The Reparations Movement in Higher Education

Photograph courtesy of the author

At the height of the Global Pandemic, the citizens of New Haven stormed the city’s March 30, 2020 Zoom budget meeting to vent their annoyance and outrage at Yale University’s continued strain on city finances. Residents specifically pointed to Yale’s vast and tax-exempt property holdings compared to the deficit-ridden New Haven public schools hungry for property tax dollars. On July 29th, a new coalition of Yale union workers and residents followed up with a 600 vehicle “Respect Caravan” that brought downtown traffic to a halt. With signs that read “Yale: Pay Your Fair Share,” rallygoers acknowledged that while the university offers the city voluntary payments in lieu of taxes, these funds are “pocket change” compared to the $30 billion endowment.[1] For the protestors, COVID-19 merely exacerbated longstanding disparities between the city and its largest economic entity.

The protests in New Haven have not emerged in a vacuum. The increased visibility of prosperous ivory towers sitting in multi-racial cities of economic despair has galvanized a broad-based call for reparations in higher education. Right before our eyes, not Amazon or Walmart but universities have become the largest low-wage employers, real estate holders, health care providers, and even policing agents in major cities all across the country. Summer 2020 made it clear the degree to which higher education had pervaded everyday lives in ways that had nothing to do with teaching classes. When working-class residents were placed on furloughs during the global pandemic it was probably from food service labor or groundskeeping staff at a university. And the protests against police violence made visible the growing degree to which city blocks are now being policed by private campus security forces with little public oversight.

As students, activists, and everyday citizens went from study groups to the streets, they quickly realized that the college campus had become the shop floor of city workers, the land baron of residents, and the political boss of city budgets. And this disparity had grown out of a history of unequal relations between cities and campuses built on racial injustice. But still, how did the concept of reparations become the rallying cry to help bring together such a broad litany of frustrations?

For decades, reparations had been dismissed as the radical, fringe idea pushed forward by groups like the National African American Reparations Commission, N’COBRA, and later the Black Radical Congress. The idea of reparations—financial compensation—for the loss of wages and wealth from slavery, has been around since before the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. has, in fact, paid reparations for the Japanese that were thrown into internment camps during World War II. Some Native American nations have also received under-resourced acreage and financial aid to compensate (albeit inadequately) for the massive theft of their land and livelihood amidst U.S. colonial expansion. The irony is that while the descendants of slaves are arguably the most significant group to have not received reparations for state-sanctioned terror, in 1862 the federal government did compensate Washington D.C. slave owners for their “loss of property.”[2] 

Since 1989, Congressman John Conyers marked every session by calling for simply the study of reparations and HR 40 never made it to the House floor. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee picked up the mantle when Conyers left the House in 2017. But this passing of the baton also came with a change in strategy; from a broad call for study to a more focused insistence on solutions. Ta- Nehisi  Coates’ landmark Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations,” also helped by grounding a broad legacy of injustice within a targeted analysis of racist Federal housing policies and private lending practices that stole land and wealth building opportunities.[3] His focused diagnosis of state-sanctioned racial discrimination for African Americans in Chicago gave reparations advocacy a more tangible target and reached a broad audience.

After tangible reparations seemed like a near impossibility for decades, the mobilization for Black Lives during the summer of 2020 has helped to approve actual reparations policies in Evanston, Illinois and Asheville, North Carolina, while Providence, Seattle, and the state of California are all considering reparations programs.[4] These focused campaigns address the direct redistribution of wealth but also call for a rethinking of the specific laws and practices that underwrite the gross racial disparities in wealth, health, and life chances. It is this targeted, localized approach to reparations that has overlapped with a racial reckoning faced by America’s colleges and universities.

