Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

Summary
This book examines the relationship between colonial colleges and colonial slavery and the legacies of slavery in American intellectual cultures. Many of America's revered colleges and universities-from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNC-were the product and accomplice of American slavery and intertwined with the social project of disposing Indian people. “The founding, financing, and development of higher education in the colonies were thoroughly intertwined with the economic and social forces that transformed West and Central Africa through the slave trade and devastated indigenous nations in the Americas.” (2) The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest as they armed students with theories of racial difference and scientific claims about the superiority of white people. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Wilder shows that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained the slavery and racial hierarchies. He summarizes: “The academy never stood apart from American slavery – in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.” (11)