Halfway to Anywhere: Reassessing the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Almost one year has elapsed since its disastrous debut, yet the mission of Brown University’s committee on slavery and justice remains unclear. Is the controversial committee a good-faith attempt to instruct the campus community in the virtues of disinterested dialogue, as university officials insist, or is Brown flirting with yet another intellectual fad, as many conservatives suspect?

On March 13, The New York Times reported that Brown had convened a committee to undertake “an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for the past.” In support of this claim the article quoted President Ruth Simmons: “If the committee comes back and says, ‘Oh it’s been lovely and we’ve learned a lot,’ but there’s nothing in particular that they think Brown can do or should do, I will be very disappointed.” There is no possible interpretation of this statement that is not favorable to some version of reparations.

Contrast that with President Simmons writing in The Boston Globe in late April: “The committee’s work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past.”

The latter quotation conjures up in the mind of the innocent reader an image of be-speckled professors and bow-tied students sifting through the dusty recesses of history in search of truth. Yet the committee is much more than a grand historical inquest. It is, after all, designated as the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Does not the suffix “justice” suggest some sort of corrective action in the present such as reparations?

To be sure, President Simmons’s editorial in The Globe precludes the possibility that the final committee report will actually specify how and to whom Brown should pay reparations. But there is also no doubt that the committee will examine the idea of reparations even if it does not actually recommend that Brown itself pay reparations. As President Simmons herself conceded in a recent interview with The Brown Spectator, “As to whether the committee will consider the idea of reparations, I am sure that it will.”

The committee schedule confirms the centrality of reparations studies to its work: for the first semester the committee will review the history of slavery in America, then it will turn to comparative studies of how other societies have addressed their own legacies of social injustice, culminating in the fall of 2005 with one whole semester dedicated to the topic of reparations. Cynics suggest that the committee is actually a preemptive move by Brown to avoid paying reparations. They point to the nine reparations lawsuits filed against FleetBoston, Aetna, J. P. Morgan Chase, and other companies in 2002. Attorneys involved in these cases listed Brown as one of the probable defendant in future lawsuits.