Laughing before you said 10 years ago when you first started you had hair. Guest not a lot but i had hair. Host what started you down the road to actually put it ebony and ivy together . Guest its actually a long story that i can make short. I had just been moving from one job to another in a teaching position and i had just finished a book project and i started out on what i thought was going to be simple book, simple article actually. I was just going to explain how black abolitionist got their education given the fact that they were excluded by race from american colleges. I was just going to tell the story and some of them went to europe. Some of them went to new england and studied privately. Some of them studied privately in the atlantic and they became ministers and teachers and doctors and all sorts of things. But in fact one of the things i got more interested in if they started that project was why they were excluded from these colleges and universities. These colleges in fact have a long history with live people on campus as enslaved people but not as students. They also had a long history with native americans and at the very time black students were excluded native American Students have been on campus from 200 years. Host native American Students have been on campus doing what . Guest as students. Host how is it that they were able to be on campuses . You write about that. Guest in fact thats at the beginning of the book and if you think about it the first attempts to build a college for native American Students is 210 years before the first attempt to build the look college in the first native american graduate College Graduates almost 200 years before the first black graduate school. The first minister ordained before the first black and that sounds like native americans or provision in fact put of the story i tell him the book the role of the university. Its precisely the role of the university and colonialism that explains the early prisons of native americans on campuses and that role that explains how universities turn to the slave trade to fund their enterprise. Host when you say the conquest, from what i was reading part of the conquest was this thing of these are savages. These are people that are inferior and we have to educate them or train them or somehow make them on savage like and im speaking in reference to the native americans. Guest that belief was that that the belief was that the goal, the application was to bring in gospel, to bring the bible to untutored peoples and to civilize them in that way. But in fact thats civilizing project went handinhand with conquest and handinhand with Torit Torrealba expansion in one of the things that was surprising to me as i started the book was really the quiet roll the colleges played in early colonial period area, great beneficiary of the american college. The american colleges and universities helps take me as a kid with a single mother raising three kids all by yourself from Brooklyn New York and turned me into a College Professor with tenure. Guest you and your sister who is an m. D. Guest my sister is it easy attrition right here in d. C. And you know so i have always thought of Higher Education and colleges and universities as these benevolent institutions, these institutions that do good things if we can get access to them. And with the Research Began to expose was this other role that universities can play. Universities can be in my mind weapons of social justice but what shocked me when i started doing the research was that they could also be weapons of social destruction. Host and otway . Guest they could actually play a huge part in undermining the integrity of native american nations and civilizations. One of the things i write about in the first chapter is the desire to christianize the native people leads to several attempts to build colleges but virtually all of the early colonial colleges have as a primary mission the education of native peoples. But that has all sorts of impact on native society. It means that they are going to be generational divisions between parents and children. It means that youngsters who are brought into the Christian Education system are going to be tutored in english and only happen fact the remnants of native culture in native language. Host in the book ebony and ivy you talk about the type of chasm that might hit and created an as it relates to intergenerational conflict. Guest i touch on it in the first chapters of the book and try to show the ways in which the early colleges actually had a very militaristic role. They were part of the goal, part of their purpose was to help achieve the strategic aims of the columnists. This is the right word. We often deploy education and we deploy schools in the colonial world to soften the resistance of native peoples to europeans. Host lets fastforward to then the whole issue of slavery because the one thing that catches obviously peoples attention and critics have talked about this is how the slavery funded these College Campuses. It funded and built these campuses and who were these individuals that built the harvards, the gales, the browns . I think many of us may remember the headlines of Brown University that started with a studied there. How much of that had an impact on what was then ebony and ivy . Guest it actually had a great impact. I was four or five years into this project when Brown University released its report and the former president of ground courageously and in the face of great criticism and great criticism from her own constituents. Host her board of trustees and her alumni. Guest she courageously articulated the purpose of Higher Education which is this didnt start free and the pursuit of all of these other arenas we also have to truth in our own histories. The brown report meant a lot to me because i was four or five years into this project and it was a massive undertaking. It was about 2006 