That terrible Harvard Law School crest.

See the problem? Last November, I blogged about the controversy in a post titled "Looking for something to be offended by? Check out Harvard Law School's logo."

And now the law school's dean, Martha Minow, is writing to alumni to tell them about the committee she formed and the recommendation it reached — to drop the crest (she calls it a "shield") — and about her support of that recommendation and her forwarding of the recommendation to the Harvard Corporation. Alumni see her letter to the corporation, which is printed out over at Above the Law, where Elie Mystal strongly supports the crushing of the old crest. He says:

Sure, the shadowy “Corporation” could always overrrule Dean Minow. But the only way to turn this from a campus controversy to national news would be for a secretive collection of impossibly rich white people to overrule the students and the dean of a law school in support of a racist insignia. I expect the Corporation will go along with Minow’s recommendation.

The links within the Minow letter don't appear at ATL, so the reference to a "thoughtful separate opinion with a different view" goes nowhere. But I have it: here. The author is Annette Gordon-Reed (the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History). Excerpt:

[F]rom the moment I learned, some years ago, about the wheat sheaves’ connection to the Royall Plantation and the plantation’s connection to the Law School, the burning question for me has been, “What would be the best and easiest way to keep alive the memory of the people whose labor gave Isaac Royall the resources to purchase the land whose sale helped found Harvard Law School?”....

Maintaining the current shield, and tying it to a historically sound interpretive narrative about it, would be the most honest and forthright way to insure that the true story of our origins, and connection to the people whom we should see as our progenitors (the enslaved people at Royall’s plantations, not Isaac Royall), is not lost....

But isn't it like flying the Confederate flag?

For nearly its entire existence, the shield has sent no singular public message or had any function besides announcing the “arrival” of the Harvard Law School, generally viewed positively as one of the premier educational institutions in the world. Therefore, the shield is not, as I have heard it said in formal conversations about this issue and in informal ones, in any way akin to the Confederate flag....

The Confederate Flag came into existence as part of a clear and unambiguous project: it was a battle standard.... By this point in our history, these associations are too strong to totally divest that flag of its original meaning....  As lawyers, we are trained to distinguish situations—to notice how this particular thing is not like that other particular thing—and to find the reasoning about them that should flow from those differences. We can apply that here.....

I understand that getting rid of the shield altogether may seem less confrontational and the more conservative option. But this is a moment for daring and creativity. We are in the midst of an explosion of interest in and scholarship about slavery in New England. As an educational institution, HLS should be among the leaders of the effort to explicate this history....

Thanks to historians, we have “new knowledge” that we are joined in history to a group of people entrapped in the tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade. This also joins us to the larger American story of slavery. We should take this knowledge and run with it, not away from it. I end where I began: the larger purpose outside of our own personal feelings is to marry the memory of the injustice done to the people enslaved on the Royall plantation to Harvard Law School’s modern commitment to justice and equality through a well-known symbol that connects both.

ADDED: ATL also didn't provide Minow's letter to the Corporation or the committee's recommendation Minow. The Washington Post reprints the committee's recommendation, here.

Someone forwarded the Minow letter to the Corporation. Excerpt:

Each year since I became dean, I welcome entering JD students to campus with discussion of the portrait of Isaac Royall, Jr., whose gift of land helped support the first professorship of law at Harvard. I observe that the money came from the work of individuals enslaved on his family's plantation in Antigua, and that while Harvard University at that time acted legally in accepting the gift, it is crucial that we never confine ourselves to solely what is currently lawful, for the great evil of slavery happened within the confines of the law. That is why HLS does not simply teach what the law is, but engages in critiques of the law, constant reminders to test what we do in service to our aspirations for virtue and justice.

Whatever was known in the past, powerful and challenging questions now arise about the Harvard Law School shield. Designed in 1936 as part of the University’s tercentenary, it contains a design based on a bookplate used by Isaac Royall, Sr., who passed his wealth—including enslaved persons—to his son, the initial donor to the school. What role should history play in defining who we are?...

As for the shield itself, I endorse the committee’s recommendation to retire it. There are complex issues involved in preserving the histories of places and institutions with ties to past injustices, but several elements make retiring the shield less controverted than some other issues about names, symbols, and the past. First, the shield is a symbol whose primary purpose is to identify and express who we mean to be. Second, it is not an anchoring part of our history: it was created in 1936 for a University celebration, used occasionally for decades and used more commonly only recently, and does not extend back to the origin of the School or even much beyond recent memory. Third, there is no donor whose intent would be undermined; the shield itself involves no resources entrusted in our care....