Colleges and universities have a significant role to play in investigating and reconciling the nation’s legacy of slavery, the presidents of Georgetown University and Harvard University said at the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday.
It is a fairly straightforward endeavor to point to a building named after a Confederate leader and request that the name be changed, but it is a far more complicated process to grapple with the murky roots of a university’s origins. As venerable institutions that date back decades and centuries prior to the Civil War, Harvard and Georgetown both existed in a period when slavery was commonplace. As a result, both have direct and indirect ties to the institution of slavery, as do many other of the nation’s oldest institutions of higher learning.
“Folks are having to at last reckon with the long effects of history,” said Ta Nehisi Coates, national correspondent at the Atlantic and author of Between the World and Me, who led the conversation with the two presidents. “I think there’s no problem reckoning with history when those things reflect well upon us, but now we’re being forced to reckon with those things that don’t necessarily reflect well on us.”
Coates led the conversation with the two presidents at the Washington Ideas Forum. In addition to their histories, Coates noted that universities “had a prime role in shaping the leadership class of this country,” during a time when the aftereffects of slavery such as Jim Crow and redlining were alive and well.
At its founding, Georgetown derived funding from the profits of plantations in Maryland run with slave labor. In 1838, when the university was facing mounting debts and the plantations were no longer turning a profit, 272 slaves were sold and dispersed to plantations in the Deep South, where some of their descendants still live to this day.
The university has been actively engaged in the study of its historic ties to slavery and the 1838 sale over the past several years, establishing two working groups to untangle its historic legacy and determine appropriate measures to take in reconciliation. Earlier in September, Georgetown announced that it would begin to give special consideration in the admissions process to descendants of the 272 slaves sold in 1838, among other measures.
Georgetown is a need-blind institution, so it has elected to not set aside scholarship funding for the descendants. John J. DeGioia, Georgetown president, said that the university will look at the applications of children of the descendants in the same way that it would regard those who have an enduring relationship with the university, such as the children of faculty, staff, and alumni.
