It was one of the most striking images of 2019: A worker, standing on a ladder with a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, chipping off the letters in the name “Sackler” from the
entrance to a building at the Tufts University medical campus in Boston. It was a stunning repudiation of a family once celebrated worldwide for its generous giving to institutions from the Met in New York to the Louvre in Paris to Tel Aviv University in Israel.It didn’t happen by accident.