Culture Watch: Legacy Admissions.(Yale Univeristy, and other schools, are finding alumni ties to the slavery of the past)(Brief Article)

A controversy over nomenclature at Yale University has spun into a broad discussion of America's national purpose, and the role of slavery, past and present.

The germ of the spat at Yale is the fact that one of its twelve residential colleges is named for a famous alumnus, John C. Calhoun (class of 1804). How could a modern liberal university enshrine the Cicero of the slave power? Upon examination, it turned out that most of the other 18th- and early 19th-century worthies who were namesakes of Yale's colleges-northerners all-had also owned slaves.

This embarrassing fact led back to others. All 13 colonies, and their successor states, north and south, permitted slavery. Even after slavery in the North ended, northern merchants and manufacturers were heavily invested in transporting and processing slaves and slave-picked crops.

David Brion Davis, one of the nation's premier historians of slavery, and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, published an essay in the New York Times tying the threads together, and arguing that America has only in recent decades emerged from an amnesiac period of ignoring "slavery's centrality" in its history. Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore and a Yale trustee, then asked whether this centrality meant that America should now pay reparations to slaves' descendants (he thought not).

Universities, and people generally, should be mindful of history. That includes not overcorrecting. By focusing on pre-Civil War foreign policy, Davis can write that the "one" antislavery act ...