Harvard president apologizes for comparing wealthy Ivy League donors to Civil War slaves
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Harvard’s president has backtracked from comments made last week where he compared the school’s affluent alumni donor base to 19th-century slaves.
In remarks made to members of the university’s staff, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow was discussing the new ways for donors to contribute to the university's schools. Individual schools don't "own" donors, he emphasized, just as the 13th amendment near the end of the Civil abolished ownership of slaves.
His intention, the school president said in an email to the administration over the weekend, was that donors should not feel bound or pressured to give to the Ivy League institution’s individual schools from which they graduated. Rather, his hope is they will also give to other departments, such as the College of Education, which struggles to attract wealthy donors.
Upsetting his audience “was certainly not my intent,” Bacow said.
“People, appropriately, have high expectations for their leaders and their choice of language. In fact, you have high expectations for me as your president,” Bacow wrote. “I promise to learn from this experience.”
Harvard was recently ranked as the best higher education institution in the nation by The Wall Street Journal. It has the largest endowment in the nation, nearly $39 billion.
At the start of the semester, during Harvard’s traditional Morning Prayers, Bacow discussed the importance of communicating about differences rather than building barriers because of them.
“How can we profess to be seekers of veritas, seekers of truth, if we shame and shun those who disagree with us?” Bacow said during the semester's opening Morning Prayers. “How can we urge forbearance and generosity in others if we are unwilling to practice it ourselves? How can we have any hope for the wider world if we cannot model in our community the reasoned debate and discourse we wish to see elsewhere?”
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