What Universities Owe

On​ Yale’s 300th anniversary in 2001, three graduate students at the university issued a report titled Yale, Slavery and Abolition. It was published by the Amistad Committee, a small organisation in New Haven that seeks to preserve African American history in Connecticut; it is named after the maritime slave revolt of 1839. The report drew attention to the university’s ties to enslavement at a time when its leaders preferred to stress its anti-slavery tradition. The students pointed out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the profits of the slave trade and forced labour, and to consider reparations to those whose ancestors suffered under slavery’, drawing inspiration from the movement for reparations that had been gaining influence in the wider culture for decades.

Not long afterwards, Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, announced that her university would begin to reckon with its historical entanglement with slavery. That initiative inspired administrators at other institutions. In 2004 the University of Alabama issued a formal apology for its forebears’ role in perpetuating and promoting slavery. Emory University began a ‘process of discovery and dialogue’ about its history. William and Mary, the second-oldest college in the US, began a similar project in 2009, and in 2013 the University of Virginia appointed a Commission on Slavery and the University; it also became host to the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, which soon included more than a hundred institutions. Also in 2013, Craig Steven Wilder published Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, the first major scholarly history of the relationship between slavery and higher education. Like the reports emerging from many universities, Ebony and Ivy showed the extent to which higher education had depended on the wealth generated by enslaved labour. Wilder also examined the shifting attitudes towards slavery among students, faculty, administrators, alumni and donors.

Some universities now considered the ways in which they might repair the harm caused by their connections to slavery and their history of promoting racial inequality. In 2016 researchers at Georgetown University identified some direct descendants of the 272 men, women and children that its Jesuit leaders had sold in the 1830s. The university set up a Reconciliation Fund to benefit the descendants of people enslaved on Jesuit plantations in Maryland. In 2017 the Princeton and Slavery Project hosted an international symposium; two years later, Princeton Theological Seminary pledged to spend $27 million on scholarships and other initiatives to redress its ties to slavery. The trend wasn’t confined to the US. In 2019 Glasgow University agreed to raise and spend £20 million on reparations after its researchers uncovered that the university had received millions in donations from benefactors invested in the slave trade and slavery in the Americas. In partnership with the University of the West Indies, it undertook to sponsor further research and promote public awareness of the legacies of slavery. In 2022 Harvard University announced that it would allocate $100 million to similar efforts as part of its Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.

Each of these projects wrestled with the difficult question of who should be recompensed. Was it the direct descendants of those enslaved by a university’s officials and supporters? What did universities owe to the wider community? Given that enslaved people were considered property – made fungible by cash exchanges, bonds and insurance contracts – and that widely shared racist ideas supported their exploitation, weren’t all Black people owed something for the dispossession that accumulated over generations, like a distorted mirror image of compound interest? Or was the university’s primary function only to pursue knowledge about the history that gave rise to these questions, deferring remuneration to a later date or another authority?

Although scholars at Yale had long been at the centre of research on the history of slavery, the university didn’t formally commit to publishing its own study until October 2020, following the demonstrations inspired by the murder of George Floyd. David W. Blight, director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, was chosen to lead the Yale and Slavery Research Project. The result is Yale and Slavery, an analytical narrative that considers institutional accountability (or, at least, accounting) in the context of a world marked by systemic violence and inequality. Blight makes clear that the relationship between institutions and enslavement was never merely a matter of taking a moral stance. Officials have been just as likely to equivocate or do the bidding of their benefactors when institutional interests seemed to dictate it.

The uprisings and protests that culminated in 2020 sharpened awareness of persistent racial inequalities. Symbols of the colonial and slaveholding past were the focus of demonstrations that criss-crossed the Atlantic, from the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the US to the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa and the UK, which in turn inspired people to take down statues of Confederate soldiers in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims.

Like some businesses, churches and government agencies, universities hoped to get ahead of the public mood. They appointed commissions to absorb and sublimate angry demands. New ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ programmes laid down codes of conduct that aimed to soften potential conflicts. Principles and processes were drawn up for de-naming and renaming controversial public landmarks, as Yale had done in 2017 following protests over the name of Calhoun College. Some proposed the creation of new monuments to the enslaved; one such was erected at the University of Virginia.