In 2001, Ruth Simmons stood alone on many fronts: as the first African American president of an Ivy League university who also had the audacity to assemble a Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2003 to determine Brown’s debts for its slave past. She told the Boston Globe, “Understanding our history and suggesting how the full truth of that history can be incorporated into our common traditions will not be easy. But, then, it doesn’t have to be.” This pathbreaking endeavor met with mixed results. Some resurrected the ideas of conservative writer David Horowitz that had been circulated in student papers across the country two years earlier, dismissing reparations and telling African Americans they should be grateful for the abolition of slavery by white Christians. Others worried that these acknowledgments of slavery might turn into a self-congratulatory moment announcing the end of racism.[5]

Things stayed relatively silent for years until the 2013 publication of Craig Wilder’s masterwork study Ebony and Ivy. He looked beyond a single campus and found that America’s colonial-era colleges “stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”[6] Students and scholars across the country fled to the archives using Wilder’s book as a template to come to terms with their own slave pasts.

Georgetown became perhaps the most notable touchstone when controversy erupted after a 2016 New York Times article uncovered the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved people by Jesuits seeking to rescue the college from severe debt. The administration immediately apologized and committed to raising about $400,000 a year as part of a reparations fund for the descendants of the 272 enslaved people. Students immediately released a statement criticizing the university proposal. They said it fell far short of the $1 billion goal set by the descendants themselves. Students also believed the administration’s proposal, which was built on fundraising, also undermined student efforts to atone for their own culpability. They had proposed a reparations plan to increase the tuition of every student by $27.20 a year in memory of the number of enslaved people sold.[7]

By this time more schools had assembled various working groups and committees that were coming out of the archives announcing what many already knew: there are far more schools touched by slavery than not. The University of Virginia brought many of these efforts together as part of a consortium called Universities Studying Slavery.[8] Now the various membership bodies engage in what some consider a ceremony of collective bloodletting. There first is the initial “discovery” of personal ties to slavery, which is followed by official reports and efforts to rename buildings and offer scholarships.

At about the same time, momentum was also building around critical reconsiderations of the famed Morrill Act of 1862. For decades the Morrill Act had been understood simply as the federal policy that democratized higher education by using “public” lands to underwrite the endowments for the country’s first land grant universities. However, scholars like Sharon Stein, had pointed out that the 10.7 million acres for this project were actually indigenous lands, confiscated through direct seizure or suspect land treaties.[9] Oglata Lakota scholar and college administrator Megan Red Shirt-Shaw appreciates the indigenous land acknowledgements currently spoken before almost every event on a college campus. But she also makes clear that is no longer enough. Shirt-Shaw insists that these ceremonial mea culpas must be backed by real structural commitments to aggrieved communities, including giving the land back.[10] Other organizations across the country agree.

In 2017, the progressive, Black feminist-led organization, Scholars for Social Justice (SSJ) emerged, largely driven by a shared desire to push beyond ceremonial acknowledgments of racial injustice. The goal here was to see how the labors of academics could service social justice organizations like the Movement for Black Lives and the broader political collective, The Rising Majority.[11]

One of SSJ’s key initiatives is a Reparations in Higher Education campaign, built specifically to break from what they felt had become the ceremony of acknowledgment. Co-founder, Barbara Ransby told me, “There has been a lot of attention by university administrators about institutional connections to slavery. This is good. But a few scholarships and buildings renamed is not enough, nor is it enough to say that a university’s connections to slavery are all that they have to be accountable for in terms of racism and white supremacy.” She went on to detail how the long march of white supremacy pervades the history of higher education’s function as a racist “parastate;” from slavery and indigenous land seizure to residential segregation policies, prison labor, and unjust policing practices. And just as SSJ took shape, their Chicago headquarters became ground-zero for this reparations campaign.

A group of graduate students created the Reparations at the University of Chicago (RAUC) organization. The goal was to force their home institution to reckon with what they consider the school’s infamous and detailed history of racial exploitation. RAUC activists highlight the school’s slave roots but also its hand in underwriting racist residential covenants, pushing urban renewal projects that demolished Black neighborhoods, and instituting broad policing practices that profile Black residents.

