Leon Levy—a well-known Wall Street investor who died in 2003—and his widow Shelby White started the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications at Harvard in 1997 to support research on terminated and unpublished field work from sites in Greece, Turkey, Cyrpus, Iran, and the Middle East.
The program has has awarded $6 million over the past decade.
But archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Cinncinnati say that because Levy and White’s own artifact collection was obtained through questionable means, academic institutions like Harvard should not take money from them.
Update: A comment on this article here: When archaeologists accept monies from the likes of Leon Levy and Shelby White, how are they not implicated in such unethical behavior? How would their association not be understood as condoning the destruction of the record of the past?