Colleges seizing the moment to confront troubled history
The recent news that the 19th-century founder of Johns Hopkins was a slaveholder has given rise to the latest bout of soul-searching by a prestigious university looking to align the values of its past with those of its present. Like Georgetown, Brown, Yale and many other institutions of higher learning grappling with uncomfortable histories, Johns Hopkins must now move beyond public shock and embarrassment to accountability, making sense of its legacy while recognizing the validity of present-day challenges to it.
This is, of course, easier said than done. Earlier this year, Princeton sought to sidestep the problem by choosing to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson — an avowed racist — from a prestigious institute, now known the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Some worried this change would come at the cost of long-term institutional identity. Other universities, like Brown or Georgetown, have sought to counterbalance a compromised history through expensive institutes or initiatives, such as Georgetown’s reparations project, which seeks to tip the scales of moral justice and make monetary amends to descendants of the enslaved people sold to ensure the school might keep its doors open. Yet not every institution has the wherewithal to pursue such costly initiatives.
What might historical accountability look like for other educational institutions? Liberal arts colleges might offer an answer. By using tools that help shape the minds and lives of students to focus on their own origins, historical narratives and practices, liberal arts colleges are uniquely positioned to develop incisive modes of historical reckoning. Dartmouth College, the institution with which we are affiliated, has recently launched a successful program to engage undergraduates in shedding light on complicated corners of the college’s past. Four students a term have been given a stipend and room and board for a quarter to focus on a project of their choosing that is grounded in documents held in our Special Collections library. The project might have something to do with women faculty; with the history of LGBT individuals at Dartmouth; or with the enslaved labor that supported the construction and maintenance of the college’s first buildings.
The fact is that no institution can claim a blameless past when it comes to accessibility, racial equity, gender parity and inclusivity. There is no organization unmarked by hierarchy, exclusion or discrimination. Yesterday’s benign monument is today’s signifier of toxic privilege. What is at stake for colleges, universities or any organization today is to find flexible, reflective and concrete measures, tailored to their particular needs, constituencies and histories to affirm the core values embedded in an institution and its legacy while also maintaining a receptive, open commitment to continual institutional self-renewal. What will work for one institution will not work for another. But threaded through all of these activities — be they exhibitions; historical re-accounting; renamings; new rituals — is their grounding in the central precepts of the liberal arts — that we must grapple with the stories we tell ourselves and one another about who we are and what matters. These efforts need to be integrated into the normal functioning of an organization — not a scrambled, last-minute response to a public crisis.
The entwined scourges of racism and the COVID-19 pandemic — for all the misery they have created and brought to light — offer an unprecedented opportunity for this kind of work to begin. With a fresh start on the horizon, we are all hungry to make the institutions our children attend and the ones where we work and teach places where all can thrive. The tools are at our fingertips. They are in our libraries. They are in our memories. They reside in oral histories and in our museums. These stories are literally everywhere. But we need to be ready to listen to them, reckon with them and treat them with the respect and care that they deserve.