By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now! speaks with the author of a shocking new book that reveals the Ivy League’s bloodied history.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us a little about Rutgers.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: You know, the—it’s a fascinating institution for a lot of reasons. And the original Queen’s College, which is a Dutch Reformed college, the Dutch colonists are establishing their own institution, and it’s, as we all know, really quite close to the College of New Jersey, Princeton, and Princeton is originally founded in the eastern part of the state over by Newark and then drifts over, and the governor, Governor Belcher, actually helps it eventually settle in Princeton, New Jersey. And—but, in fact, actually, one of the things that happened is there’s a lot of pressure from the College of New Jersey, from Princeton, for the Queen’s College, Rutgers, to actually fold in. But, in fact, the denominational allegiances are too strong for that, so the Presbyterians remain at New Jersey, Princeton, and the Dutch Reformed at Rutgers.
One of their earliest presidents, [Jacob] Hardenbergh, the Reverend Hardenbergh at Queen’s College, manages to purchase slaves despite the fact that the college is doing quite poorly. You know, Queen’s is so financially strapped that it closes multiple times in its early history, and for long periods. But on the eve of one of its first closures, when it just has to shut down and stop operations, Reverend Hardenbergh manages to buy a second slave for his household. And what does that tell us about colleges in the 18th century? One of the things that it should remind us is that colleges survived on the margins in the 18th century. You know, they were constantly seeking sources of funding. And the most obvious and immediate sources of funding were the rising wealthy traders of the big port cities, dominated by the slave traders, and then the planters of the South and the West Indies who had both cash and children but very few schools. As one historian of the British West Indies puts it very nicely, the British West Indies actually didn’t need colleges because of mainland North America. And there are very few institutions of higher education, or even secondary education, established in the West Indies during the colonial period, because those planters could sent their sons to Europe or to North America, the mainland.
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