It seemed as though the movement was inexorable. But the public disorder of 2020, which coincided with the Covid pandemic, also provoked a hostile reaction, and the political mood shifted dramatically. In the US, a number of states passed laws restricting the teaching of Black history and the subject of race and racism. Right-wing activists saw an opportunity in the domestic divisions sown by war between Israelis and Palestinians to target diversity officials at universities. A growing chorus including powerful university donors identified student protests with an ‘oppressor/oppressed worldview’, in which Israel was associated with the history of colonial racism. Reformers went into retreat, while Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard, argued that ‘ideologies arising out of identity politics have too often had the effect of driving discrimination against groups whose members have been most committed to the values of rigorous study and intellectual enquiry.’ One prominent Harvard donor concluded that ‘DEI’ and ‘racism against white people’ were the ‘core of the problem’. In recent months, higher education in the US has faced a withering assault from a national government committed to reversing generations of halting progress towards racial equality. Yale and Slavery seems now to have arrived at the end of a moment, perhaps as a capstone, a monument to the process of commemoration and reparation that motivated its creation.

As an academic concerned with the politics of memory, Blight understands that the stories universities tell about their past are vital to their sense of mission. The core function of universities is the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge through research, scholarship and teaching. They also want to endure and grow, so they seek to limit liability and risks to their reputations. When challenged to justify past investment in slavery – or current investments in, say, fossil fuel extraction or arms manufacture – officials weigh the costs and benefits of potential reforms. In the wrong hands, the internal review or study can be little more than a PR exercise, allowing the institution to acknowledge past wrongs while sidestepping accountability. Blight will have none of this: Yale and Slavery is a clear-eyed account of an era when university leaders knew slavery was wrong, but supported it nonetheless.

The first sentence of his report reads like a confession: ‘A multitude of Yale University’s founders, rectors, early presidents, faculty, donors and graduates played roles in sustaining slavery, its ideological underpinnings and its power.’ Deeds, baptismal records, wills and probate inventories list the names of more than two hundred people purchased, possessed and sold by the founders of Yale. New England’s Puritan colonies, Blight writes, emerged from a landscape of ‘destruction, migration and enslavement, both Indigenous and African’. He describes the period from the Pequot War of 1637 to King Philip’s War of 1675-78 as a 17th-century version of a ‘regional total war, a struggle to determine whether the Puritan Israel or various Native homelands would survive at all’. Both conflicts resulted in the capture and sale of Native people. There was nothing new in this. Slavery expanded in tandem with colonisation across the globe; New England was just one outpost.

The founders of Yale, Blight writes, ‘were fully aware that they now lived in an Atlantic world in which the African slave trade was peopling the Americas at a scale not seen before the 18th century, a trade now dominated by British slave traders who seemed the agents of a permanent, lucrative industry in human flesh’. Between 1676 and 1802, ships coming from Africa unloaded ten thousand captives in New England, but many more arrived via trade with the Caribbean, where enslaved people accounted for 90 per cent of the population. In the early 18th century, Black people in Connecticut numbered in the hundreds. By 1774, on the eve of independence, a census counted 6464 Black people in the colony, more than 3 per cent of its now greatly increased population and the largest number in any of the New England colonies.

In 1701, the Connecticut legislature adopted a charter ‘to erect a Collegiate School’. Chief among the early donors was Elihu Yale. Born into a wealthy Boston family in 1649, he grew up in England and then spent many years as an East India Company administrator in Chennai (then Madras), eventually becoming governor-president of the settlement. A severe famine in the 1680s caused widespread social displacement, leading to the capture and enslavement of large numbers of local people. Keen to profit from the opportunity, the East India Company bought hundreds of captives and shipped them to the English colony of St Helena. Blight cites the historian Joseph Yanielli, who found that Elihu Yale ‘participated in a meeting that ordered a minimum of ten slaves sent on every outbound European ship’; at least 665 slaves were exported in a single month from Fort St George. Yale enforced the quota until the end of his term in 1692: ‘Yale’s considerable fortune,’ Blight writes, ‘derived from his myriad entanglements with the purchase and sale of human beings.’ Between 1713 and 1721, he made gifts to the young college worth £1162, a substantial donation, though not compared to the wealth of his estate. The Collegiate School honoured him by constructing a building called Yale College, completed in October 1718. The college grew steadily over the 18th century with funds from the Connecticut colonial assembly, along with grants of land, goods, rental income and cash donations. Close links to a Caribbean economy dominated by the fruits of slavery enhanced the wealth and power of New Haven and of the college’s benefactors.

The first legal code put in place by the New Haven colony in 1639 recognised ‘man-stealing’ as a crime punishable by death. Yet the Puritan settlers found a way to reconcile themselves with slavery by making a distinction between unlawfully captured people and those ‘already captive by some legitimate historical action’, who ‘could indeed be purchased and owned, especially if treated well’. The theologian Jonathan Edwards, who completed a degree at Yale College in 1720, was a slaveholder like many of his peers, even though, as Blight points out, he saw ‘human history as a drama between good and evil played out before the “moral government” of an all-sovereign God’, and believed that ‘caring about the fate and the good of all humanity was the obligation of every Christian.’ William Livingston, whose father’s gift to the university established the Livingston Professorship in Divinity in 1756, rationalised the tension between civic virtue and his family’s mercantile wealth with the remark: ‘It is extremely difficult for the best of Men to divest themselves of Self-Interest.’ Indeed, the foundations for Connecticut Hall, the oldest surviving building on Yale’s campus, were laid in 1750 by a team of free and enslaved workers.

