In 2018, a teaching hospital at Harvard took down 30 portraits of distinguished doctors and researchers affiliated with the hospital. The portraits reinforced a perception that “white men are in charge”, a professor of medicine told the Boston Globe, and were relegated to less prominent areas of the hospital. Some students and faculty welcomed the decision, or were indifferent.
Others were disconcerted. They saw the portraits’ removal as the impulsive reflex of a university whose political atmosphere, already liberal-leaning, seemed to continually lurch further left.
