Academic

Colleges and Slavery Investigations

By propertyprof

One year ago the University of Virginia's board of visitors apologized for that university's connections to slavery.  And in the past year, self-investigations at the University of Maryland and William and Mary have begun.  After Brown University's Slavery and Justice Committee released its report back in 2006, I thought that other schools might follow Brown University's lead in talking about their connections to slavery.  I thought that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, as well as a bunch of southern schools, like UVA, W&M, Randolph Macon College, Ole Miss, and UGA, might take up investigations.  Only part of my prediction has come true.

As Brittany M. Llewellyn and Alexandra Perloff-Giles report in today's Harvard Crimson,
Harvard's not going to be following them right now--a position I completely understand.  As I said about William and Mary's deliberations, the decision of what--if anything--to do is best left to a school's current students, faculty, and administration.  If Harvard students and faculty think this is something that should be pursued, they should pursue it, through their research and advocacy.   The rest of us who don't have to live with these difficult decisions shouldn't put the onus on Harvard's administration.  And certainly the current students and faculty (and even alums to the extent that they care) shouldn't expect the administration to carry the burden, either.  (The Crimson article draws an important distinction between Drew Faust's role as one of our country's leading historians and her role as president.)

One thing that I think a self-investigation would remind us is the school's connections to anti-slavery as well as proslavery thought.   Harvard, like Brown, was a major training ground for anti-slavery thinkers.   Brown's president during much of the antebellum period, Francis Wayland, was a leading antislavery advocate.  And Harvard--well, in Alabama I'm not so sure we think that Harvard was a hot-bed of proslavery thought.  Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker ... all Harvard alums.  (Of course, Joseph Story, Lemuel Shaw, Timothy Walker ... all Harvard alums, too.)

The illustration is of Harvard Hall, where Edward Everett lectured and set loose the seeds of Transcendentalism, in which Emerson and Thoreau and so many others found their antislavery ideas.

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 25, 2008 (boomark / email).