My Lab Displayed A Message of Solidarity on Our Windows. Harvard Took It Down.

On Friday night, Harvard’s administration removed the 50-foot-wide Black Lives Matter sign that, for the past five years, has greeted anyone passing by the Northwest Science Building. The move was not routine campus upkeep; it was an institution retreating from its core principles.

In the summer of 2020, amid a deadly pandemic and a divisive presidential campaign, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white policeman. Captured on camera, the killing forced an emotionally exhausted nation to confront America’s original sin in its rawest form. It was in this charged atmosphere that my lab — with professor Mansi Srivastava’s support — affirmed our commitment to human dignity and racial justice by pasting 16 bright yellow letters on our office windows spelling “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

America was founded on the premise that “all men are created equal.” Yet nearly 250 years later, we are nowhere close to living that truth. The letters in our windows were a daily reminder of that — and perhaps they nudged others to reflect as well. To students from marginalized backgrounds, the sign may have offered a sense of comfort and belonging; to Black students in particular, it might have conveyed that they were seen and valued.

A year after the sign went up, tensions had eased. With Joe Biden in office, DEI flourished on campus, and, for the first time, I contemplated taking the sign down. We were still far from where we needed to be, but the sign no longer added much to the conversation and risked becoming just another performative gesture.

Then came Oct. 7 and Trump 2.0. And everything changed. The very forces that had compelled us to put up the sign roared back in new forms.

After Hamas’ horrific massacre on Oct. 7 and Israel’s devastating response in Gaza, campus protests erupted. Donors, politicians, and even some prominent faculty denounced pro-Palestinian demonstrators — many of them Jewish — as antisemitic. Following mounting pressure, Harvard’s first Black president resigned, and the administration responded by tightening limits on protest and political speech. Suddenly, our sign took on added significance — a symbol of free speech under threat.

Today, we see the stark reality student protesters tried to forestall with their now-forbidden banners and chants: the people of Gaza are starving, their homes and infrastructure in ruins, countless killed or maimed. Less encumbered by cynicism and vested interests, students see the world with a moral clarity and urgency that institutions lack. That’s why we must listen to their voices, not silence them.

Don’t we want to encourage honest discussions of controversial issues and compel our students to express their conscience, even if that means hard conversations, heated arguments, and, yes, some pain? To tell them instead that they have no business engaging with contentious topics would be to abdicate our responsibility as educators and mentors.

That responsibility — to safeguard free and respectful expression — became even more urgent after Trump was re-elected. Emboldened, he turned his sights on universities, wielding every lever of government to make academia prostrate before his twisted vision of America. Our sign — antithetical to that vision — now became both a symbolic target of an aspiring autocrat and an emblem of resistance.

Not everyone on campus shared in our defiance, and after five years of standing unchallenged, the sign gained detractors. Just weeks after Trump’s election, a senior faculty member politely asked me to take down the sign. A few months later, a University curator contacted me to discuss its preservation, seemingly acting in response to a higher-level effort to remove it. I told them both that if ever there was a time to display the message, it was now. The administration seemed unmoved. Earlier this week, I received a blunt, legalistic letter invoking a strained interpretation of vaguely written campus use rules, themselves a response to pro-Palestinian protests, to decree the sign’s removal. Once a symbol of free speech and a welcoming campus, the sign is no more, erased in the dead of night.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Across the University, efforts to build diverse and inclusive communities are being scrutinized, sanitized, replaced, or removed — good-faith measures sacrificed to placate bad-faith actors. If we continue down this path, we risk not only Harvard’s future as an institution of free inquiry and expression but also its integrity and trustworthiness.

Will Harvard remain a place where important issues can be debated respectfully and constructively, without political interference? Are we prepared to stand on principle and honor our commitments to inclusive excellence? Or will we strike a Faustian bargain — selling our souls to regain research funding and political favor?

The stakes go well beyond the University. As a world-renowned academic institution, others look to us for leadership and guidance. We provide this by defending our stated values with courage and resolve, not through political calculation and cynical maneuvering. As someone whose own research grants were recently terminated, I understand the urgency of restoring operational stability. But this must not come at the expense of our principles — sacrificing them would invite grave consequences for both Harvard and the nation.

The sign in my office window may be gone, but the choice to honor what it symbolized is still ours to make. Let’s do the right thing.

Bence P. Ölveczky is a professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.