The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Gather Your Philosophers

Sometimes an ethical question facing colleges is so compelling, so engagingly tangled, that one envies those appointed to the inevitable committee charged with finding a Solomonic solution. That’s certainly the case with a question that cropped up again last week, thanks to a New York Times article: How, if at all, could Georgetown University make amends for not only having owned slaves, who worked on its plantations in Maryland, but also having sold 272 of them in 1838 to pay the Jesuit college’s debts and keep it open?

By the Times’s reckoning, the sale netted an amount equal to $3.3 million today — a pittance by the standards of a university with an endowment worth $1.5 billion, but in 1838 it was a much smaller institution. A university historian who is part of its Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation told the newspaper that Georgetown “owes its existence” to the sale.

After students brought the matter to the fore with a protest in November, President John J. DeGioia accepted the working group’s recommendation to remove from campus buildings the names of two university presidents who organized the slave sale. Meanwhile an alumnus set up the Georgetown Memory Project to track the descendants of the slaves who were sold and “acknowledge them as members of the Georgetown University family.”

The Georgetown slaves ended up on three Louisiana plantations, but recordkeeping was poor and genealogists have had difficulty tracing families from one generation to the next. Nonetheless, the university is asking itself what is the right thing to do about a history few people knew of until recently.

Georgetown is by no means the only university with slaves in its past. The College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and Washington and Lee University, among others, have histories replete with enslaved African-Americans. Other institutions, notably Brown University, were enriched by fortunes built on human trafficking.

Should those institutions apologize? Pay reparations? Offer scholarships to the descendants of those enslaved? On the one hand, today’s students benefit directly from wealth generated by the work of those slaves and by the trade in human beings, so the question isn’t moot. On the other hand, should colleges feel responsible today for the actions of their institutional forebears — actions that were entirely legal and widely practiced at the time, though not universally approved? Similarly, do colleges and other philanthropic organizations that benefit today from the great fortunes of 19th-century robber barons bear some responsibility for unsavory business practices by which many of those fortunes were made?

Where does our responsibility for the misdeeds of ancestors and predecessors begin, and where does it end? These are hard questions, and fascinating.

Bathroom Break

Last week a federal appeals court agreed with the Education Department that federal rules against sex discrimination protect a transgender student seeking to use men’s bathrooms even though he was born female. The student, Gavin Grimm (left), is a junior in a Virginia high school, but the case attracted attention in higher education because North Carolina recently enacted a controversial law requiring, among other things, that the state’s public colleges force students to use restrooms for the genders listed on their birth certificates. Mississippi has enacted a similar law, and like measures are being considered in other states.

The federal judge who first heard Mr. Grimm’s case sided with the Gloucester County School Board, which had approved a rule limiting students to facilities intended for their “biological gender.” The appeals court disagreed.

“At the heart of this appeal is whether Title IX requires schools to provide transgender students access to restrooms congruent with their gender identity,” the appeals-court ruling said. The judges said that the Education Department’s interpretation of Title IX requirements has “controlling weight in this case.”

Honor Code Questions

Meanwhile a Brigham Young University student has rallied supporters and filed a high-profile Title IX complaint against the university because it allegedly used information gained in the course of investigating her rape allegation to charge her with violating its Honor Code. Included in the code are prohibitions on drinking, using drugs, and sexual activity outside of marriage.

The student, Madi Barney, filed assault charges against a man she had invited to her apartment. The man was not a BYU student, but a sheriff’s deputy gave university officials information about the allegations, which in turn prompted them to bring an Honor Code case against her that they have refused to delay, despite a request from the local prosecutor. An online petition that Ms. Barney created calls on the university to establish “a way for victims to come forward without being reported to the Honor Code Office.” By late last week it had attracted nearly 100,000 signatures.

Last week the university also released a video in which its president, Kevin J. Worthen, says BYU recognizes that there is “tension” between the university’s Title IX process and the Honor Code, and that the university wants to “minimize that as much as possible.”

In Colorado, a different sort of Title IX case is raising questions about whether Education Department rules pressure universities to side with alleged victims of sexual assault. Grant Neal, a football player and wrestler at Colorado State University at Pueblo, sued the institution and the Education Department last week, saying he had been suspended for sexual misconduct that was actually a consensual encounter. According to the lawsuit, a third person reported a suspected assault, and the university proceeded to discipline Mr. Neal even after the supposed victim told the university that she hadn’t been assaulted. The university cited confidentiality rules in saying it could not comment on the case.

And There’s More

Four professors are suing the American Studies Association, saying that its boycott of Israeli universities is outside of its mission. … Al Gray stepped down last week after seven years as president of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which has been criticized for lax oversight of such for-profit institutions as Corinthian Colleges. … A longtime English professor at San Jose State University, Martha Heasley Cox (right), gave the institution a $4.8-million bequest to support its Center for Steinbeck Studies, which she founded.

400 Years, Going Strong

A few days before the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death last week, I spotted a car on Interstate 81 with the license plate “got bard.” I wasn’t far from Staunton, Va., home of the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse, so a Shakespeare-themed license plate wasn’t a surprise. Still, it brought to mind the playwright’s enduring popularity. The only other Elizabethans who can be said to have any effect on day-to-day life four centuries later are the scholars who translated the King James Bible, but you don’t see license plates celebrating them.

As it happened, I had been to a first-rate production of Othello a few weeks before — a production with a Pakistani-American actor, Faran Tahir, in the title role, which gave the play a particularly contemporary resonance. Shakespeare’s plays are regularly celebrated for the genius of their language — my favorite line, maybe, is one of Hamlet’s: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” But in the end it’s the lasting and universal appeal of their plots and characters and the ease with which inventive directors can add new layers of meaning through costumes or sets or casting, that keep the plays so gloriously alive — so infinite, really, though they be bounded within the nutshell of a stage.