RAUC found that their school’s massive $7 billion endowment derived from an initial ten acres of land donated by politician Stephen Douglas, land that was purchased with his slave plantation profits. The university denies any explicit financial or legal relationship between today’s University of Chicago and what they call the “first” college that collapsed in a state of debt and foreclosure in 1886. However, activists point to the work of university historian John Boyer who argues that an overlapping network of donors and faculty cements a clear inheritance between the two campuses.[12]

No matter the debate, RAUC continues to detail its reparations demands that include an ethnic studies program, increased faculty of color, the transformation of campus police into an unarmed emergency response service, and a community board with binding authority to veto campus expansion projects in their neighborhoods. RAUC also aligned their advocacy with a broader Community Benefits Coalition in Chicago. This group is fighting for the city to consider affordable housing guarantees and tax relief programs because of the university-affiliated Obama Presidential Center’s impact on rising land values and the threats of working-class displacement.[13] But no issue seemed to capture the yawning gulf between thriving universities and the barely surviving communities of color that surrounded schools more than campus policing.

Historically, policing has not been seen as a reparations matter. But students and activists began to see how campus police worked in hand with campus expansion projects that both terrorized and displaced residents in the name of neighborhood revitalization. For years, students and community activists were increasingly troubled by the growing power of campus police. Not only did universities control their own armed police departments, but these security forces were also being given the power to police neighborhoods around campus if not hold jurisdiction over the entire city. And most private police forces are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, so even with pubic authority, their actions are not held up to public scrutiny.[14]

When Johns Hopkins announced its desire to create a private police force, students held a month-long sit-in. Organizers specifically denounced campus police as what they considered the front line to gentrifying a largely poor and Black Baltimore. Siding with the protestors, local Senator Mary Washington denounced what she saw as a breach of public authority: “It’s akin to establishing a Vatican City within Baltimore.” And UChicago students had already seen the consequences of what Baltimore residents feared.[15]

Records revealed that Black residents in UChicago’s jurisdiction were being stopped at numbers far greater than their actual population. Student activists found that the school had created what they called a “two-tiered system of policing.” A student and a community member can be accused of the same infraction but the former meets with the dean and the latter is shuttled through the criminal justice system.[16] The implications of this campus policing crystalized after the nation was forced to face the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks on a digital feedback loop. When social movement actors began to raise the specter of abolishing the current policing apparatus, students and residents also turned their attention to campus police as a flashpoint for broader reparations in higher education campaigns.

SSJ held a webinar with over eight hundred attendees on “Police, Race, and the University.” This event foreshadowed a series of direct-action campaigns across the country that made direct connections between calls for reparations built around the reform or outright abolition of campus police. Over 100 UPenn students and Philadelphia residents gathered, on July 24th, to protest UPenn Police Department’s alleged role in the teargassing of protestors on May 31st while also calling for the tax-exempt university to issue Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) to support the community and local schools. Faculty and students at UCLA demand the school to replace campus police with preventative and anti-carceral forms of community-based public safety and use that money towards a reparations plan to support faculty of color and expand community initiatives. They also want the university to cut all ties with external law enforcement agencies, after the Los Angeles Police Department used the UCLA-leased Jackie Robinson stadium to detain and process protestors on June 1st.[17]

The unrest of summer 2020 ultimately forced Johns Hopkins to halt its controversial private police force for at least 2 years. The official statement pointed out that this “moment of national reckoning” requires the university to reconsider its policing decision. In response, Baltimore community activist Joseph Kane exclaimed, “The power of the people is greater than the people in power!” In Portland, meanwhile, as the city reached 80 days of nightly protests, Portland State University administrators said on August 13 the school would disarm its campus police force, two years after an officer from the department shot and killed Jason Washington.[18] On October 1st campuses throughout the University of California system and across the country instigated a “Cops off Campus” day of action.

As momentum grows, campus policing is no longer understood as an isolated injustice. Through organizing, those on and around campuses are seeing that the jurisdiction of university police is extending to the very same areas targeted for campus expansion. Residents fear the university control of their daily lives. As universities dictate working-class wages, land values, health care standards, and policing practices, campuses have become a vital site of struggle over broader democratic possibilities that extend far beyond slavery.

