By Catherine Imani
Ever since the news broke that a group of wealthy parents were paying bribes to get their kids into college, the issue of college acceptance at elite schools has moved to the forefront of national conversation. As someone from New England, I’m not ashamed to say I did not realize that bribing a school to ensure a child’s acceptance wasn’t already legal. Growing up, I heard many stories of parents being friends with board members or donating buildings to a school before admission season to ensure their child was accepted.
This is definitely a problem, and it is definitely unfair, but the answer isn’t a screed about how hard it is to navigate college as an Exceptional Marginalized Person, or about how the rich use charity to “cheat.” What we need to do is abolish elite colleges altogether.
I am not anti-education. I support HBCUs in theory and indigenous teaching practices. I believe there should be a formal education system that ensures more specialized skills like medicine or auto mechanics are taught to a reasonable standard. But that does not mean I support the current college system, especially the way elite colleges impact and disproportionately guide national and international politics and policy.
The fact is, more than 60% of Americans do not have a college degree. Globally, over 93% of the world’s population does not have one. In spite of this, all decisions that affect the world—from war, to industry, to food production—are made by people with college degrees, and disproportionately those decision makers are coming from schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. These schools and their legacies are viewed as almost untouchable, even by fellow abolitionists working towards Black liberation. It’s time for that to stop.
Harvard, Yale and Princeton are older than the United States, and have an outsized influence on American History.
Chartered in 1636, 1701, and 1746 respectively, these schools are older than the United States by a considerable amount. From their inception, they were designed to ensure that the 1% of the colonial United States of America would have a place to refine their education and receive guidance on how to think and lead, and they did.
Half of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence had a college degree, with almost 30% of the signers coming from Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Many colonial era government bodies met in Nassau Hall in Princeton, including the Congress of the Confederation—the precursor to our current government.
Even though you do not have to have a degree to be president of the U.S., graduates from these three schools account for almost 40% of U.S. presidents. The first U.S. president to graduate from college, and second president overall, was a Harvard graduate, John Adams, who enacted laws like the Alien and Seditions Act and the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed him to deport legal immigrants and other marginalized people for a variety of previously illegal reasons, all while continuing to uphold African American and Native American genocide. Every president aside from Trump since 1988 went to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, and the sustained oppression of this country shows for it.
Our entire Supreme Court is currently run by Yale graduates. Of the 48 Supreme Court judges with a law degree, 30 went to Harvard or Yale. The violence of this over-representation is especially prevalent in cases that predate law school, such as the landmark Dred Scott decision in 1857. In this court, 2 of the 9 judges did not have a college degree, while 1 of the judges went to Harvard and 2 went to Princeton.
Many other major horrific events in US history were led by graduates of these schools. Some of the main leaders and supporters of the Salem Witch Trials were Harvard educated or connected. Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton graduate and former president, laid the foundation for the Federal Reserve, and its policies still impact people to this day.
In more recent times, these schools have influenced world history in many remarkably terrifying ways. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard grad, and has recently caught flack for their violation of its users private data, their influence over the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, and their manipulation of users emotional and mental states in ways that were illegal and violated the norms around studies of that size.
Graduates from all three of these schools, on both sides of the isle, have perpetuated a violent war in Afghanistan, which killed at least 147,124 people and cost US taxpayers over $1.7 Trillion. Afghanistan is but one of the 76 countries where America is actively fighting “terrorism,” due to the policy decisions made by even more graduates of these schools.
Harvard, Princeton and Yale are all schools that perpetuated and continue to benefit from chattel slavery of African Americans.
Yale University was named after Elihu Yale, the president of a colony owned by the East India company who plundered and conquered parts of Asia with grotesque brutality. He was also a well-known slave trader who personally ensured the trafficking of at least 667 Black people throughout the colonized world. The college that chose this man as a namesake not only worked to keep African Americans from accessing education, but named a majority of their colleges after slave owners.
Likewise, Princeton developed and grew in part due to donations from Moses Taylor Payne and other slaveholders. Even Harvard got in on the human trafficking by not only benefiting from slavery but also having enslaved people on campus.