when i realized just how big this was, how much time is going to take and how many years it was going to take and there was a part of me that it to go forward with it. Host why . Guest it just seemed enormous and it wasnt clear that you know five years later or 10 years later i would actually be done with a coherent book of what it seemed i would have more and more information. At that time the book wasnt here in my head yet am what i feared was the amount of material that there was to go through, the number of places that i would have to go. Host such as . Guest the project took me from you know quebec city in canada to the carolinas along the east coast to scotland and england, to holland. Host lets start with those that are the furthest away. Why scotland . I could understand england but why scotland, bring people up to an understanding. Why would it look on race race slavery in the troubled history of american universities, why scotland . Guest its in the sections about racial phot. Scotland is a tremendous influence on the lives of colonial north america and ultimately on the United States as a nation. Scottish immigrants are the Largest Group of free people. Host is that where the word redneck came from . Guest this was the Largest Group of free people to cross the atlantic before the American Revolution. They were failing in places like pennsylvania backcountry, the carolinas, westward toward kentucky towards georgia and with this enormous migration all comes of daschle also comes the Scottish Universities who played a key role in helping to modernize the colonial american colleges both stood spanish faculty you come to teach and scottish memories and loads of American Students, colonial students who had to scotland to study science and medicine and then come back to north america to do things like for instance establish the first medical schools in the north american colonies, established by a american colonial students in places like new jersey and philadelphia who would head have off to scotland. Host now the scottish and correct me if im wrong, they are one of the principle players in the slave trade bill werent they . Guest they are not the usual suspects that you look at. Theres a trade that comes out of scotland just like theres a trade that comes out of the small towns and we have to remember small towns like bristol. We have to remember how massive the slave trade is including with the book is about in many ways is actually the enormously of the african trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. The ways of the trade shape the Atlantic World and that constituted the economy that connected europe to the americas to africa to south america and created in fact it transoceanic trade part of which the United States was involved with. Host in terms of building these campuses, who were these founders of these universities . Were the slave traders . Guest they are largely ministers from the various denominations. Remember the colonial schools are denominational schools. So there is puritan harvard and there is Baptist Brown and episcopalian columbia which is then the Kings College. There is the dutch reformed college which is now and theres the Presbyterian College of new jersey which is now princeton. These are actually too combinational schools. They are schools that emerge out of the church communion. And then once they are established and as you establish them you need money to do it. A lot of the money, the first source of funds will be england, the columnists will turn to england. Guest why would they want to run the schools . Guest that is one of the real problems. I jokingly described to myself is that was working, whether the english want to give the puritans money to establish a school in new england in massachusetts when in fact actually getting rid of the puritans was a great goal. So theres not necessarily warm friendly relations between the puritans and the Anglican Church but this is where we get a too native American History and were native americans become key. The american colonists were really quite skillful at raising money using the evangelization of native people as the goal. And so sending off missionaries are emissaries to england and raising money under the claim that they were evangelizing native American People in the americas the first part building in harvard is the indian and that is where the donations are coming from. Host this goes back to what you are saying earlier. This allows the expansion of the colonial. Guest it facilitates the expansion and economic expansion and facilitates territorial expansion. Then it accelerates. The crumbling of native society on the frontiers and on the borders. Host they are not quote unquote save slaveowners but eventually after independence. Guest even before. Host the dude turned to slaveholders. Guest they turn pretty quickly so these are religious schools to begin with and they are religious schools, very quickly they have to figure out the sources of hunting. One source is going to be europr and raising money often under the claim that one is evangelizing native americans. The other source of money they have available to them is the pricing population of colonial elites, people who actually have money within the colonies and in particular both in england and the americas that is made up of slave traders who are operating out of places like barbados and jamaica. Many of them actually live our absentee landlords who live in england and manage their plantations from afar. Host often sending children. Sometimes as i have read the oldest male children might go to the militaries are the oldest might go to own the land in the middle child of the next youngest goes off to college. For the extended shipping voyages. Theres reasons why they do this, but the american schools, the colonial schools quickly begin to also turn to the population of increasingly wealthy man and families. With