Reckoning With History

Illustration by Martín Elfman for The Chronicle

Many older American colleges take great pride in their history, preserving venerable buildings, displaying early library books and gilt-framed portraits of long-ago presidents, and including the ornate meeting rooms of 19th-century debating societies on admissions tours. But increasingly colleges also find themselves facing difficult questions about the past, sometimes from angry students demanding immediate responses. And answering has sometimes proven to be a challenge.

In the past, questions have concerned such issues as admissions limits for Jews, discrimination against gay students and faculty and staff members, and whether administrators stood up for academic freedom during the McCarthy era. Lately the hottest topic is colleges’ links to slavery — a particularly difficult issue, but one for which Brown University’s high-profile Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, created back in 2003, offers a model response. The committee was appointed by Ruth J. Simmons, then Brown’s president. She charged it both to “examine the university’s historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade” and to reflect on “the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present day confrontation with past injustice.” The committee’s final report, released in 2006, runs just over 100 pages and is as eloquent as it is thorough.

Its intellectual heirs aren’t hard to find, especially now that Black Lives Matter activists have put the issue front and center. Already this year Yale University has dropped John C. Calhoun’s name from a residential college because Calhoun, a member of the Class of 1804 who served as U.S. vice president from 1825 to 1832, was a slavery proponent. Columbia University has created a website noting not only that its early presidents owned slaves but also that its first donors included many whose wealth “derived either from slave trading or from commerce in goods produced by slaves.” The University of Virginia is considering where to put a memorial to enslaved laborers — some owned by the university and others hired from nearby residents — who terraced its famous Lawn and built buildings designed by one of the republic’s most prominent slaveholders, Thomas Jefferson.

Even some institutions you might not expect to have had any involvement with slavery are caught up in controversies related to it: The University of Oregon’s president, Michael H. Schill, said in January that he would not recommend removing Matthew P. Deady’s name from a campus building, even though Deady “ran as a pro-slavery delegate to the Oregon Constitutional Convention in 1857" and at the convention “actively promoted the exclusion of free blacks and Chinese from Oregon,” according to a 2016 report by a university committee.

The report also says that Deady, who became a federal judge and president of the university’s Board of Regents, later “wholeheartedly supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution” and wrote decisions that shielded innocent and vulnerable Chinese immigrants from mob violence. Mr. Schill said he would instead propose creating a display in the building to describe Deady’s views. “In some ways, I think that’s more powerful than obliterating the name of Deady,” he told The Oregonian. “Then people won’t know anything.”

Perhaps no institution is more entangled with its slaveholding past right now than Georgetown University. In 2015, after black students staged a sit-in at the president’s office, Georgetown stripped two campus buildings of the names of the presidents responsible for the 1838 sale of 272 slaves from Jesuit plantations in Maryland to pay off the institution’s debts. But no one anticipated what happened when a white alumnus, Richard J. Cellini, started to wonder what had become of the slaves.

Mr. Cellini didn’t buy the university’s traditional answer — that all 272 had perished without a trace soon after being sold to two sugar-plantation owners in Louisiana — and began working with genealogists to find their descendants. Hundreds of them still live in and around Maringouin, La., where the Georgetown Memory Project, an independent organization created by Mr. Cellini, is seeking them out and hopes to “acknowledge them as members of the Georgetown family.” Last summer, Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia, visited Maringouin, and subsequently the university announced that it would offer descendants of the slaves the same admissions preferences given to children of alumni.

At Brown, the committee had discovered that the university’s links to slavery were just as strong, if not as easy to track into the present. Despite living in Rhode Island, members of the Brown family owned slaves, and at least 30 members of the Brown Corporation either owned slave ships or served as captains on them. Indeed, says the report, slavery “permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island, the Americas, and indeed the Atlantic World,” and there is “no question that many of the assets that underwrote the university’s creation and growth derived, directly and indirectly, from slavery and the slave trade.”

Among other actions, the report suggested that Brown expand opportunities “for those disadvantaged by the legacies of slavery and the slave trade,” create a memorial acknowledging the role the slave trade played in the university’s history, and create a center for continuing research on slavery and justice. Several years later, an update reported that some of the recommendations had been carried out successfully, but not all.

Still, the report’s conclusion seems as relevant as ever: “If this nation is ever to have a serious dialogue about slavery, Jim Crow, and the bitter legacies they have bequeathed to us, then universities must provide the leadership. For all their manifold flaws and failings, universities possess unique concentrations of knowledge and skills,” the report concludes. “The fact that so many of our nation’s elite institutions have histories that are entangled with the history of slavery only enhances the opportunity and the obligation.”

Correction (2/27/2017, 11 a.m.): The date of Brown University’s report on its ties to slavery was referred to incorrectly in this article. The report was released in 2006, not 2007; the article has been updated to reflect that.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.