Tufts Will Investigate Its Ties to the Sackler Family. Here’s What Other Universities Are Doing.

The Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, has said that Purdue Pharma and its directors, including members of the Sackler family, used Tufts University to burnish their reputation and peddle the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. Now Tufts officials say they will investigate whether that’s true.

Anthony P. Monaco, the university’s president, announced on Monday that he had asked a former U.S. attorney, Donald K. Stern, to review a program on pain research that Purdue Pharma executives helped start at Tufts. According to a complaint filed by Healey in January, the company used that program to promote OxyContin in the medical and research communities.

In a message to the Tufts campus, Monaco described the attorney general’s allegation that Purdue Pharma had used Tufts to “legitimize the marketing” of OxyContin as “deeply troubling.” He vowed to make any changes in university policies recommended as a result of the review.

Monaco’s statement was among the most significant examples of a university weighing the ethics of its ties to the Sacklers, but Tufts is far from the only university that has accepted large donations from the family. Once known widely for their gifts to universities and museums, members of the Sackler family are becoming more closely associated with the source of their wealth: the painkiller that many blame for the opioid crisis.

Following a series of news reports and lawsuits that have named individual Sacklers as defendants, several universities and cultural institutions have announced plans to review their connections to the family. Museums like the Guggenheim and the Tate have pledged not to accept any more money from the Sacklers. (Some members of Arthur M. Sackler’s family have tried to distance themselves from their relatives because he died before OxyContin came to market.) The chief executive of Purdue Pharma has said the company is considering bankruptcy.

In a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family who helped run the privately held company, Healey said the Tufts program, a master’s in pain research, education, and policy, had “brought Purdue name recognition, good will in the local and medical communities, and access to doctors at Massachusetts hospitals.” The program is aimed at physical therapists, nurses, pharmacists, and health-policy makers. It offers courses in topics like “the pharmacology of pain” and “sociocultural aspects of pain,” according to its website.

Monaco said Stern and “a team of academic leaders” would review the program and other programs related to opioids that received funding from Purdue Pharma or Sackler family members. The goals, Monaco said, are to determine if the university had adhered to its policies and to judge whether those policies reflect best practices for research integrity and conflicts of interest.

Tufts is also home to the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. According to Healey’s complaint, Purdue Pharma employees taught a seminar at Tufts, and Richard Sackler sat on the board of the Tufts University School of Medicine and “paid Tufts hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The Tufts Daily, the student newspaper, called for the university to cut ties with Purdue Pharma in an editorial in January. “Tufts has crossed a line past complicity,” the editorial said.

Purdue Pharma has denied that it is responsible for the opioid crisis. The company is not the only maker of opioids, nor is it the only drug company being sued by attorneys general, as well as counties and municipalities across the country. In a statement to The Chronicle, a representative working for some members of the family said that court filings had created a false picture of the Sacklers, who remain committed to combating the opioid crisis.

“For more than half a century, several generations of Sacklers have supported respected institutions that play crucial roles in health, research, education, the arts, and the humanities,” the statement said. “It has been a privilege to support the vital work of these organizations and we remain dedicated to doing so.”

Tufts has not confirmed details of the Sackler family’s role in the pain-research program. “Tufts University has always been and remains deeply committed to the highest ethical and scientific standards in research and education,” a Tufts spokesman said in an emailed statement.

The Defense Is in the Details

How are the other universities that have received Sackler funds reacting? Some have barely acknowledged their connections to the family. But others are sifting through details about their Sackler gifts — how the money was used, which members of the family it came from — to guide their decisions on what, if anything, should change.

After a review, the University of Connecticut decided it would keep its money — $4.5 million from Raymond and Beverly Sackler between 1985 and 2014. The Sacklers donated $3.1 million to the School of Medicine and $1.2 million to the School of Fine Arts, a university spokeswoman said. The Sacklers have made smaller gifts to the libraries and for scholarships for students from Stamford, Conn., where Purdue Pharma is based, among other programs.

The spokeswoman said the university had determined that none of the Sackler funds “are connected to research, teaching, or programs related to opioids, pain management, the marketing of prescription opioids, or influencing what physicians prescribe.” Returning the money “would not undo the damage of the opioid crisis or punish the family or the company they are associated with,” and would only hurt UConn students and researchers, she said.

Several other colleges have conducted reviews or continue to do so. Columbia University is home to the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology; its Sackler Institute Award supports research on psychiatric illness. A spokesman said the university had “re-evaluated accepting donations from the Sackler family’s philanthropies” and is not currently accepting donations from them.

The Yale Daily News, the student newspaper at Yale University, reported that the Sacklers had endowed professorships, including $3 million for the Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship, and had funded the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, among other gifts. Peter Salovey, the president, told the newspaper that while the opioid-addiction crisis is real, “generosity from the Sackler family has funded issues core to Yale’s mission.” He said he would not comment further before consulting with faculty members and deans.

A Yale spokeswoman said that the university is “aware of the ongoing efforts to determine potential contributing factors in the current opioid epidemic, including through legal processes, and will continue to monitor the outcomes of those efforts.” She said that many researchers at Yale are working on causes and treatments for addiction.

Brown University received a pledge for a Sackler donation in 2016. The university has not spent the gift, and plans to do so are on pause, a Brown spokesman said. The university did not disclose the value of the gift but included it on a list of donations of $1 million or more.

At Harvard University, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which houses Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean art, has become a flashpoint. Protesters held a “die-in” last summer at the museum, where they lay on the floor surrounded by empty pill bottles. Nearly 15,000 people have signed a petition calling on Harvard to cut ties with the Sacklers.

A museum spokesman said in a statement that funds for the construction of the museum’s former building were donated in 1982 by Arthur Sackler, who died in 1987, before OxyContin was developed.

“Given these circumstances and legal and contractual considerations, Harvard does not have plans to remove Dr. Sackler’s name from the museum,” the statement said.

In an essay for ArtNet News, an artist who is a member of the Council for Feminist Art at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art argued that the branch of the Sackler family descended from Arthur should not be lumped in with those who developed and profited from OxyContin. According to a recent Esquire report, though, it was Arthur who pioneered the aggressive marketing tactics, albeit with different drugs, that were later deployed for OxyContin.

Donations Across the Country

The Massachusetts attorney general’s complaint said that in addition to the donations to Tufts, in 2010 Purdue Pharma gave $50,000 to Boston University for a “program on opioid prescribing for chronic pain” and $15,000 to Northeastern University for a program on pain management. A Boston University spokeswoman said the institution had received “a modest donation for a lecture series,” and “those funds have been expended.” A spokeswoman for Northeastern said that she could not find any record that the university had received a donation from the Sackler family or Purdue Pharma for research or study in the past 10 years.

A spokeswoman at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University’s medical school in New York City, did not return a request for comment on the university’s Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology in time for publication.

The California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Los Angeles received a joint gift from the Sackler Foundation to fund biomedical science research in 2012. Caltech said it had not received a gift from the Sacklers in the past five years, and a UCLA spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

At New York University, home to the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, students have held demonstrations and asked the university to commit to not accepting any more money from the family. Artforum reported in July that NYU had told a student activist that the university is “in negotiations with the Sacklers about the name of the program.” In a statement, a spokeswoman for the NYU School of Medicine said that the institution is “not accepting donations from the Sackler family or any Sackler-related entities.”

So far, no university has said it will give back Sackler donations or remove the Sackler name from its buildings or programs. Calls for institutions to do so haven’t reached the pitch of some other campus protests. But the legal pressures on the Sacklers, and therefore the news reports about the family’s history, show no signs of abating. And still, an average of 130 people per day are dying from opioid overdoses.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.