Harvard commits $100 million to deal with ‘complicity’ in slavery while fighting to continue discriminating against Asians in admissions

In their effort to "continue researching and memorializing" their "complicity" with slavery, Harvard will work with those who are "descendants of [b]lack and Native American people enslaved at Harvard," The New York Times reports.

Harvard has recently been embroiled in a lawsuit brought by Asian American students who say that the University has discriminated against them. That case is currently before the Supreme Court, and will determine the fate of race-based, or race-conscious admissions at Harvard.

The school is accused of using discriminatory admissions practices to limit the Asian American population at the school, creating what the Times calls a "ceiling" for Asians in admissions.

Harvard has defended so-called "race-conscious admissions," saying that they are lawful. Slavery, too, was lawful at the time it was practiced by the University that now seeks to repair the damage done by them under a legal practice.

April 26, 2022

The university is working hard to figure out who the descendants of those who were enslaved at the University are so that they can be given certain kinds of reparations, of a kind, as a belated repayment for the labor of their ancestors. These will not necessarily be directly financial reparations, but ones in which those descendants, who could number 50,000, will have a say.

Other storied American universities have also gotten on board with spending gobs of cash in an effort to ameliorate their colonial crimes, including Brown, Georgetown, and Princeton Theological Seminary. Georgetown used a massive donation from the leaders of the Jesuit conference of priests, in 2021, to pay off the "descendants of 272 enslaved people sold in 1838 to pay off the debts of Georgetown University" in what the Times calls a "racial reckoning."

"Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas," said Edward Blum, who brings the case under Students for Fair Admissions. "Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group."

But for Harvard, eliminating this practice of limiting Asian American admissions "would jeopardize what has become a fundamental principle of college admissions," the Times reports.

Harvard President Dr. Lawrence Bacow said that the challenged to the admissions policy "puts at risk 40 years of legal precedent granting colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities."

Bacow's "Presidential Initiative on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery" was the basis for the new funding and the report on how Harvard should deal with their own legacy of slavery.

That report recommends that Harvard should be "working to improve educational opportunities for the descendants of Black and Native American enslaved people, notably in the South and the Caribbean, where plantations traded with New England; honoring enslaved people through memorials, research and curriculum; forging partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges, including a program to exchange students and faculty; and identifying and building relationships with the direct descendants of enslaved people who labored on the Harvard campus or who were enslaved by Harvard’s leadership, faculty or staff."

Perhaps Bacow can only deal with one racial reckoning at a time.