Harvard acknowledges history of slavery and eugenics

哈佛大学承认与奴隶制历史联系，设立1亿美元基金“赎罪”

An internal committee commissioned by Harvard University has published an exhaustive inquiry into the prestigious school’s history and ties to slavery and the study of eugenics, university president Lawrence Bacow announced on Tuesday, adding that the school was setting aside $100 million to “make amends” for its past transgressions.

哈佛大学校长劳伦斯·巴科4月26日宣布，哈佛大学委托的一个内部委员会公布了一份详尽的调查报告，调查这所名校历史上与奴隶制和优生学研究的联系。他还表示，该校将拨出1亿美元用于“弥补”其曾经的过错。

Harvard profited from “the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage,” the report, published on Tuesday by the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, revealed.

哈佛大学奴隶制遗产委员会4月26日发布的报告称，哈佛从“通过奴隶贸易积累财富的捐赠者的慈善行为中获利；从加勒比岛屿和美国南部种植园中的奴隶的劳动中获利；从奴役奴隶种植棉花的北方纺织制造业中获利。”

Indeed, “more than a third of the money donated to or promised to Harvard by private individuals came from just five men who made their fortunes from slavery and slave-produced commodities,” including cotton, the report found.

报告发现，事实上，“私人捐赠或承诺捐赠给哈佛大学的资金超过三分之一来自五个人，他们通过奴隶制和奴隶生产的棉花等商品发家致富”。

Bacow initially formed the committee in 2019 in order to probe the school’s “historic ties to slavery - direct, financial, and intellectual.” Its report found that from 1636 to 1783, the school enslaved 70 people, some of whom were responsible for caring for the university’s presidents, professors and students.

该委员会成立于2019年，目的是调查哈佛大学“与奴隶制的历史联系——包括直接的、经济的和知识层面的联系”。报告发现，从1636年到1783年，学校奴役了70人，其中一些人负责照顾学校校长、教授和学生。

Harvard didn’t just benefit from slavery - it took concrete steps to quash abolitionist sentiment on campus, according to the committee, which made a point of countering the popular narrative that places New England at the center of the “antislavery moment” and in particular casts Harvard’s home state of Massachusetts as a “hotbed of opposition to slavery.”

据该委员会称，哈佛不仅从奴隶制中受益，还采取了具体措施压制校园里的废奴主义情绪。该委员会特别反驳了将新英格兰视为"反奴隶制"中心的流行说法，尤其是将哈佛大学所在的马萨诸塞州视为 "废奴制的温床"。

Harvard’s medical school admitted three black students in 1850 but subsequently expelled them following complaints from white students and alumni, and only admitted an average of three black students per year as late as 1940, according to the report, which noted that Harvard was still promoting the study of eugenics - central to World War II-era “race sciences” - at the time. Harvard’s women’s college, Radcliffe, denied housing to its few black students.

哈佛大学医学院在1850年录取了三名黑人学生，但随后在白人学生和校友的投诉下将他们开除，据该报告称，截至1940年，哈佛大学平均每年只录取三名黑人学生。报告指出，哈佛当时仍在推动优生学研究（二战时期“种族科学”的核心）。哈佛女子学院拉德克利夫学院拒绝为少数黑人学生提供住房。

Additionally, Harvard Law School’s first professorship was established with the profits of the slave trade in the form of a bequest from Isaac Royall Jr., a rich slave merchant who left the school a hefty sum in his will in 1781. The university incorporated elements of the family’s coat of arms into its law school seal, an issue which became controversial in 2016, leading to the retirement of the seal and Royall’s denunciation as “the son of an Antiguan slaveholder known to have treated his slaves with extreme cruelty.”

此外，哈佛大学法学院的第一个教授职位是用奴隶贸易赚取的财富——来自富有的奴隶商人小艾萨克·罗亚尔的一笔遗赠——设立的，罗亚尔在1781年的遗嘱中赠予哈佛一笔巨款。哈佛大学将该家族的徽章元素纳入其法学院的印章，这在2016年引发争议，导致法学院印章被弃用。罗亚尔因是“一个安提瓜奴隶主的儿子”而被抨击，这个臭名昭著的奴隶主“以极端残忍的方式对待他的奴隶”。

Many such problematic “early benefactors” left their names on buildings and professorships and their images in statues sprinkled throughout campus, according to the report, which found that “the color line held at Harvard” despite the official collapse of slavery following the Civil War. Harvard’s longest-serving president and other prominent academics were key figures in the study of eugenics, a pseudoscience used to justify racial segregation in the US and abroad.

报告称，许多有问题的“早期赞助者”在哈佛大学的建筑和教授职位上留名，而他们的雕塑也遍布校园。报告发现，尽管美国内战后奴隶制正式瓦解，但“哈佛的肤色线”依然存在。哈佛大学任期最长的校长和其他著名学者是优生学研究的关键人物。优生学是一门伪科学，用于为美国和其他国家的种族隔离辩护。

The report calls on the university to "identify, engage, and support" direct descendants of enslaved workers early in the university's history, which included Black and Native American slaves. The primary recommendation was to offer increased access to educational opportunities, while also attempting to reach broader groups that have largely been excluded from attending Harvard.

该报告呼吁，大学应该“识别、雇佣并资助”其历史早期奴工的直系后裔，包括黑人与原住民，并建议提供更多教育机会，以及尝试触及一般情况下无法就读于哈佛大学的更大群体。

The report recommends a closer partnership between Harvard and historically Black colleges and universities, in part through the creation of a new “Du Bois Scholars Program," to subsidize semester, summer or yearlong visits from HBCU students to Harvard.

报告建议，哈佛大学要与传统的黑人学院和大学（HBCU）建立更紧密的合作。其部分目标将通过创建新的“杜波依斯学者计划”实现，后者对HBCU学生在哈佛的学期、暑假或全年访学提供补贴。

“Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral,” Bacow wrote in his letter accompanying the report, arguing the school bears “a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society.”

巴科在报告随附信件中写道：“哈佛从极其不道德的做法中受益，并在某种程度上延续了这些做法。”他认为，哈佛“有道德责任尽我们所能解决这些历史做法对个人、哈佛和社会的持续腐蚀性影响”。

来源：今日俄罗斯，福布斯新闻网

编辑：董静

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