Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities

Craig Steven Wilder. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 352 pp. $30.00.

Craig Wilder's Ebony and Ivy offers a comprehensive synthesis and interpretation of the ways in which race-based thought and slavery are implicated in the founding, development, and intellectual norms of America's universities. This is a national history, convincingly demonstrating how university faculty and administrators used slavery to their advantage and both reified and institutionalized scientific racism into its curriculum. The book is a profoundly sad and troubling assessment of the political, economic, religious and intellectual underpinnings of a nation based on principles of white supremacy and the central role of American universities in support of such ideas. It is a tour deforce of scholarship and analysis, and should be widely used by students of American history and culture.

Many universities have begun to explore the role of slavery in their founding and evolution. Brown University president Ruth Simmons supported the most comprehensive institutional self-study of institutional ties to the slave trade. Others- at Emory, William & Mary, Williams, Harvard, Yale, Duke, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, and elsewhere-have established courses, commissions, tours, brochures, plaques, and websites to demonstrate their deepening interest in uncovering their institution's previously hidden and sullied history on race matters. Some focus on the role of slaves in building and sustaining their institutions. Others explore how founders, trustees, and presidents owned, traded or otherwise profited from human beings of color. Yet others expose the dependence of students on enslaved labor to maintain their privileged status. Collectively, this work supports Wilder's research. But it is in the aggregate that the full impact can be felt. While Wilder draws upon this body of work at individual institutions, his capacity to synthesize it into a larger narrative is what gives this book its power.

Ebony and Ivy is divided into two parts. The first four chapters, grouped under the section called "Slavery and the Rise of the American College," center on how the slave economies of the colonial world became intertwined with the founding and development of American academies of learning. The second part, "Race and the Rise of the American College," traces the production of knowledge itself, revealing how ideas...