Ben Franklin Matters

An introduction to History of Higher Education in the US

This essay is intended for students taking History of Higher Education in the US, but anyone who stumbles across it is welcome to read it. I posted it so I could easily link to it from AI Log teaches.

“Ben on the Bench” by George Lundeen. The photo appears on https://www.upenn.edu/about/history. Photo credit: unknown

I expect you have noticed how much Ben Franklin matters to the University of Pennsylvania. As the celebrated founder and first president, his name and image appear all over campus and the institution’s online presence.

By the way, those titles are a bit of an exaggeration. Franklin was one of several prominent Philadelphians who raised money for the collection of educational institutions that evolved into Penn. His “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” helped convince wealthy landowners and merchants to give to the cause, and is an important artifact in the history and theory of public education. As for his being president, the provost was actually Penn’s chief executive during its early history. Franklin’s role was more like that of a board chair.

It would be more accurate to say Franklin was among the founders of the collection of schools, one of which became a college. Like most board chairs, his attention was mostly elsewhere, on activities like fighting a war with England and creating the political structures of a new nation. But, Franklin signed fundraising and legal documents, and his disagreements with Penn’s first provost shaped the early curriculum of the college.

You can read all about Franklin on Penn’s About page, which celebrates Franklin’s vision for education, especially his argument that a college should prepare students for their chosen professions while also teaching them what we now call the liberal arts. This is a great story for connecting Penn’s past to its current academic structure of a school of arts and sciences combined with eleven professional schools.

If you click on that About page, you won’t learn that Franklin owned another human being. Nor will you learn that “many of Penn’s founders, early trustees, and faculty owned enslaved people and profited from their labor.” To read about that, you have to go to the Penn & Slavery Project website. If you want to learn even more about the enslaved people who lived and worked in Franklin’s household, you would need to visit the Benjamin Franklin House website.

Does it matter to Penn that the household that Franklin headed, consistent with the legal structures and social conventions of his time, owned Joseph, Jemima, Peter, King, Othello, George, and Bo? Yes, it does. Can you ignore this fact and the questions it raises for Penn today? Not if you take this class.

The Walking Purchase

Similarly, there is nothing on Penn’s official website about the Walking Purchase fraud perpetuated by Thomas Penn, the son of William Penn, and James Logan upon the Lenape people in 1737. You would need to visit the West Philadelphia Collaborative History website and read this article about the land where Penn’s campus now sits. Few institutions of higher education in the US have reckoned with this history despite the documentation of what this project calls Land Grab U. Does that history matter? Yes, it does. Can you ignore it? Again, not if you take this class.

To say that you cannot ignore this history is not to say you have to agree with me or each other about what it means. There is a story going around that professors like me are indoctrinating students into an ideology that says the United States is evil and that its history and culture are tainted by events that occurred centuries ago. That story appears pretty silly to anyone with actual experience in a college classroom, but apparently, it works to raise money and get votes. What actually happens in history classes, at least the ones I know, is that we think and write about what history means to those living today.

Institutions of higher learning in the US benefited from the labor of enslaved people, and much of the capital used to first endow our oldest and most prestigious colleges was from the cross-Atlantic trade in human beings. Our idyllic campuses are built on the lands that once belonged to sovereign nations that lived alongside European settlers for centuries, sometimes in peace and sometimes at war. The European settlers, often through violence and fraud, took that land and used it to build colleges. In many cases, it was land legally owned by those early nations. Until recently, these stories were ignored in history classes, which is one reason they matter so much today.

The past is not past

If you think this history is about the distant past, please read about Delaware Nation v. Pennsylvania, the court case that ended in 2006 with the US federal government telling the Lenape nation that, yes, their lands were stolen, but there is nothing to be done about it. Please download the augmented reality app from the Penn & Slavery Project and wear comfortable walking shoes on the first day of class. We will be taking the tour together.

To quote William Faulker, who knew something about writing about history:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

Our labor together in the first part of History of Higher Education will be to think about what the twin legacies of slavery and land dispossession mean for the administration of the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions of higher education in the US. That long-ignored history has emerged as a topic of campus conversations and has led several institutions to memorialize or publicly acknowledge the way injustice has shaped their development.

Questions and answers

Should Penn update its About page to include this history or, in some other way, acknowledge it? Does it matter that Franklin’s household treated enslaved people better than the laborers working on plantations in the Caribbean or the southern colonies? What about the fact that Franklin’s Will provided freedom for those he enslaved when he died or that he was the lead signatory on a petition to abolish slavery that was submitted to US Congress the year he died? Does the resolution of Delaware Nation v. Pennsylvania mean the colleges and universities that benefited from the fraudulent land grab are absolved of any moral responsibility to the Lenape Nation? Why is so much of the historical work on these questions done by students?

These and similar questions about institutions of higher education in the US are entangled in webs that envelop us as teachers, students, and administrators, now and in the future. This semester, we will explore how we should answer them. I am excited to be a part of this conversation. I expect to learn a lot. Welcome to the History of Higher Education in the US.