Scientific and medical departments at the Massachusetts school were named after family as Tufts acknowledged it accepted gifts

Tufts University has announced it is removing the name of a longtime, major donor from its departments – that of the Sackler family which owns Purdue Pharma, maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin blamed for fueling the US opioids crisis.

The prestigious college on the outskirts of Boston has been a beneficiary of largesse from the billionaire members of the pharmaceutical family whose reputation is at stake amid an avalanche of lawsuits over their role in aggressively pushing sales of OxyContin.

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Several scientific and medical departments at Tufts have long been named after the Sacklers and the university acknowledged that it had received and solicited gifts from the family over the years.

In a statement, Tufts said on Thursday: “Our students, faculty, staff, alumni and others have shared with us the negative impact the Sackler name has on them each day, noting the human toll of the opioid epidemic in which members of the Sackler family and their company, Purdue Pharma, are associated.”

In 2013 Tufts’ president, Anthony Monaco, personally traveled to the headquarters of Purdue Pharma in Connecticut to bestow an honorary doctorate on Raymond Sackler, one of the co-founders of Purdue who died in 2017 at 97.

The decision to remove the name is highly significant. Leading billionaire members of the Sackler family have given millions to elite colleges and arts institutions in the US and UK.

Amid court cases and high-profile protests, some said in the last year that they are no longer taking donations from the family, such as Columbia University, the University of Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in the US and the Tate art group and the Serpentine gallery in the UK.

But most have not taken down the name – with the notable exception of the Louvre in France, and now Tufts. Others, such as Yale University in Connecticut and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, have resisted calls to shun Sackler philanthropy, and the V&A was the latest place to suffer a high-profile protest led by the US artist Nan Goldin.

Eight members of the Sackler family have been individually named in hundreds of lawsuits brought by US states, counties and cities seeking accountability and damages for the ravages of overdose deaths and opioid addiction blighting communities coast to coast.

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A group of Sackler family members that own Purdue Pharma are estimated to be worth collectively at least $13bn, generated largely by profits from its opioids business. The family, usually via public relations or legal representatives, has repeatedly and vehemently denied all the allegations in the lawsuits.

A statement issued on behalf of the Raymond and Mortimer branches of the family, which include widows and descendants of the late brothers, on Thursday afternoon called the decision to remove the Sackler name by Tufts “extraordinary” and “disturbing” and hinted at possible legal action in response.

Nan Goldin called Tufts’ decision “commendable”. She said students graduating from colleges with departments named after the Sacklers were suffering as a result of having the family name on their résumés.

After battling an opioid addiction herself, the US art photographer launched a campaign to persuade institutional beneficiaries of Sackler donations to shun the money and remove the name.

She said that Tufts’ past relationship with the Sacklers was “questionable and did harm” and referred to the university’s having allowed a Purdue executive, David Haddox, who was on record saying OxyContin was not addictive, to lecture in its pain research program.

Goldin added, however, speaking on behalf of her campaign group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (Pain): “We commend Tufts wholeheartedly for making this decision … We hope that other institutions are watching and will follow their brave lead.”

Tufts announced on Thursday that it will remove the Sackler name from the university entities carrying it: the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences; the Arthur M Sackler Center for Medical Education; the Sackler Laboratory for the Convergence of Biomedical, Physical and Engineering Sciences; the Sackler Families Fund for Collaborative Cancer Biology Research; and the Richard S Sackler, MD Endowed Research Fund.

The name does not appear on the university’s other campuses, it noted. They are all being retitled using the Tufts name instead.

The university pointed out that Arthur Sackler, one of the three Sackler brothers, alongside Raymond and Mortimer, who originally developed the firm, died in 1987, almost a decade before Purdue Pharma labeled and launched OxyContin, “a drug intended to ease severe pain that is now at the center of the nation’s opioid crisis”. But it nevertheless is erasing the family name from its department titles, while planning an educational exhibit inside the medical school “to describe the Sackler family’s involvement with Tufts and to educate the community about lessons we all must learn from the opioid epidemic”.

In February 2019, Tufts commissioned a review of its relationship with the family, conducted by a Donald Stern, former US attorney for Massachusetts, and Sandy Remz, a lawyer from the Boston firm Yurko, Salvesen & Remz, and made that review public on Thursday.

The review team asserted that there was no wrongdoing by the university. The report noted: “There was some evidence suggesting the appearance of influence in that Tufts officials at times may have provided favored treatment to the Sacklers and Purdue or acted to avoid controversy related to them. However, they did not find there was evidence of any material impact on instruction or research.”

A statement on behalf of Daniel S Connolly, described as an attorney for members of the Sackler family, read in part: “Purdue and the Sackler family conducted themselves properly and no wrongdoing or threat to academic integrity was found … There is something particularly disturbing and intellectually dishonest when juxtaposing the results of the Stern investigation with the decision to remove the name of a donor who made gifts in good faith starting almost 40 years ago.”

And in a hint about future plans, the statement concluded: “We will be seeking to have this improper decision reversed and are currently reviewing all options available to us.”

A separate statement was issued by a representative for Jillian Sackler, the widow of Arthur Sackler.

“Arthur had nothing to do with OxyContin. The man has been dead for 32 years. He did not profit from OxyContin, and none of his philanthropic gifts were in any way connected to opioids or to deceptive medical marketing – which he likewise had nothing to do with.

“It deeply saddens me to witness Arthur being blamed for actions taken by his brothers and other OxySacklers,” the statement said, using a term to refer to the Raymond and Mortimer branches of the family that wholly own Purdue Pharma.