Harvard removes BLM sign, cites public signage rules instead of new DEI rollbacks

For the past 10 years, the Ölveczky Lab at Harvard University has displayed a 50 ft. Black Lives Matter flag in its windows—but on Aug. 22nd, the sign was taken down as the university acted on public signage rules that had been in place for over a year.

Bence Ölveczky, the lab’s principal investigator, argued that he saw the sign as a direct resistance against the second Trump administration. He describes Trump as “wielding every lever of government to make academia prostrate before his twisted vision of America.” The BLM sign, Ölveczky says, is “antithetical” to Trump and his vision. 

[RELATED: Harvard ends long-running minority recruitment program following federal DEI crackdown]

Dean of Science Jeffrey W. Lichtman handed Ölveczky a letter addressed to him and Srivastava, saying that the message would be removed because it violated Harvard’s campus use rules, which were introduced in Aug. 2024 in response to the pro-Palestine protests. 

“We need more clarity on why they believe that our sign is violating the policies because the letter did not provide that clarity,” Mani Srivastava, another member of the Ölveczky lab, told The Crimson. Srivastava also spoke about how Harvard’s sudden call to remove the sign, a year after the rules took effect, is suspicious. 

Benjamin L. De Bivort, a co-chair of the department the lab is in, said that only a “naive” person would refrain from connecting the removal of the message to the Trump administration’s enforcement of Title VI policies on campus. De Bivort also said that he was worried about the state of “political speech” and its freedoms on campus. 

Pablo Manzo, a member of the Harvard Republican Club, spoke with Campus Reform about his reactions to the sign’s removal, which he’d seen in person many times on campus. 

“Harvard and other elite colleges have promoted a rhetoric of disrespect for institutions that uphold law and order, which are the preconditions for any so-called commitment to free-expression which the curator seems to praise,” Manzo told Campus Reform.

Manzo believes the BLM movement to be the cause of an “unjustified distrust for community authorities” and urges Harvard to make a “vocal attempt” to correct the wrongs that this kind of anti-police rhetoric has done to the social fabric of this country. 

Campus Reform has previously reported on the relationship between the George Floyd protests and the ‘Defund the Police’ movement. Dr. Timothy Furnish wrote about how after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, “Defund the Police” moved from the fringe into mainstream Democratic politics. By that summer, at least 13 U.S. cities had cut police budgets, and crime surged in their wake.

[RELATED: ‘Defund the Police’ movement still alive and well on America’s college campuses]

Campus Reform has highlighted how quietly Harvard has restructured and rolled back DEI policies. In July, the Graduate School of Education closed its DEI office. Kirk Carapezza of BDG said “behind the scenes, I’m told Harvard is calling this a shift to a more ‘distributed model for DEI’ — basically, a redistribution of resources.” 

Campus Reform has also covered how Harvard has begun to rebrand their DEI language. The university said it will consolidate several cultural and identity-based offices into the “Office of Culture and Community.” 

As the university reshapes its DEI framework, it is grappling with how to preserve the BLM sign.

Brenda D. Tindal, curator for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, called the BLM sign’s letters “an important piece of Harvard cultural ephemera” and said she hopes to preserve them in the university archives. Materials in these university archives include Ralph Waldo Emerson’s student notebooks from the 1820s and the remnants of John Harvard’s personal library.

Campus Reform has reached out to Harvard University, Bence Ölveczky, and Mansi Srivastava for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.