Debate/Discussion Questions: (7-10 pages, double-spaced, 12 pitch font, please number your pages,, Chicago format)

1.In the book by Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, he states that American higher education was the third pillar of a civilization built on slavery along with the church and the state. He continues that:

“In the decades before the American Revolution, merchants and planters became not just the benefactors of colonial society but its new masters. Slaveholders became college  presidents. The wealth of the traders determined the locations and decided the fates of colonial schools. Profits from the sale and purchase of human beings paid for campuses and swelled college trusts. And the politics of the campus conformed to the presence and demands of slave-holding students as colleges aggressively cultivated a social  environment attractive to the sons of wealthy families.”

Given the documentation and arguments in the book as well as the article on Georgetown’s University’s on the role of major academic institutions in not only slavery, but also the exploitation of Native Americans, how do you assess these facts with the prevailing history of American higher education? These new revelations have now resulted in many students demanding these institutions acknowledge this past and make restitutions. How should institutions deal with these embarrassing revelations?