While not directly reparations projects, nurses in Baltimore are calling Johns Hopkins to account for its hounding of low-income, primarily African American patients for medical debt that is likely covered under reduced or charity care. [19]  Milwaukee students launched the Marquette University Neighborhood Kitchen, which turns unused food from dining halls into healthy meals for community members in need. [20] Residents in Buffalo are developing a community land trust to reduce housing inflation, as the Niagara Medical Campus continues to encroach into the predominantly Black Fruit Belt neighborhood.[21]

Ultimately, reparations have extended far beyond slavery. Higher education continues to shape the life changes of the largely working-class neighborhoods and communities of color that surround today’s campuses. As the “Yale: Pay Your Fair Share” campaign demonstrated, the prosperity of today’s universities can’t be disentangled from the despair in which they sit. Reparations has become not simply a call to reckon with the past alone but a beacon to chart the course for a shared future. 

[1] See, Hawkins, “Yale Comes Under Fire at Budget Meeting;” Thomas Breen, “Rally Demands Yale, YNHH Pay ‘Fair Share,’” New Haven Independent (May 26, 2020); and Ko Lyn Cheang, “Respect Caravan Clogs Downtown Streets,” New Haven Independent (July 29, 2020).

[2] Kris Manjapra, “How the Long Fight for Slavery Reparations is Slowly Being Won,” The Guardian (October 6, 2020); Patrick Jonsson, “Reparations is a Nonstarter in Congress. Not in this Southern City,” Christian Science Monitor (August 5, 2020); Tera Hunter, “When Slaveowners Got Reparations,” New York Times (April 16, 2019).

[3] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014).

[4] Peter Dixon, “U.S. Cities and States are Discussing Reparations for Black Americans,” The Washington Post (August 24, 2020); Neil Vigdor, “North Carolina City Approves Reparations for Black Residents,” New York Times (July 16, 2020); Vivian McCall, “Evanston Crows Celebrates ‘Bold’ Reparations Plan,” WBEZ (December 12, 2019)

[5] Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, 2006 and Pam Belluck, “Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade,” New York Times (March 13, 2004).

[6] Craig Steven Wilder. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

[7] Ryan Di Corpo, “Georgetown Reparations Plan for Slaves Sold by University Draws Criticism from Students,” America Magazine (November 4, 2019) and Adeel Hassan, “Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund,” New York Times (April 12, 2019). 

[8] Julia Piper, “New Role: Taking an Unblinking Look at a University’s Past,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 13, 2019); “University Consortium Addresses History of Slavery and Its Continuing Impact,” Higher Education Today: Blog of American Council on Education (October 3, 2018); Corinne Ruff, “Many Colleges Profited from Slavery. What Can They Do About It Now?” Chronicle of Higher Education (April 19, 2016)

[9] Sharon Stein, “A Colonial History of Higher Education Present: Rethinking Land-Grant Institutions Through Processes of Accumulation and Relations of Conquest,” Critical Studies in Education (2017), 4 and Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land Grab Universities High Country News (March 30, 2020).

[10] Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, Beyond the Land Acknowledgement: College “LAND BACK” or Free Tuition for Native Students, (August 2020).

[11] Barbara Ransby, “The White Left Needs to Embrace Black Leadership,” The Nation (July 2, 2020)

[12] Caine Jordan, Guy Emerson Mount, and Kai Parker, "'A disgrace to all slaveholders': The University of Chicago's Founding Ties to Slavery and the Path to Reparations," Journal of African American History 103:1-2 (Winter/Spring 2018); John Boyer, The University of Chicago: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

[13] Curtis Black, “Obama center community benefits agreement gains traction as Jackson Park site controversy continues,” Chicago Reporter (Nov. 21, 2019). Audrey Henderson, “Will Obama’s Presidential Center Invigorate or Gentrify Chicago’s South Side,” Next City (March 18, 2019); Ariel Zibler, “Obama Presidential Center will pay $10 for 99-year lease set to approve building plans,” Daily Mail (Sept. 19, 2018); Benjamin Schneider, “The Obama Center,” CityLab (June 8, 2018); Edward McClelland, “Meet the Community Organizers Fighting Against…Barack Obama,” Politico (Feb 28, 2018)Brad Subramaniam, “City Allocates $4.5 Million to Housing Plan for Woodlawn,” Chicago Maroon (March 3, 2020); Sara Freund, “How city officials propose to preserve Woodlawn’s affordable housing,” Curbed Chicago (Feb 26, 2020); Christian Belanger, “Lightfoot unveils proposed affordable housing ordinance in letter to Woodlawn residents,” Hyde Park Herald (Feb. 25, 2020); and A.D. Quig, “City Grabbing Land Near Obama Library,” Crain’s Chicago Business (Jan. 6, 2020).

