At the first public event of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice last month, committee members said they hoped questions from the audience would grapple with Brown's historic ties to the slave trade and the University's current responsibility to come to terms with that legacy.
Instead, many audience members, including journalists and alumni, asked committee chairman James Campbell, associate professor of Africana studies, American civilization and history, to explain the group's purpose and in particular whether the committee is likely to propose that Brown pay monetary reparations to the descendants of slaves.
Committee members say a March 13 New York Times article contributed to the widespread misconception that Simmons formed the committee to advocate monetary reparations. In fact, the group will spend the next two years researching many different ways for Brown to come to terms with its relationship to slavery.
But weeks after a national media blitz thrust the committee's activities into the spotlight, students told The Herald they remain unsure of the committee's mission.
Now, the committee is planning a Commencement Weekend event that will introduce six of the students, professors and administrators on the committee and give them a chance to explain their efforts to engage with Brown's history.
"I think we should have done something like this earlier," said committee member Ross Cheit, an associate professor of political science. "(The committee) has clearly been miscast."
Several of the students who spoke to The Herald last week said they felt uninformed about the committee. Others, such as Kevin Kliman '06, said they were open to the idea of reparations but they disagreed with the committee's formation.
"This school's always saying it doesn't have that much money," and "potential conservative donors might be turned off" by the idea, Kliman said.
An editorial in this semester's issue of The Spectator, a conservative student magazine, argued that the committee was ideologically homogenous and in favor of monetary reparations.
In fact, committee members have diverse research interests, and many of them say they have no clearly formed opinion on the question of reparations.
Several committee members also say they are not close to Simmons and were surprised to receive letters last spring informing them that they had been appointed to the committee.
"I don't think I know her really well," Cheit told The Herald, "but you get a letter like that and I think the thing to do is say yes."
Cheit guessed that he was selected because he is one of only a few Brown professors with a law degree. As a result, Cheit is qualified to analyze legal documents from a lawsuit filed in Illinois, in which slave descendants are suing for reparations from corporations they claim profited from slavery.
The committee also includes historians and political scientists with a range of specialties, undergraduates and graduate students interested in the issues the committee will discuss.
Though they come from diverse backgrounds, all of the committee's members are prepared to confront the legacy of slavery head-on, and they share the conviction that Brown has a responsibility to do so.
Committee member and Professor of History Omer Bartov, whose research focuses on genocide, told The Herald, "How can I, as a professor at Brown University, come to class and talk about the fact that people stood by and saw how genocide was enacted on other people and not talk about the fact that there was a period when this University, and other universities, and American society more generally, was involved in slavery? It is almost unthinkable that any institution of learning in the United States that has that in its past would ignore it."
Bartov said he brings to the committee knowledge of the ways in which states and institutions compensated for their involvement in the Holocaust. But he said that because the Holocaust and American slavery were such different events, it would be dangerous to assume the same restitution techniques are appropriate for both.
Following World War II and the Holocaust, the West German government began to pay to Israel what has amounted to billions of dollars in compensation. Although this is regarded as a successful restitution effort, Bartov said it is not applicable to the American debate on reparations because West Germany paid compensation to a state, not individuals.
Swiss banks and German car manufacturers have also compensated Holocaust victims, but Bartov said that, as a university, Brown is not comparable to these institutions.
"Universities are institutions that claim to be about education, about ethics, about giving young people some sense of culture and morality," Bartov said. "Also, Volkswagen is much richer than Brown."
Committee member Farid Azfar, a second-year graduate student in the history department, researches the ways societies and institutions deal with "dramatic events" such as slavery. He said that despite inexact analogies, it is necessary to compare institutions' attempts to deal with troublesome historical events.
A historical event that might prove useful in discussing slavery restitution is the internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, Bartov said. In 1998, Congress passed legislation granting $20,000 each to survivors of the internment camps. Professor of History Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, brings expertise on Japanese history to the committee.
But considering the amount of time that has passed since the end of slavery in the United States, Bartov said he believes direct monetary reparations are probably not the right course of action for Brown.
"What can be done is a general recognition that an evil has taken place. But that's not enough," Bartov said. "It's become very fashionable right now, everyone is apologizing now. You can do whatever you want now, as long as you apologize afterward. You have to do something else."
What that "something else" is has yet to be determined, although Campbell said one possibility might be establishing special scholarship funds.
Committee member Seth Magaziner '06 was selected by Campbell to join the committee last summer. He is interested in 18th-century Rhode Island history and told The Herald reparations are something he is "undecided about."
Cheit said his only exposure to the reparations debate prior to being named to the committee came from reading the book "Slaves in the Family," by Edward Ball '82 of Charleston, S.C.
In the book, Ball traces his family tree, noting the different ways his white and black relatives deal with the family's history of slavery and slave-ownership.
"I was very taken by that," Cheit said. "If part of what we do is an inquiry like that, I think it would be really interesting."
For Bartov, the most important point to remember when discussing injustice is that no restitution will ever be enough.
"Restitution never pays you back what you lost in any way," he said. "You never get the property you lost, you never get the freedom you lost, you cannot be paid back for the pain."