The anti-slavery movement took encouragement from the American Revolution. In New England, where the enslaved populations were smaller in size and the experience of slaveholding more limited, national independence encouraged a wave of manumissions and a movement to legislate gradual emancipation. Ministers such as the Yale-educated Samuel Hopkins revised Jonathan Edwards’s theological vision, making Christian benevolence the foundation of his denunciations of slavery as a ‘mortal personal and social sin’. In a sermon of 1776, Hopkins exhorted his listeners: ‘You assert your Right to be free in opposition to the Tyrant of Britain; come be honest men and assert the Right of the Africans to be free in opposition to the Tyrants of America.’ Ezra Stiles was a slaveowner when he was selected as president of Yale in 1778, but he manumitted his ‘Negro Man Newport’ before taking up the post. Stiles supported Connecticut’s Gradual Abolition Act in 1784 and in the early 1790s ‘took a personal interest’ in a short-lived anti-slavery group called the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage. And yet, Blight concedes, ‘Stiles was a consummate gradualist and his actions in the anti-slavery society, which seems to have quickly ceased to exist, remained only temporary.’ Stiles was cautious, in Blight’s view ‘befitting the role of a college president’. Others were bolder.

When the British attacked New Haven in 1779, Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved man and devout Christian, defended the young wife of James Hillhouse, who would become the treasurer of Yale College. In 1786 Hammon wrote a poem called ‘An Essay on Slavery’. Archived in Yale’s library, the manuscript is a ‘revelatory work of Christian devotion’ and a prayer for the deliverance of the enslaved: ‘If we will have our only choice/’Tis slavery no more.’

The revolutionary era’s dynamic contest between slavery and anti-slavery, racism and anti-racism, continued into the 19th century. Yale’s leaders, in their drive to make the college a national institution, were careful not to alienate wealthy and powerful benefactors, including slaveholding Southerners. The invention of the cotton gin by the Yale graduate Eli Whitney facilitated slavery’s westward expansion, which generated vast wealth for planters, merchants and domestic slave traders. Yale graduates such as Calhoun advocated slaveholding and white supremacy. A number of their opponents, convinced that education offered a route to liberty and equality, tried to establish in New Haven what would have been the nation’s first Black college in 1831, but that effort foundered under racist attack and resistance from Yale itself. David Daggett, one of the founders of Yale Law School, was among those who argued against the proposal, stating that its abolitionist impulses signified an ‘unwarrantable and dangerous interference’ with the concerns of slave states.

It would be wrong, however, to see Yale during this era as intrinsically pro-slavery and anti-Black. Many New Haven residents rallied in support of the Africans on trial for rising up against their captors onboard the Amistad. In 1864, a pivotal year in the fight between the North and South, crowds gathered to hear Frederick Douglass declare that one ‘Mission of the War’ was emancipation, as a route to ‘national regeneration’. Many more Yale graduates fought for the Union than for the Confederacy, even though there remained a reservoir of sympathy for the Southern slaveholders, and to some degree for their cause. Drawing on his own study of Civil War memory, Blight describes the way in which reconciliation between White Northerners and Southerners came at the expense of the struggle for Black civil rights. The university’s Civil War memorial of 1915 honoured the ‘sacrifice of Yale men on both sides’ of the conflict while slighting the achievement of emancipation. Today’s students largely ignore the memorial and campaign instead for new monuments that reflect their views concerning justice and humanity.

Those views remain threatened. Protests at various universities against the conduct of the war in Gaza have been met with police raids and punitive sanctions. Many have welcomed the repression, blaming the protests on university curricula. They argue that since the late 1960s universities have set a trap for themselves by encouraging an identification with the colonised or the enslaved. But Blight shows that the basic dynamic of power and protest has roots as deep as the American university itself. Higher education has customarily influenced people to advocate for a freer, fairer and more peaceful world, even while universities have hesitated and hedged their bets, always with an outstretched hand and a finger to the wind. Confronted with a US president who has identified universities as ‘the enemy’ and vowed to punish them if they don’t ‘vanquish the radicals’, too many academic leaders appear willing to obey. ‘Part of the challenge in our research and writing,’ to borrow Blight’s words, ‘is to educate the surprise out of this reality.’ The institutions are unlikely to point the way to that better future, but the people they teach still might.