At Brown, It's Time to Atone
At Brown, the prescriptively named "
Committee on Slavery and Justice" has issued a report suggesting that the university make amends for its ties to slavery.
(You can find
the report here;
coverage in the Brown Daily Herald is here.)
Established by Brown president Ruth Simmons, the committee recommends that Brown make amends for slavery by building a memorial, creating a center for the study of "slavery and injustice," and recruiting students from Africa and the West Indies.
None of these, in and of themselves, are bad things. By all means, recruit students from Africa. (Although isn't that Brown's version of the
Madonna baby adoption?) A memorial? Can't be a bad thing, I suppose.
But the implications of this are interesting. By far Brown's greatest connection with slavery is accepting money from slaveholders or slave traders. So Brown needs to make amends, the argument goes, for accepting money from people who did bad things.
Now, universities everywhere have and continue to accept money from people who do bad things, on the grounds that better they should give their money to universities than that they should use it for nefarious purposes.
Why is slavery any different?
After all, it's not like the slave traders were practicing their heinous business in order to raise money for Brown. The gifts to the university were incidental to what these people did for a living.
Of course, you could reject the premise of the argument, and say that universities should never take dirty money. That's opening a can of worms.
Or you could say that slavery was a unique evil which mandates special measures. But since the committee is proposing a center for "slavery and injustice," it clearly doesn't think that slavery is a unique evil, but one out of various kinds of injustice.
(And of course these days slavery is defined in all sorts of ways: wage slavery, sexual slavery, and so on.)
So my question is, Will Brown be consistent here? Two hundred years from now, who knows what donors of today we may consider sinful. Will Brown hold its current donors to the standards to which it is now holding its donors of centuries ago?
