gaza, debates over academic freedom, and the unremitting scrutiny now directed at Harvard — “was inseparable from the committee’s work.”
The committee also wrote that its work was “even more difficult given the tense period during which the committee did its work” and alluded to the abrupt January 2024 resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and a champion of diversity efforts on campus.
“The student proposal was submitted under one University President, the committee was constituted under a second, and it delivers its recommendations to a third,” the report observed.
The Winthrop report is the second that has been reviewed under the FAS’s guidelines. In 2022, a group of students submitted a request to remove the name of Arthur M. Sackler from two campus buildings — but Harvard decided against doing so in August 2024.
In that instance, the committee reviewing the request did not find the students’ arguments, which centered around Sackler’s family’s ownership of a pharmaceutical company charged with aggressively marketing opioids, to be compelling.
Winthrop House Faculty Deans Stephen N. Chong and Kiran Gajwani wrote that they would help the House engage with the report in an email to House residents on Thursday.
“We know that members in our community and beyond will have different reactions to this decision,” they wrote. “After we’ve all had some time to read and digest the report, we’ll offer opportunities to discuss the report’s findings and your reactions to it.”
—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
