A Forced Reckoning
Snapshot: In this fictional case, a group of Harvard University students learn the history of Professor Louis Agassiz, whose research and theories justified the institution of slavery, highlighting the university’s ties with enslavement. Each student grapples with how to react to the University’s complex history and legacy. What responsibility does the University have to teach this history, and what are our personal responsibilities to learn?
Detailed Case Description:
In this fictional case set at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, five Harvard students discuss an elective history of science lecture highlighting the University’s involvement with the development of racial pseudo-science. One student is particularly rattled by the lecture and his ignorance on the topic; he wonders why all students aren’t required to learn this material. Some of his peers question whether mandatory teaching about a university’s history would be wise, equitable, or inclusive. As the students talk, they wrestle with questions about identity, history, choice, responsibility, and the aims of a university education.
The case brings up different viewpoints around a central question: What responsibility does a university have to teach its historical ties to slavery and the legacy of those ties, and what are our personal responsibilities to learn this history?
Explore Further:
- For more information about the life and legacy of Louis Agassiz, see this biography from the Harvard Crimson (redirect).
- If you want to know more about Harvard University’s international population and global engagement, this resource shares demographic information about Harvard’s global work (redirect).
- To consider potential limitations of mandatory history education from a different context, try finding parallels in Germany’s mandatory Holocaust education (redirect).
- For a sense of what coursework about institutional ties to enslavement and the legacies of slavery might look like, read about two courses at the University of Virginia: “Slavery and its Legacies at UVA (redirect) and “The Aftermath of Slavery at UVA" (redirect).
- Two historians offer their perspective on the ways that new laws governing history education in U.S. K-12 schools might impact learning about the legacies of enslavement at the university level (redirect).
- To learn about how a growing number of universities globally are engaging with the legacy of slavery at their institutions, check out the Universities Studying Slavery consortium (redirect).