The New York Times reports that the historic college has a complex history with slavery.
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In August, the university announced the reopening of the Mulledy Hall, a residential building that held the name of a Catholic priest and former Georgetown president, Thomas Mulledy, who sold 272 slaves to fund the university almost two centuries ago.
WASHINGTON-Georgetown University apologized on Thursday for its historical links to slavery and said it would give an admissions edge to descendants of slaves whose sale in the 19th century helped pay off the USA school’s debts.
Georgetown’s fellow Ivy League universities, Brown and Harvard, and the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, have publicly recognized their ties to the slave trade, but have not gone so far to give preferential status in admissions to the descendants of slaves.
See the university’s report below.
The planned steps have been heavily influenced by the suggestions of the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation – a crew of students, administrators and alumni formed by the university in the fall of 2015 who were tasked with tracing the role that slavery played in Georgetown’s history.
The university sold 272 slaves in 1838 to pay off debt and save the school from financial trouble.
Descendants of the slaves will be included in a group advising on the memorial. ” Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said in an open letter”.
DeGioia’s plan, which builds on the recommendations of the committee that he convened previous year, represents the university’s first systematic effort to address its roots in slavery. The sold slaves were taken from Maryland and moved to Louisiana.
A university report recommending the policy also calls on Georgetown officials to issue a formal apology for the school’s participation in the slave trade.
For a college that charges its students an average of $50,000 a year for tuition, I think not-and neither does The New York Times.
Georgetown’s plans to address its history go beyond initiatives other schools have enacted to deal with their pasts, the Times said. Almost two centuries have passed since the university benefited from the sale of almost 300 slaves, The New York Times reports, and now administrators plan to incorporate preferential admission treatment for those whose ancestors were enslaved.
Only recently did the details of its slavery past come to light, but the university has taken the lead in confronting its past.
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The oldest Jesuit and Catholic educational institution in the United States with a teaching hospital on its main campus, it is also one of the country’s wealthiest universities.