Harvard continued our oppression and genocide through how they chose to educate the few Black people who were allowed to go there. As schools created to teach the future leaders of colonial America, they successfully indoctrinate Black students into whiteness and their role in perpetuating white supremacy.
When African Americans and other marginalized people went to these schools, they were often taught to turn against their own people. I often wonder if W.E.B. DuBois would have perpetuated the white supremacist and eugenicist “Talented Tenth” theory, which states that only ten percent of African Americans are intelligent, deserve a modern education, or are qualified to lead the masses of African Americans, if not for his time at Harvard.
While these schools allowed select Black people to enroll and indoctrinated them into white supremacist ideologies, for many years they were still not allowed to stay in the dorms. Even now, Black students at these schools experience violent racism and a culture of isolation where even congregating and having Black friends is controversial.
Even as these schools sheepishly admit that they once perpetuated or benefited from Chattel Slavery, they have yet to admit the full complicity they have in our historical genocide. More than just their historical presence in our oppression, they still fight for the right to profit from the same genocide they hesitate to admit their role in. For example, Harvard is choosing to continue to make money from pictures of enslaved African Americans even though their descendants are completely opposed to it.
Harvard is a leader in the eugenics movement, and had strong Nazi ties.
When people think of eugenics, they often think of the Nazis in Germany and Namibia, as they should. Some people even think about the Belgium colonizers of Rwanda, who used phrenology and colonial law to deepen division between the indigenous populations which later triggered the Rwandan Genocide.
Unfortunately, few people think of Harvard, even though the school was the “brain trust” of the American eugenics movement. In fact, the eugenics movement and concept was normalized by the work of Harvard President Emeritus Charles William Eliot, who spoke all over the world about the need for racial purity, and the forced sterilization of “undesirables” such as LGBT people, prisoners and people with disabilities.
This ideology even became formal federal government policy when racial and ethnic limitations were put on who could immigrate to America, and where. In 1927, the Supreme Court decided that people could be sterilized based purely on eugenics reasoning.
It is also a well-known fact that Hitler was inspired by American racism. As the center of eugenics in America, Harvard specifically retained relationships with known Nazis and eugenicists even after the Jewish Holocaust became public knowledge.
This ideology affected state and public policy in insidious ways that have carried over to the present. Throughout America, African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and people with disabilities have been sterilized without their consent. Although a lot of the eugenics laws were rescinded in recent years, the spirit of the law remains when prisoners are left to die in inhumane prisons or offered shorter sentences when they get sterilized.
The wealth and influence of the people who started these schools and graduated from them influences policies that impact everyone in America and internationally for the worse. This imbalance of power is especially reflected in their endowments, which are valued at $32.7B (Harvard), $29.4B (Yale), and $25.9B (Princeton). According to my research, Princeton, with the lowest of the 3 endowments, still has more wealth than the GDPs of 48% of the countries in the world.
This power and legacy has contributed to the idea that these schools are benign institutions of higher education, but there is nothing benign about white supremacy. The wealth of Harvard, Princeton and Yale needs to be redistributed to African Americans, Indigenous Americans, to these school’s workers, to their sub-contractors, and to the countries their ideologies have harmed via colonialism.
Unfortunately, these schools and their position in society has created a culture where other colleges have perpetuated similar ideologies, even though they do not necessarily have the same reach. Even HBCUs, which were started to use indigenous teaching practices to meet the needs of our community, have internalized and perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness in specific intracommunal ways.
But by refusing to allow elite schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale to continue without rectifying their past, we can begin to turn away from the culture they helped to create and reconnect with an educational model that ensures the success of our society. Either way, All institutions of white supremacy must fall.
Suggested Readings:
Gregory Cajete, “A Very 101 introduction to Indigenous Education Models“, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, 2004.
Catherine Imani, “If Princeton Was A Country“, Medium, 2019
Catherine Imani is a hood philosopher, theorist, and strategist writing while chronically ill and predominately housebound. You can tip them at Paypal or CashApp, and talk to them directly on twitter @imaniloves_you. You can support them on Patreon and through the Free The Land Initiative as well.
