Vindicating Yale Bogus slave accusations

Last August, with Yale in the midst of preparations for its huge 300th-birthday bash, three graduate students dropped a bomb on the university in the form of a report, entitled "Yale, Slavery and Abolition." To cause maximum damage, they coordinated with the New York Times, which published a story on the report the same day it was released.

The authors, Antony Dugdale, J. J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, set out to expose Yale's slave-holding roots and early dependence on slave-trading money, to paint Yale as a bastion of pro-slavery thought, and to tarnish the reputations of Yale's founders and leading men. Among these latter, they focused their scrutiny on Timothy Dwight, Christian minister and president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, charging him with supporting American slavery and owning slaves. But they also saved some fire for other pro-slavers lurking in the dark recesses of Yale's past, among them the men after whom nine of Yale's twelve residential colleges are named.

The report, and the biased coverage of it in the New York Times, set Yale atwitter. Dwight Hall, a breeding-ground of socialist/leftist "social justice" groups named after Timothy Dwight, considered changing its name. Reparations activists, local and national, cheered gleefully. University officials made a lame attempt to defend the school.

But since the initial bombshell, facts have emerged showing the graduate students' scholarship to be shoddy and biased, and calling their motives into question. Most recently, The Yale Standard, a campus Christian publication, has published a vindication of Timothy Dwight and other Yale worthies tarred by Dugdale and his cohorts. It has also come to light that the report was part of a public-relations war against Yale waged by GESO, the shrill and coercive graduate-student union that is the bugbear of the Yale administration. All three of the authors of the report are actively involved in GESO, and Dugdale acknowledged working on the report during his paid time for Locals 34 and 35 (the union groups that have joined GESO's fight to organize graduate students). In the Yale Daily News, the moderately liberal student paper, Yale president Richard Levin linked the report to upcoming union negotiations, saying, "This report and other interventions in city politics are . . . often part of the environment created prior to negotiations."

The vindication of Yale and Timothy Dwight in The Yale Standard does not concern itself with union negotiations or the details of this hidden agenda. The author, Marena Fisher, wants to set the record straight and expose the "patently slipshod scholarship" of Dugdale et al. This "counter-report" is meticulously documented and may become an important weapon in the university's public-relations arsenal when it becomes the next national institution targeted for shakedown by reparationists. The vindication lists a few of the blatant historical inaccuracies in the report, which has a seven-year-old Timothy Dwight executing the will and selling the slaves of his grandparents, Jonathan and Sarah Edwards. Even more laughable is the graduation date given for abolitionist Leonard Bacon-1783-a full nineteen years before his birth.

The Yale Standard also debunks the more serious falsehoods contained in the report, such as that Dwight defended southern slavery, despised American blacks, and himself held slaves. Quite to the contrary, Dwight condemned slavery in the strongest terms in sermons and other writings, joined the first antislavery society in Connecticut (his signature is prominent on a copy of its 1792 constitution), mentored Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) and many other abolitionists, and bought a black woman in order to set her free. In fact, as The Yale Standard points out, Dwight could more rightfully be used as a supporter of reparations: "It is in vain to alledge," wrote Dwight, "that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we. . . . We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. . . . To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse."

The Yale Standard's "Special Report" also tells the stories of some of the many Yale men who were responsible for turning public opinion against slavery and abolishing the "peculiar institution" in America. One of them, Manasseh Cutler, is credited with influencing Congress to include an article in the Northwest Ordinance (1787) that outlawed the transportation of slaves into the Northwest Territory.

The counter-report comes just in time for Yale. New Haven activists are spoiling for a fight over reparations for slavery. Their demands are wide-ranging and absurd, among them: 1) that Yale rename those nine colleges; 2) that it set up a fund to provide grants to black-owned non-profits, and no-interest loans to for-profit businesses owned by blacks; and 3) that Yale change the titles of the heads of the residential colleges, who are called masters. (This last is typical of the ignorance of reparationists; the word "master," of course, is taken from the British universities on which the residential-college system is based and has no relation to slave-owners.)

It is only a matter of time before reparations enthusiasts bring a suit against Yale, as they already have against Aetna, FleetBoston, and CSX. While the legal grounds for such suits are scant, these battles are also waged in the court of public opinion. The Yale Standard counter-report will be invaluable to Yale in this arena-and, just as important, it exposes the willful distortion of history that is all too prevalent in the reparations camp.

Good to see your "cold-turkey" treatment to wean you off FR did not work.

YALE DAILY NEWS

GUEST COLUMN | WAYNE HSIEH

Leftist professors blinded by ideology in terrorism debate

As a Yale College graduate in the Class of 2000 and a second-year graduate student in history at the University of Virginia, I have found the undergraduate response to our current crisis heartening. Many undergraduates have vocally supported the war effort in these pages, and I have heard that a solid, if silent, majority of the College realizes that terrorism must be crushed.

But I am dismayed by the faculty's reaction, a reaction that reflects the makeup of America's academic elite. For the last 30 years, the far left has dominated academic life in American universities, especially in the humanities. Conservatives too frequently portray the academic left as being more monolithically malignant than it truly is, but the hegemony of the left has had a deleterious affect on our universities.

And these elites have now started to lecture Americans about the evils of their country and the legitimate grievances of murderous terrorists.

Professors Donald Kagan and Steven Smith have, in these very pages, rebutted these sorts of arguments with more ability than I could ever muster, and I have nothing to add to their cogent arguments.

Instead, I hope to address those undergraduates who already recognize the merit of those arguments and who may be considering academia as a profession. Those undergraduates may feel the need to respond to their country's call, to recognize that patriotism is not a sin, and to realize that love of country is nothing to be ashamed of.

I am sure that many well-educated academics will laugh and snicker at that statement. I say to them:

Laugh all you want. Marx and Foucault may be your heroes, but I prefer older, nobler and more beautiful allegiances. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that Henry Clay "loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country." To love America is to love its noblest ideals, not some abstract political entity.

My parents brought me to this country as an infant when our native Taiwan was still ruled by an authoritarian one-party regime. They built a reasonably comfortable life here while their native land prospered and democratized under the protection of the American government.

America has its flaws, but it is easy to forget that this country has been a force for good in the world more often than not. Look at postwar Europe and Japan, at South Korea and Taiwan, at the sad record of totalitarianism in the 20th century, and tell me that America has only been a force for ill.

For those who agree with me, I want to say this:

Please, if the scholar's life fits you, enter the academy and oppose the leftists who disdain America, who fail to realize the privilege of dissent that they can only have in a society such as ours, and who advocate a policy of appeasement to terror in the name of scholarly sophistication. Raise your voice in opposition to the tenured elites who control the terms of scholarly debate.

Be willing to defy the scholarly dogmas of our day. Test our academic culture's commitment to true dissent. This is our task, our duty -- to make sure that someone will stand up for America in her universities.

Our universities are important. They educate many of our future citizens and serve as the guardians of our nation's culture and history. We cannot abandon them to our opponents.

Always remember that good scholarship rises above politics and take heart in this when you feel isolated and exposed. The most intelligent of your ideological foes will respect your work if it shows merit. Remember to do the same with their work and simply ignore all the rest who reject reason. But most importantly, always keep faith in both your convictions and your country.

Link to article HERE

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There's still hope for America, and for Yale.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.