Slavery Isn’t the Only Historical Blemish That Colleges Have Had to Confront

National Archives at Fort Worth

Questions about universities’ ties to slavery are only the latest example of how they have confronted troubling incidents from their pasts. The slavery discussions follow inquiries into other difficult topics, among them whether colleges discriminated against Jews and gay men and whether administrators and trustees stood up for academic freedom in the early years of the Cold War.

• Several Ivy League universities enforced a variety of quotas limiting the number of Jewish students; in Yale University’s case those quotas were said to have lasted into the 1960s. When the proportion of Harvard University students who were Jewish rose above 20 percent in the early 1920s, the president, A. Lawrence Lowell, sought to cap Jewish undergraduates at 15 percent. He is said to have worried not that Jewish applicants wouldn’t make good Harvard students, but that they would drive away the university’s traditional Protestant applicants and supporters.

• Questions about discrimination against gay students and faculty and staff members have arisen less often, but a fascinating 2002 article in The Harvard Crimson brought to light a secret five-member “court” that expelled students for homosexual behavior in 1920. The group was convened after the brother of a gay student who had committed suicide brought the university the names of other gay students, some of which the brother had gathered after beating an older Boston man who had been the dead student’s lover. Other names were taken from letters from two other Harvard students, Ernest Weeks Roberts and Harold W. Saxton, that arrived after the suicide.

The court concluded that 14 men, including seven undergraduates, were guilty as accused. The students were ordered to leave Cambridge, and notes were put in their files in the university’s Alumni Placement Service: “Before making any statement that would indicate confidence in the following men, please consult some one in the Dean’s office. If they do not know what is meant, tell them to look in the disciplinary file in an envelope marked ‘Roberts, E.W. and others.’” After the Crimson article was published, Lawrence H. Summers, then Harvard’s president, issued a statement saying Harvard deeply regretted “the way this situation was handled, as well as the anguish the students and their families must have experienced eight decades ago.”

• How colleges responded to anti-Communist crusaders in the late 1940s and early 1950s has been repeatedly investigated. In 1999, for instance, the University of California at Berkeley held a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of a loyalty oath imposed by the Legislature in 1950. Some 31 faculty members had been dismissed by the university system for refusing to sign the oath, but they sued the university and were rehired.

This year, however, ties to slavery seem likely to remain the hot-button topic. Among other events, a consortium of Universities Studying Slavery that got its start in Virginia in 2015 has scheduled a meeting at Georgetown University in March. And Princeton University was planning to look at its links to slavery with a fall symposium and a series of short plays.

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