USS welcomes Columbia University!

On February 13, 2017, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger officially accepted our invitation to join the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium. We are so excited to have Columbia University on board. If you have not seen the fine work done by Professor Eric Foner,  Lecturer Thai Jones, and now Professor Karl Jacoby, please visit their impressive website, Columbia University and Slavery.

Since 2015, those professors have been leading students on research about the institution’s historical entanglement in human bondage. As professor Foner says, “We hope that this website, very much a work in progress, will contribute to public understanding of the key role slavery has played in our nation’s history and offer an example to other institutions of higher learning as they pursue their own investigations.” We agree and hope that the collegial collaboration of multiple institutions both encourages schools already doing this work to think differently about their projects and spurs other universities to participate.