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**MAY 9, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Cheap Grace
Anti-slavery meets the modern sale of naming rights at Harvard.
With a great deal of fanfare and self-congratulation, Harvard issued a
report last month acknowledging
its complicity in slavery and setting up a $100 million research fund to
dig deeper and make amends. The report reveals that "Enslaved men and
women served at least 70 Harvard presidents and professors and fed and
cared for Harvard students," in the period from 1636 to 1783. This only
ceased when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that slavery
was illegal.
"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," Harvard President Lawrence
Bacow said in a letter
to the school community and the public. The university pledged to spend
$100 million toward a "Legacy of Slavery Fund."
The fund will support further research, and develop partnerships with
other nonprofits, notably with historically Black colleges and
universities, to address "enduring inequities" that affect descendants
of slaves who served Harvard. It does not propose financial reparations.
The response to this mea culpa was appropriately underwhelming. Harvard,
with a $53 billion endowment, could easily provide a tuition-free
education to any descendant of slavery and increase its Black enrollment
from its present 7 percent of undergraduates.
Harvard's use of slaves ended more than 200 years ago. Here's
something that happened just last year, when Harvard opened a whole new
campus across the Charles River in Allston, to house its science and
engineering complex.
The complex is named the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences. It cost Harvard about a billion dollars
to
build. Wall Street billionaire Paulson got his name on the school by
purchasing naming rights for $400 million.
This would be the same John Paulson who made an estimated $4 billion
-most
of his fortune-by using credit default swaps to bet against the
subprime housing market. When that market crashed, a disproportionate
share of the victims were African Americans who lost their homes. The
SEC fined Goldman Sachs
a record
$550 million for Goldman's part in facilitating the scam, which cost
investors billions.
As a modern assault on Black wealth, the subprime collapse was a
21st-century sequel to slavery. But it's a lot easier for Harvard to
shame slaveholders who are long dead, while it besmirches its new campus
every day, with Paulson's name.
Maybe, 200 years from now, some Harvard president will discover with
shock and dismay that the university's science and engineering complex
is named for a speculator who made his billions at the expense of
African American wealth, and issue an apology. If anything, Paulson's
name belongs, in scarlet letters (not Crimson ones) at the Business
School.
Or maybe Harvard could send Paulson a check and buy back its good name
now. The W.E.B. Du Bois School has a nice ring.
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~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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