Harvard University is earmarking $100 million to study and make amends for its history of and ties to slavery, as well as the perpetuation of racist eugenics by some of its past faculty. The school’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, announced the fund in a letter on Tuesday.
A report by an internal committee details the legacy of slavery at Harvard through the school’s nearly 400-year history, noting that past Harvard leaders and faculty enslaved over 70 Black and Indigenous people between the school’s founding in 1636 and 1783, when slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts. The report also chronicles the way in which some past presidents and faculty engaged in abusive and racist practices under the guise of scholarship.
“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow wrote. “Consequently, 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.”
The fund and its accompanying acknowledgment of harm comes after similar moves by other U.S. colleges. Georgetown University in 2017 formally apologized for selling over 270 enslaved people in an effort to pay off its debt. Harvard Law School previously distanced itself from a shield it had used for over 80 years whose design was rooted in a crest of a family that enslaved people. And in 2019 Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne demanded reparations from Harvard to address donations made by that same family.