[14] John Sloan, “The Modern Campus Police: An Analysis of Their Evolution, Structure, and Function,” American Journal of Police 11.2 (Jan. 1992) and Jared E. Knowles. Policing the American University. Civilytics Consulting, 2020; Nathalie Baptiste, “Campus Cops: Authority Without Accountability,” American Propsect (Nov. 2, 2015)

[15] Brandon Soderberg, “What a Private Police Force Would Mean for Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore,” The Real News Network (March 13, 2018) and “Opposition Grows to Hopkins Armed, Private Police Force Proposal,” The Real News Network (Feb. 21, 2019); Bruce DePuyt, “Senator on Hopkins bill: ‘It’s akin to establishing a Vatican City within Baltimore,’” Maryland Matters (Feb. 21, 2019).

[16] Jonah Newman, “U. of C. police shooting came at time of increased stops, continued disparities,” Chicago Reporter (April 6, 2018); “University of Chicago to release data on stops and arrests by campus police,” Chicago Reporter (April 13, 2015) and “New data supports old accusations of racial profiling by University of Chicago Police Department,” Chicago Reporter (April 5, 2016). Also see, Aaron Gettinger, “UCPD pedestrian, traffic stops involve disproportionate number of blacks, minorities,” Hyde Park Herald (July 3, 2018).   

[17] Jonah Charlton and Kylie Cooper, “‘Fire Rush, defund UPPD, pay PILOTs’: Over 100 Gather to Protest Police Violence,” The Daily Pennsylvanian (July 24, 2020) and Genesis Qu, “UCLA Faculty Criticize Decision to Let LAPD use Jackie Robinson Stadium,” Daily Bruin (August 14, 2020). Also see, Julia Barajas, “At Some U.S. Universities, a Time to Rethink Cops on Campus,” Los Angeles Times (July 9, 2020) and Michael Sainato, “US Students Call on Universities to Dismantle and Defund Campus Policing,” The Guardian (June 24, 2020) and

[18] Kate Ryan, “Johns Hopkins University Delays Plans for Campus Police Force,” WTOP News (June 12, 2020); Maryland Matters Staff, “Full Statement Here: Hopkins to Put off Establishment of Police Force for at Least 2 Years,” Maryland Matters (June 12, 2020); and Jacob Took, “Abolish, Not Delay: Opposition to Proposed ‘Pause’ on Johns Hopkins Private Police Force Grows,” Baltimore Beat (June 13, 2020). Also see, Gillian Flaccus, “Portland State Disarms Campus Police After Black Man’s Death,” Yahoo.com (August 12, 20200 and Meerah Powell, “PSU to Disarm Campus Police Officers this Fall,” OPB (August 13, 2020).

[19] Taking Neighbors to Court: Johns Hopkins Medical Debt Lawsuits. AFL-CIO/National Nurses United/Coalition for a Humane Hopkins (May 2019).

[20] Mary Schmitt and Tracy Staedter, “Sharing Hope,” Marquette Magazine (April 30, 2020). 

[21] Oscar Perry Abello, “Buffalo Neighborhood Takes Control of Fight Against Displacement,” Next City (July 26, 2016); Rising Tide: A Blueprint for Community Benefits from the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. Buffalo: Community First Alliance, 2016; Karen Robinson, “First Land Trust Effort in Fruit Belt is Growing, but so is Skepticism,” The Buffalo News (March 8, 2018); “A Plan that Bears Fruit: A Community Land Trust and Other Tools for Neighborhood Revitalization in the Fruit Belt,” Partnership for the Public Good (June 22, 2016).

Davarian L. Baldwin is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Founding Director of the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of the forthcoming In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021); Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC, 2007) and co-editor (with Minkah Makalani) of the essay collection, Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (University of Minnesota, 2013).  

(c) 2020 Davarian L. Baldwin