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)