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 Fleet Boston, 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.
Yet there is much more than mere self-interest at work here. Consider the recent history of the reparations movement. In 1988, Congress authorized reparations payments to Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II. This emboldened civil rights radicals in their own demands for reparations for slavery.
In 1989, Congressman John Conyers introduced a bill which acknowledged the cruelties of slavery and mandated an investigation into the consequences for the descendants of slaves. And then in 1998, President Clinton offered a quasi-apology to Africans for America’s culpability in the slavery trade. Two years later, activist Randall Robinson published a manifesto, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.
Then came two climatic moments: in 2000 Aetna Inc., a Connecticut company, apologized for its role in slavery, and then followed the barrage of nine lawsuits in 2002. Yet, in January of 2004, a federal judge in Chicago dismissed one of these lawsuits. Barely less than two months later a similar lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa race riots likewise failed due to the statute of limitations.
The reparations movement had collided with legal reality. The threat of a lawsuit against Brown therefore was minimal. Of course, the committee was assembled months before the dismissals, but then again, the public announcement of the committee came later. Clearly, Brown administrators sensed a deeper need for the committee. If anything, the slavery and justice committee has rehabilitated the idea of reparations, endowing it with a measure of academic credibility.
In all fairness, I feel compelled to note that President Simmons, Associate Provost Brenda Allen, and committee chairman Professor James Campbell have all repeatedly asserted in interviews with The Spectator that the work of the committee is an affirmation of the principles of intellectual diversity.
As President Simmons put it, “[t]he Committee’s creation was actually recommended by the deans who correctly saw this as an opportunity to educate students about how to address complex questions.”
Likewise, in perhaps the most concise formulation of the mission statement to date, Campbell told The Spectator that the purpose of the committee was to “open up space for people to start reflecting in comparative and contextual ways” on the question of how societies deal with “legacies of historical injustice.” He also expressed interest in inviting conservatives like Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter as speakers. Yet, as John Adams famously said, facts are stubborn things and there is one inescapable fact that spoils any reasonable hope that the committee will produce intellectually diverse programs for the campus: there is not a single conservative member nor is there even an outspoken moderate.
Of course, in a university in which more than 90 percent of the humanities professors are registered Democrats—as Campbell himself pointed out—this should come as little surprise. Yet does this not merely make it all the more imperative that the committee reach out to conservative professors? It is especially disconcerting that the one committee member who had publicly criticized reparations, historian James Patterson, has since resigned due to conflicts with other academic commitments. It is all the more revealing that even the initial student representation on the committee ranged from the radically liberal president of the College Democrats to the president of the Young Communist League at Brown. In her interview with The Spectator, President Simmons explained that all committee members were chosen primarily on the basis of their “professional and academic expertise.” There is no evidence that consideration was also given to ensuring that the committee reflected a diversity of social and political philosophies.
Why then were so many of those who I interviewed for this article surprised and even offended that conservatives are lamenting the lack of intellectual diversity on the committee? Would they be comfortable if the situation was reversed? Would we expect an intellectually diverse conversation on “slavery and justice” from Bob Jones University were it to convene a similar committee? Lest we forget, Brown is the same place that exploded in a perfect storm of racial animosity after David Horowitz published a polemical advertisement on reparations in the Brown Daily Herald. How are the lessons of the Horowitz controversy being applied to the current situation? When this question was posed to her in The Spectator interview, President Simmons tersely replied that the “Horowitz ad that appeared in The Brown Daily Herald dealt only with the narrow legal issue of reparations. The controversy that ensued was largely about the rights and responsibilities of community members and newspaper editors.”
The wording of her answer indicates that President Simmons misunderstood the question, yet it is telling nonetheless. For conservatives and classical liberals the debate over freedom of speech obscured the deeper issue that was at stake: the dearth of intellectual diversity on campus.
So unaccustomed were students to expressions of conservative thought that they could not even consider their merits without first rethinking the very meaning of freedom of speech. Such was the severity of the situation that the only source of contrarian opinion during Black History Month was a petty newspaper advertisement. And radical students did everything in their power to smother even this whisper of dissidence. As for the university administration, it merely stepped aside and chided The Herald editors.
Brown as an institution has simply not proven itself capable of sustaining a rigorous dialogue on a topic as toxic as slavery reparations. The committee’s final report to President Simmons will likely do everything it can to promote the idea of reparations without actually endorsing reparations. One doubts that the committee will issue a minority report.
