Will Harvard’s New President Act to Confront the University’s Legacy of Slavery?

Standin’ on the crossroad, I attempted to flag a trip
Didn’t no one appear to know me, all people go me by

— Cross Road Blues (Take 2), Robert Johnson

Harvard College is acknowledged as one of many world’s main educational establishments and alma mater to famend figures in just about each facet of American life. Based in 1636, the varsity’s official web site proudly declares itself “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Not solely the oldest, however one of many wealthiest, with an estimated endowment of $53 billion, a sum larger than the GDP of 110 of the 190 international locations on the earth.

Right now, the company finds itself at a crossroads.

In April 2022, Harvard launched its “Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery,” a doc crammed with guarantees and pledges, and accompanied by a flashy video. College President Lawrence Bacow insisted, “We bear a ethical accountability … to deal with the persistent and corrosive results of these historic practices on people, on Harvard, and on our society.”

The report opens by invoking its motto:

Harvard’s motto, Veritas, inscribed on gates, doorways, and sculptures throughout campus, calls for of us fact. This report … advances our quest for fact by scholarship concerning the College’s historic ties to slavery — direct, monetary, and mental.

The report concludes with the heady, if peculiar pledge: “We are able to renew our dedication to Veritas, and imbue it with deeper that means.”

The stain of slavery is broad and deep, and the college’s pledge of a $100 million dedication, a small fraction of its endowment, to deal with its previous is a major begin. The college pledges to extend academic alternatives for descendants of enslaved individuals, improved hyperlinks to traditionally Black schools and universities, in addition to an “imposing bodily memorial” to those that had been enslaved. However the work of rebuilding can’t be a standard educational train with outcomes printed, sure and positioned on a shelf, or in a slide present, quick film, convention continuing or a cosponsored museum exhibit.

Veritas?

There may be one particular person, Tamara Lanier, who has flagged the college however, like Robert Johnson on the crossroads, has been handed by.

In 1977, the university discovered daguerreotypes (photographs) of enslaved Africans who had been photographed on the behest of Nineteenth-century Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz. Amongst these photographs captured seems Renty Taylor. He stands earlier than the digital camera, his arms by his facet, his physique seemingly emaciated in what a New York Instances article described as one “of historical past’s cruelest, most contentious photographs.”

Whereas Agassiz commissioned the picture as a part of an effort to offer scientific proof of the inferiority of Africans, and thus rationalize the evil of U.S. slavery, Renty stares again on the digital camera — and therefore in any respect of us — his eyes ablaze with defiance and human dignity.

Primarily based on the oral historical past handed down for generations and her personal analysis, Lanier acknowledged the person within the photograph as Papa Renty, her great-great-great grandfather. Renty could have been solely a specimen to Agassiz, however he was an precise ancestor to Lanier, who grew up listening to tales that put the flesh of household and personhood on these bones.

Lanier started to hunt management of the pictures from the college in 2011 by direct correspondence with then-President Drew Faust. Dissatisfied with the varsity’s non-responsiveness over time, she filed a suit in March 2019. The swimsuit was supported by 43 descendants of Agassiz, who argued that turning the pictures over to Lanier would “start to make amends … for the white supremacy concept Agassiz espoused.”

The preliminary ruling within the case affirmed Harvard’s declare of possession, however Lanier appealed to the Supreme Judicial Courtroom of Massachusetts. Shortly after the discharge of Harvard’s report, on June 23, 2022, the high court upheld the initial ruling on possession, however discovered that the college put “itself and its agenda earlier than any effort to reckon with its previous or make amends within the current.” The court docket remanded the case to the decrease court docket, advising Lanier “to include a declare of reckless infliction of emotional misery.”

Regardless of the College’s public posturing about therapeutic the legacy of slavery, Harvard has acted very very like a company defending what it considers its property. It fails to acknowledge the variations between possession and possession, the regulation and justice, or summary fact and sincere human emotion. Certainly, in December 2022, the college sought to dismiss the remanded case.

On the Crossroads

I’m the brother of a Radcliffe and Harvard Enterprise Faculty graduate, my spouse and I maintain superior levels from the college, and I lately retired as director of a analysis institute at Harvard Regulation Faculty. I write as a deeply involved member of the Harvard group.

The Lanier case predates Harvard’s latest reckoning (though not its awareness of its relationship to American slavery), and whereas the college’s 2022 report spends a while on Agassiz and the daguerreotypes, the 132-page doc, replete with over 1,000 footnotes spanning 50 of these pages, makes no point out of both Lanier or her declare. Reasonably than imbuing Veritas with new that means, the failure to say the Lanier case trades in partial truths.

Fact is, in any case, such a lofty time period. It units one each above and other than the world. The college would possibly as an alternative aspire to a extra grounded area: communitas. It would search to rejoice group, to emphasise sharing and customary expertise over hierarchy; to encourage and facilitate membership and participation for all. And, most significantly, to acknowledge and rejoice itself as half of a bigger, extra vibrant and promising group.

With the election of Claudine Gay, present dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to the presidency of the college, Harvard could make strides on this path. Homosexual, the daughter of Haitian immigrants and the primary individual of colour elected to the presidency, insisted Harvard doesn’t “exist exterior of society, however as a part of it, and that signifies that Harvard has an obligation to … interact and be in service to the world.” She additionally spoke of “the daring agenda of reckoning and restore impressed by” the college report on slavery.

The Harvard web site cites Harvard Regulation Faculty alumnus Charles Hamilton Houston as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow” and a part of a “Legacy of African American Resistance … that right this moment’s Harvard college students inherit.” Houston, the primary Black elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Regulation Assessment, was the architect of the authorized technique for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Schooling resolution and mentor to lots of the attorneys who received the case following his premature demise in 1950. Notably absent from its proud and self-congratulatory remembrances, nevertheless, is Houston’s pitiless however sadly timeless lament that, “A lawyer is both a social engineer or a parasite upon society.”

That is the continuum in opposition to which we should all measure ourselves and our establishments. So it’s for the Harvard Company. In right this moment’s parlance, Harvard could possibly be stated to have turn into “woke” by documenting its previous. However till it may possibly radically and convincingly change its posture towards the declare of Tamara Lanier, its grander guarantees appear extra like sleepwalking.

As she enters the crossroad and seeks to chart a brand new course for the college, President Homosexual would possibly start by accepting Lanier’s name.