* The Ivy Covered Lies of Academia: Gothic Empires Built off Black Sweat

Now that we have built our academic empires 

off your sweat, 

let us move humbly on

 expanding our portfolios,

acknowledging  'unpleasant' facts 

in impeccable scholarly fashion, 

while assiduously avoiding all talk 

of reparations.

Link to NYT article

“Ebony and Ivy,” with its cover image of a tendril of ivy wrapped around a chain, may not find a home on many alumni-office coffee tables. But Mr. Wilder, a graduate of Fordham and Columbia who has also taught at Dartmouth and Williams, says that some people are too quick to see political motives behind work like his.

A 2001 report on Yale University’s connections with slavery, he notes, was dismissed by some as a partisan hit job, written by graduate students with connections to labor unions that were then battling with the Yale administration. And the Brown report was begun at a moment when northern universities, along with banks and insurance companies, were threatened with class-action lawsuits demanding financial reparations for their connections with the 18th-century slave trade.

“There has been a fear that there’s something lurking in the archives that will be devastating to these institutions, and that people doing this work are motivated by hostility,” Mr. Wilder said. “But history is a poor medium for seeking revenge.”

“There has been a fear that there’s something lurking in the archives that will be devastating to these institutions, and that people doing this work are motivated by hostility,” Mr. Wilder said. “But history is a poor medium for seeking revenge.”