interest in the americas. They began to advertise themselves actually to these classes at institutions of their own making and on design that can cater to their children more efficiently. I use several examples of this. One of the more famous as john leavitt would become the scott, a minister from scotland, becomes the president of what is now princeton university. One of the first things he does when you message country princeton shortly after. One of the chapels is named after it, in which he says the name has come to imply great wealth. Then he goes on to promise that if they send their boys to princeton will be well taken care of. And guided unsupervised entering into substantial and responsible young men. But if you send them off to england, theres british universities too large and too decentralized to give them that kind of attention. What hes really telling is the potential of the american colonies to serve themselves and the potential of the institutions cater to the needs of the colonial elite. The colonial elite is largely a product of the slave trade. Slave trading merchant of large plantation owners in the caribbean and american south. We read across the review says most people probably will be for without getting into the meat of ebony ivy. We are talking with her presser craig steven wilder. The books subtitle, ebony ivy race, slavery the troubled history of americas universities, the impression is that please both these universities, not just the money from the slave trade finance them, but was there actually the person of slaves on the universities of harvard, io, print, brown . What capacity related to labor . Guest every capacity related to labor, youd be in think people. Theyre often called a secluded dormitories of the colonial period. They clean up the students. They prepared meals. They collect wood. They gather wood for fires. Theyre in charge of lighting the candles and putting them out in the evening, cleaning them the study rooms and recitation rooms and running errands for the faculty at harvard, io, columbia, princeton many of the College President owned enslaved people and arrived on campus. Within a couple years, is purchased at least two people. One for the main house and one for campus house. Host were these individuals under the ownership of the university inc. . Or were they under the ownership of various professors . Guest the problem is that this kind of a technical issue that is a little bit harder to decipher. For instance, one of the things i looked at as i was exploring the county record in which the counties look at the colonial county record, very often you have enabled the president or the name of their professor in the did with their taxable property will be in enslaved person or two or three. Host did students bring slaves . Guest students breastplates to school. When you look at the name of the president in three lines over part of the property is in lake person. Like a lost and how is for an infinite case of prince and or harbored, youll have the president s name did go to college. Who owns the person . In the Common Knowledge of the local area, the president and college are inseparable anyway. I didnt spend a lot of time trying to decipher that. Its like we see today, is a college town. Guest theyre very much more college town friendly than they are now. Host cambridge to be a college town. Guest the tallest building. They dominate the environment. Host one of the things that i also found fast about ebony ivy is the talk about the slaves who built the campuses and waited on the faculty and the student. Was the curriculum. This White Supremacy that was perpetrated. U. S. A. History teacher, this mustve driven you i dont know how you maintain your selection will sanity. You obviously knew this before. But to have it supported in the Actual Research of this quote, unquote, what we now consider institutions, teaching White Supremacy. I am not trying to sound as if im surprised, but if you said that now about yale or harvard, you know, people with my goodness, when did they start . How did it get charted . Who started it i that because of the people whose target these universities. Guest its in the source of their funding. Remember, as the American Revolution approaches, and tension between the colonies and england increase. The capacity to raise money and england. It is largely taken down at the end of the 17th century. They start using it. I read it in the book is as a native American Military threat in new england to climb, to interest in evangelizing native americans declines with that. Its always been to some extent linked. It doesnt mean it is safe to your desire to christianized then. It was also a strategic interest in evangelizing and christianizing. So absolutely. One of the things that happened that arrested within the book and is related to the question you asked me earlier is students bring slaves to campus . Yes, they do. While they have been married to actually pay fees to house their slaves on campus. At columbia and king college. George washington comes to new york city and jackie slave. The president of colombia, Kings College at the time that jackie dent has been seen as suited to his taste. Show was actually in the smaller bedroom. So yes, these students arrive for slaves to campus. The faculty often have plays. But particularly the chapter about enslaved people on campus is that in late people were in the herbal of the college. To some extent. Guest theyre examples of days to the president s of princeton. And becomes an extraordinarily gifted and biblical scholar to her she is consulted by biblical scholars in the parts of the night dates. And shes largely selftaught. The president who owned her gave her instructions. He instructed her in the president s house and then she continued to study on her own as she got older. Host s let me share something i highlighted. This comes from the chapter. Cotto