Sara Russo

A report entitled "Yale, Slavery and Abolition," published by three Yale doctoral candidates in August 2001 has recently come under fire after it was revealed that the report was fully financed by Yale's unions and contains numerous inaccuracies. The report's errors include describing several prominent Yale figures as "slave owners" when in fact the men in question were vehement opponents of slavery.

Written by Yale graduate students Anthony Dugdale, J.J. Feuser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, the report examines the ties between the University's founders and early leaders and the slaveholding culture of Connecticut in the late 18th century. It concludes that nine of Yale's twelve residential colleges are named for men who had owned slaves.

A chart in appendix I of the report summarizes the "public positions" on slavery of the men for whom Yale's buildings are named. Timothy Dwight, who served as President of Yale during the late eighteenth century, is described as: "Slave Owner. Defends American slavery, but attacks slave trade and slavery in Britain and West Indies. During his tenure, Yale graduates more pro-slavery clergy than any other college."

The report's severe indictment of Dwight led members of the Dwight Hall Cabinet to seriously consider changing the name of their community service organization, which is housed in Dwight Hall, and is known by the same name. After two months of consideration, the organization voted to keep its name, but publicly renounced Dwight's pro-slavery position with a plaque placed inside the building.

"With this plaque, Dwight Hall at Yale renounces the pro-slavery thought and actions of Timothy Dwight, while reaffirming our predecessors' work on behalf of justice and equality," the plaque states. "We maintain the name of Dwight Hall to ensure the ideological continuity of this work in the minds of Yale students and New Haven residents who associate Dwight Hall with the ideals of public service and social justice."

Despite the initial furor caused by the report, the Dwight Hall Cabinet's actions were later shown to be misplaced after an investigation by the campus paper, the Yale Daily News, revealed that Dwight was in fact a virulent critic of slavery.

"Dwight was probably New England's most passionate and outspoken opponent of slavery," noted Peter Dobkin Hall, a research associate at the Yale Divinity School who has researched Dwight's life in depth. The Yale Daily News noted that while Dwight did at one time purchase a slave, he bought her with the intention of granting the woman her freedom. "I never intended her for a slave," Dwight wrote, in a manuscript quoted by the report's authors.

The report's authors have also been charged with slandering Ezra Stiles, once president of Yale and the namesake of one of Yale's twelve residential colleges. Stiles is summarized in the report's appendix as "Slave owner. Late in life joins society that enforces gradual emancipation law," while Samuel Hopkins, a graduate of Yale, is declared to have "supported immediate emancipation." Despite this vast difference in description, Robert Forbes, the assistant director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition has stated that no significant difference can be found in the legacies of the two men and notes that Stiles and Hopkins co-authored a letter denouncing slavery.

Further allegations pertain the report's treatment of an effort to establish a "Negro College" in New Haven, which was opposed by several Yale professors and prominent graduates. Brion Davis, director of the Guilder Lehrman Center argues that the report lacks context in describing that issue because it fails to mention that Nat Turner's rebellion, a slave insurrection in which at least 55 whites were killed, occurred less than three weeks before the college was proposed. If Yale had supported the college, Davis told the Yale Daily News, the resulting backlash "probably would have burned Yale to the ground."

Minor inaccuracies are also evident throughout the report. In the section marked Appendix I, for example, the men for whom Yale's residential colleges are named are listed along with the honors from the University and the city of New Haven that they have received. John Davenport is noted to have received the honor of having "Davenport Avenue" named after him, but Jonathan Trumbull is declared to have no New Haven honors dedicated to him, despite Campus Report's discovery that "Trumbull Street," named for the onetime governor of Connecticut, appears on campus and city maps, only blocks from the center of campus.

In addition to the errors and misrepresentations found in the study, the report has also been characterized as being part of a public relations campaign on behalf of Yale's unions, which stand to benefit from negative press about the University.

That the report was funded, publicized and distributed by the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, is no secret. The acknowledgements section of the study states, "Thanks go especially to the Federation of Hospital and University Employees. Our gratitude extends in particular to HERE Local 34 and GESO (the Graduate Employees and Students Organization), for encouraging people active in the unions to spend valuable time researching this topic."

Of the report's three authors, one (Dugdale) is a research analyst for Local 34 and has confirmed that he wrote the report as part of his full-time job for the union. The other two authors of the study (Feuser and de Castro Alves) are members of the coordinating committee of GESO, a graduate student union that has been seeking recognition from Yale for a number of years. The report's website (www.yaleslavery.org) was created by a graphic designer who works for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, which is the parent organization of Yale's local 34 and 35, as part of her normal employment.

The unions also went to great lengths to publicize the report, including mailing out 2,600 copies from the offices of Locals 34 and 35, and Geso. The Yale Daily News reports that the postage was paid for by the Amistad Committee (a non-profit organization which commemorates the slave revolt aboard the Amistad), but that union sources have revealed that the union previously donated money to the Committee.

While no Yale administrator has yet suggested that the report was intended to benefit Yale's unions at the expense of the University, criticism of "Yale, Slavery and Abolition" continues to mount. "It's actually really kind of irritating that the Yale community has accepted without challenge everything that was printed in the report," commented Guilder Lehrman assistant director Forbes, "particularly when just a little bit of understanding of the scholarship would have led to different conclusions in many of the cases."