Harvard Repatriations and the Responsibility of Guilt

People walk outside Harvard Law School's Langdell Hall at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on May 10, 2010. Darren McCollest er/Getty Images

Commentary

Harvard University is the latest of America’s elite colleges to establish a fund to redress the burden of guilt it says it bears for the legacy of slavery. In doing so, it joins a consortium of 50 other colleges that pledged to address the stain of slavery and the role it played in the lives of their institutions. These colleges clearly believe that because some very bad things happened in the past—such as slavery—we remain somehow responsible for the bad actions of our forebears.