Harvard to Spend $100 Million to Study and Redress Its Ties to Slavery

Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow announced Tuesday that the university will spend $100 million to study and redress its ties to slavery.

The funds will be put toward a “Legacy of Slavery Fund” to continue researching and memorializing the history, in part by working with descendants of black and Native American people enslaved at Harvard and their broader communities. The announcement follows the release of a report from the Presidential Initiative on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery project, which Bacow commissioned in 2019.

“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow said in an email to the university’s students, faculty and staff members obtained by the New York Times. “Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

The report found that Harvard had accrued wealth thanks to patrons of the university who made their fortunes from the labor of enslaved people. Many of these patrons who owned slaves are still featured prominently on campus, with dorms and other buildings named after them, the report found. It details Harvard’s financial ties to slavery, campus abolitionists, race science, and discrimination in admissions and housing, according to the New York Times.