Harvard announces $100M fund to ‘redress’ university’s ties to slavery, but aims to avoid term ‘reparations’

Harvard is establishing a $100 million endowment fund to redress the college’s ties to slavery.  

In an e mail despatched to college students, college and employees Tuesday, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow introduced the college’s $100 million dedication to redress its ties to slavery via the creation of the “Legacy of Slavery Fund.” The New York Occasions reported the fund will work with descendants of Black and Native American folks as soon as enslaved at Harvard, in addition to their broader communities.   

“Slavery and its legacy have been part of American life for greater than 400 years,” Bacow wrote, in accordance with a duplicate of the e-mail obtained by Reuters. “The work of additional redressing its persistent results would require our sustained and bold efforts for years to return.”

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“Harvard benefited from and in some methods perpetuated practices that had been profoundly immoral,” Bacow added. “Consequently, I consider we bear an ethical duty to do what we are able to to handle the persistent corrosive results of these historic practices on people, on Harvard, and on our society.”

His e mail linked to a 100-page report titled “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery” from the college’s 14-member particular committee chaired by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a authorized historian and constitutional legislation skilled who’s dean of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Radcliffe Institute for Superior Research.

The report, additionally shared on-line Tuesday by the college, says the aim of the analysis is to supply a robust basis for the following section outlined as “the method of reckoning and restore.” 

The fund will function “a needed predicate to and basis for redress,” however doesn’t name for direct monetary reparations to descendants of enslaved folks, the report says. Brown-Nagin instructed the Occasions she avoids utilizing the time period “reparations” as a result of “fixating” on the phrase could be “counterproductive.”

The fund resembles strikes made by different Ivy League and elite universities, akin to Brown, Georgetown and Princeton, which have sought to redress their previous complicity with the establishment of slavery. In March 2021, the Jesuit convention of monks, a outstanding Roman Catholic order, vowed to boost $100 million to learn 272 descendants of the enslaved folks it bought off in 1838 to repay money owed to Georgetown College and promote racial reconciliation initiatives in the USA.