IN a poem dated 1767, an enslaved teenager in Boston who would soon become an internationally recognized poet addresses the institution she calls “the University of Cambridge in New England.” Phillis Wheatley, later Phillis Peters, writes:
“While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,
The muses promise to assist my pen;
‘Twas not long since I left my native shore…
Students, to you ‘tis giv'n to scan the heights
Above, to traverse the ethereal space,
And mark the systems of revolving worlds….
Improve your privileges while they stay…
Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul,
By you be shun'd, nor once remit your guard…
An Ethiop tells you ‘tis your greatest foe;
Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain,
And in immense perdition sinks the soul.”
Hailing Harvard's all-white, all-male population as her “students,” Wheatley presents her lesson to them through a series of subversive reversals. She juxtaposes the cold privilege of their formal learning with the “intrinsic ardor” of her poetic production, describing their time at Harvard as a “transient sweetness” beset with sin, possibly a sly allusion to the university's entwinement with the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. She warns these Harvard men that their good fortune may be fleeting and even lead to eternal damnation, a change in station that her lines place alongside a mention of the “revolving worlds” of astronomy, but also potentially of revolution.
Harvard University now openly acknowledges its involvement in the global networks through which this particular African child was stolen from her home and brought to Boston, to live in the shadow of an elite institution that not only categorically excluded her as a student and profited from the system of her enslavement, but also created intellectual infrastructures to justify it. Ill-gotten wealth built the academy, and the academy bent the project of knowledge itself to the service of white supremacy and genocide.
And yet her salvo from outside the gates seems preternaturally confident of the challenge she might pose to the university by mastering and wielding its discourses – in this case Christian homiletics and neoclassical verse. Today, her name and her poetry are known at every institution of higher learning in the region. In fact, you can find my office at UMass Boston in Wheatley Hall. This is certainly a fitting tribute and a meaningful gesture of repair on the symbolic front, but the financial realities, material legacies, and physical remains of historical injustice constitute very live and defining conflicts for every college and university in New England in the present.
These issues are not limited to the Ivies, nor to any single historical thread, and there is no inevitable arc of progress out of educational injustice. With the Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action admissions just over one year old, the Boston Globe reported in September that at the eleven most competitive colleges in Massachusetts, Black first-year student enrollment dropped on average forty percent, falling for example from eleven to three percent at Amherst College, from fourteen to five percent at MIT. Early in the second Trump presidency, the effects of a ban on diversity initiatives for institutions that receive federal funds are yet unknown.
But recent years have also proven that the university remains a hotbed of protest, a place where conflicting ideologies can and indeed are supposed to struggle, where the weight of accumulated knowledge and privilege contends with the rebellious will to uncover and to know. We can no longer imagine higher education in New England as a singularly enlightened, virtuous bastion in a uniquely liberal region, but we can make it the site of a consequential, ongoing reckoning. We offer a special forum in this issue as part of that important effort, drawn from work presented at our fall symposium co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Historical Society on the topic of racial histories of higher education in New England.
Thank you for reading.