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Craig Steven Wilder. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. 432 pp. Hardcover. $30.00; ISBN 978-1596916814.
Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities is not an easy read. Moreover, this volume does not exaggerate the role of race and racism in the creation, expansion, and legitimization of the academy. At the same time, an approach that was less direct about the history of higher education would gloss over the complexity surrounding the establishment of colleges and universities during the colonial and antebellum eras of the United States. Furthermore, such an approach would not indicate one of Wilder's main points of the volume: how important colleges were to expanding not only educational opportunities and knowledge but also in perpetuating genocide, slavery, and the myth of White racial superiority.
Wilder enhances the work of historians of higher education while expanding on how elite higher education developed, influenced the production of knowledge, and framed inequality. As he asserts, "Human slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the Americas" (Chapter 4, p. 114). Race, racism, and slavery were integral aspects of higher education that continue to influence colleges and universities-not just in the framing of their own histories and experiences, but also in how knowledge is produced, received, and deployed.
Written in two sections with four chapters each, Wilder presents how colleges began in the Americas with a focus on the British American colonies that became the United States. He also describes how the foundations of higher education relied on the institution of slavery and beliefs in racial superiority among Whites in the United States and Europe and details the evolution of racial ideology among those in higher education that led to the rise of scientific racism prior to the Civil War.
Part 1, "Slavery and the Rise of the American College," discusses the establishment of colleges in the western hemisphere in an emerging global slave economy and the missions of these early institutions in relation to the growing colonies, and interactions and perspectives with enslaved and indigenous populations.
Chapter 1, "The Edges of Empire," examines the establishment of colleges as cultural entities of the new colonies...