A painful legacy: should colleges that had ties to slavery more than 150 years ago take steps today to make up for it?

• Author: Stoffers, Carl
• Position: NATIONAL

Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which once profited from the sale of hundreds of slaves, recently announced it would issue a formal apology, create an institute for the study of slavery, and award preferential admissions status to the slaves' descendants.

"This community participated in the institution of slavery," Georgetown's president, John DeGioia, said in August. "This original evil that shaped the early years of the republic was present here."

Georgetown's plans put it at the forefront of a debate about what obligation--if any--colleges have to make up for their past connections to slavery. Most universities founded before the Civil War had some involvement in the slave trade. Southern colleges often owned slaves; and even in the North, where gradual emancipation began in the early 1800s, schools like Harvard University in Massachusetts and Brown University in Rhode Island continued to help some of their brightest graduates land work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, and administrators in the South's booming slave economy.

"Plantation owners looked to these schools for college-educated men to help staff their society," says Craig Steven Wilder, a history professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "so graduates went south, where there was wealth because of slavery."

Debates about how to address ties to slavery are now under way at schools like the University of Maryland, Emory University in Atlanta, and Princeton University in New Jersey. The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson and built by slave labor, named a new dormitory after two of the school's slaves in 201S. Last spring, Harvard Law School retired its seal because the three bushels of wheat on it represented a slave-owning family that helped found the school (see box). And in December, Yale University in Connecticut said it may rename its undergraduate college named for pro-slavery U.S. vice president John C. Calhoun.

Shining a Light

The debates are helping shine a light on a history that's often been downplayed: Though slavery was embedded in Southern society, many institutions in the North also benefited. For example, insurance companies allowed slave owners to insure their slaves as property, and banks lent plantation owners money for their operations.

Indeed, how to atone for a painful past is a question being asked not just by colleges and not only in the United States. German companies have paid more than $4 billion to Jews and others...