Harvard University has elected to keep the name of the deceased patriarch of the Sackler family on two of its campus buildings, despite years of protests and a new legal settlement that paves the way for institutions to remove the family name from buildings and programs.

A group of Harvard students and families of opioid victims this week renewed calls to remove the Sackler name from the buildings, in the wake of a multibillion-dollar plan approved by a federal bankruptcy judge that closes a long-running legal fight against the Sacklers and their company, Purdue Pharma, for their role in a decades-long opioid crisis that has claimed more than 900,000 lives.

The Sackler family, which built a massive fortune on the addictive painkiller OxyContin, agreed under the deal not to contest decisions by universities, museums, medical centers, and other institutions to remove their name. Under public pressure, at least 20 institutions around the globe — including the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, Tufts University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre Museum in Paris — have in recent years dropped the Sackler name from their walls and programs. Other institutions have canceled millions of dollars in donations.

“If ever there was a moment to remove the Sackler name, that moment is now,’’ said Nik Zappia, a Harvard student and president of a group called the Harvard College Overdose and Prevention and Education Students, or HCOPES, which has repeatedly called on the university to drop the name.

When asked for the school’s response to the legal settlement and students’ demand, a Harvard spokesman did not comment but referred to a university committee’s decision last year to retain the Sackler name on two buildings: the Arthur M. Sackler Building and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which are located across from each other near Harvard Square.

A 12-person committee that included Harvard president Alan Garber and other senior officials concluded that Arthur Sackler’s name should remain in part because he did not formally promote OxyContin, which was introduced nine years after his death in 1987.

“The committee believes that individuals should be judged by their own actions, inactions and words, not by the actions, inactions and words of others,’’ the committee wrote.

The years-long dispute highlights the reputational risks that universities and other institutions face in associating with wealthy donors with complicated pasts.

To many, the Sackler dynasty has become a potent symbol of corporate greed and indifference. A 2021 congressional committee investigating the family estimated it amassed a fortune of at least $11 billion from the sales of OxyContin, a powerful prescription painkiller Purdue Pharma introduced in 1996 and falsely marketed as less addictive than other opioids.

Some Harvard students and families of opioid victims have argued that, while Arthur Sackler didn’t live to see the devastation wrought by OxyContin, he pioneered aggressive marketing techniques Purdue Pharma later used to flood the country with painkillers.

Arthur Sackler was a psychiatrist and pharmaceutical marketing guru who played a key role in founding the family dynasty.

In 1942, Sackler helped pay his medical tuition by working at Williams Douglas McAdams, a medical advertising agency. He would later become the firm’s principal owner. At the time, direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs was restricted. Sackler targeted advertisements at physicians, sometimes sending “detail men’’ to doctors’ offices bearing gifts and free drug samples, according to the book “Empire of Pain’’ by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.

The McAdams advertising firm was also found to have used fictitious doctors’ testimonials in promoting an antibiotic drug, a scandal at the time.

In 1952, Arthur and his two younger brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, now both deceased, bought a small company called Purdue Frederick, the predecessor to Purdue Pharma.

It was Arthur Sackler’s techniques, many have argued, that laid the foundation for the aggressive sales tactics later deployed by Purdue Pharma and dramatized in such books and television miniseries as “Dopesick’’ and “Painkiller.’’ The company pushed sales of OxyContin starting in the late 1990s through large cash bonuses to its sales team and lavish, expenses-paid conferences for physicians and pharmacists. At a launch party for OxyContin, a member of the Sackler family boasted of “a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition."

Purdue also produced publications that downplayed the risks of addiction associated with OxyContin.

Students and families of overdose victims have cited Arthur Sackler’s record in their repeated efforts over the years to persuade Harvard’s leadership to drop the name. The senior Sacker was a leading collector and supporter of art, and in the early 1980s, donated $10.7 million for a museum at Harvard bearing his name. It was the largest single contribution ever made to the university’s art museums, according to a New York Times report at the time. The museum has since moved across the street, but its original building still bears his name.

The Harvard Art Museums, including the Sackler museum, are free to the public and home to a diverse and renowned collection that includes works by French impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as more modern luminaries like Jackson Pollock. Among the Sacklers’ contributions are more than 60,000 works of Asian and Mediterranean art spanning 7,000 years.

In 2022, the student group HCOPES submitted a formal proposal to remove the name, and students later staged a “die-in’’ at the Harvard Art Museums in protest and to demand the university make the overdose-reversal drug naloxone more available on campus. More than 300 students, faculty, and staff signed a petition supporting the de-naming effort.

“We would be lying to ourselves if [Arthur Sackler’s] methods were not used exactly for the purpose for which they were developed — to make a profit,’’ said Swathi Srinivasan, cofounder of HCOPES and a Harvard doctoral student in population health sciences. “And there is nothing more vile than targeting people who are vulnerable, who were looking for ways to manage their pain.’’

In their 2024 report on retaining Sackler’s name, Harvard committee members drew a distinction between Arthur Sackler and his brothers who founded the company in 1991. They noted the predecessor company to Purdue Pharma was not his primary focus and that his promotional techniques were not unique at the time in which he lived.

“Arthur Sackler may have been complicit in these scandals, but the evidence is not conclusive,’’ the committee wrote.

Harvard has a rigorous and lengthy process for considering de-naming requests, which makes it unlikely Sackler’s name will be removed anytime soon. Such requests are ordinarily not reconsidered for a period of five years after a review committee’s recommendation, according to the university’s guidelines.

Yet the opioid settlement approved this week eliminated any lingering legal barriers to removing the Sackler name. As part of the deal, the Sacklers agreed not to have their name put on institutions, and said they would not challenge requests by institutions to remove their family members’ names. These nonfinancial provisions were sought by states and victims’ advocates as part of the massive settlement, in which Purdue and the Sacklers agreed to pay $7.4 billion to victims and communities ravaged by the opioid crisis.

“Of course, the Sackler name represents so much more than just [Arthur]. The name represents everything that we’ve seen with the opioid crisis — all the harm and psychological trauma we’ve gone through as a result of opioid dependency,’’ said Ed Neiger, a New York-based lawyer for a committee of victims involved in the multiyear litigation.

Joanne Peterson, founder and executive director of Learn to Cope, a nationwide support network for those affected by substance use disorder, said the presence of Sackler’s name is “disrespectful and retraumatizing’’ for the thousands of people who have lost relatives to opioid overdoses. In Massachusetts, the overdose crisis has claimed more than 20,000 lives in the past decade.

“Anytime I hear that [Sackler] name, I think immediately of what they did and how they profited so much off harming Americans,“ said Peterson, whose 31-year-old niece died of an overdose after years struggling with opioid addiction. “It should be removed from every building in this country.’’

Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres.