“The report was a very useful and important catalyst for continued discussion and research since it came out,” says Dr. Robert Forbes, an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Connecticut and formerly the associate director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University.
The report from the students, who were not trained historians, was not intended to be a historical publication, and it was actually funded by the Yale unions. Still, it made a major impact.
”The stories and documents brought to light in the report were largely absent from the history of slavery and the history of the university at the time,” J.J. Fueser, one of the report’s authors, wrote in an e-mail. “There is no question in my mind that Yale’s unions have made the university a more equitable, diverse and self-aware institution.”
Yale administration responded in a “reactive matter,” Forbes says. “It caused great alarm among administrators. And there was an impulse to deny or ignore.” Forbes says universities could look to Brown’s report on how to officially explore their histories with slavery and other complicated histories.
“What has happened at Brown is really sort of a model about how institutions could and should address this issue and other issues, including more contemporary ones,” he says.
--Jonathan Sidhu
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