Harvard University, the oldest college in the United States, announced Tuesday it is committing millions of dollars in an attempt to rectify its ties to slavery, becoming the latest selective school to make such a commitment.
The Harvard Corporation is pledging $100 million for teaching, research and service. A new internal report described that funding as “a necessary predicate to and foundation for redress,” while stopping short of recommending direct financial reparations to descendants of enslaved people.
In a message sent Tuesday morning to the campus community, Harvard President Larry Bacow said the university’s “commitment to truth means that we must embrace it even when it makes us uncomfortable or causes us pain.”
“The truth is that slavery played a significant part in our institutional history,” Bacow said in a pre-recorded video posted on the university’s website. “The truth is that the legacy of slavery continues to influence the world in the form of disparities in education, health, wealth, income, social mobility and almost any other metric we might use to measure equality.”
The report states that before 1783, when the Supreme Judicial Court ruled slavery unconstitutional in Massachusetts, Harvard presidents enslaved more than 70 individuals. Some served the school's leader, while others fed and cared for students.
Harvard follows Brown, Georgetown and other universities around the country that have taken steps intended to address their involvement with slavery.
In 2006, Brown University commissioned a report, Slavery and Justice, that dug deep into its own ties to slavery. In 2016, Georgetown announced the university would give preferential admissions treatment to descendants of the 272 enslaved Africans the school sold to pay off its debts in the late 1800s.
Since then, Georgetown has admitted 16 descendants, a spokesperson told GBH News in February but would not say how many have applied. During the same period, the school admitted about 1,500 legacy students descended from alumni.
It’s unclear whether Harvard plans to make being descended from enslaved people a new factor in admissions. Its race-conscious admissions policy faces a legal challenge before the Supreme Court, and a Harvard spokesperson told GBH News no major changes to that policy would be made before arguments before the justices in the fall at the earliest.
“I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society,” Bacow said in his video message.
