Harvard University was directly complicit in Americas system of racial bondage and should do more to acknowledge its ties to slavery, [university] president Drew Faust said Wednesday in a forthright opinion piece in the student newspaper that sparked mixed reactions on campus.
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Faust, a historian of the American South and the Civil War, raised the issue as Harvard and other universities grapple with symbols of their history, histories that are often intertwined with slavery.
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The institution was complicit even after slavery ended in Massachusetts in 1783, she wrote, and Harvard continued to be indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties to the slave South up to the time of emancipation.
Similar explorations of college history are unfolding on campuses across the country.
Students at Yale University raised concerns about Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges and named for John C. Calhoun, a Yale valedictorian and former vice president from South Carolina who was a prominent slave owner and a white supremacist. The university has not decided whether to change the name.
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Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University who studies slavery, said Columbia has undertaken a similar project to investigate the role of slavery in its past. Slavery existed in all the Colonies before the American Revolution and even after its abolition in the North, many northerners profited from dealing in the products of southern slave labor, he said in an e-mail.
Too often, people in the North think of slavery as a southern institution.
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