Christopher Newman remembers seeing campus police officers as he walked into a human resources office at Harvard University, but he didn’t imagine that they were there for him.
It was July 2024, and Newman had just turned in the results of a two-month-long internship with the Harvard University Archives: an annotated bibliography for the landmark 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative report, which detailed the university’s ties to slavery across three centuries. He completed his project on Friday, 26 July, and on Monday, he said he received an email that HR wanted to meet with him.
After that meeting, the officers escorted Newman out of the building, told him he was banned from campus and denied his request to collect his belongings from his office, he told the Guardian. He said he was told that a flight back home was booked for that afternoon. “I was asking too many questions,” Newman said, “veering off of the proverbial beaten path.”
