The data I compiled for my project consisted of a list of all the institutions in “The Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium.” Then, I created a column for the years in which all the institutions were founded. I gathered this information conducting google searches where I pasted the name of the institution and then searched “year of founding,” which was the quickest way of assembling each date. I used the top google hit, which most of the time, was the website of the institution itself. However, I did not double check the founding dates with an additional source, so there was definitely room for human error in this process. In my final data set, I decided to omit the outliers of international universities as well as high schools in order to focus on schools most similar to Bates. So, my final set just included American universities.
Next, I made a column for the state (or country) where each institution is located and lastly, a column for the year slavery was outlawed in that state. For location, I also used the top google hit and then entered that place into the spreadsheet. Although this data collection didn’t employ much of the archival research skills we developed in this source, such as interpreting cursive handwriting from centuries ago, it did make me reflect on how google as a tool has influenced data collection. It also makes me want to further consider the drawbacks of this type of data collection. During the course, we discussed how to avoid distancing ourselves from the data we’re working with. For instance, it is important to acknowledge that the vast majority of higher education institutions in this data set are predominantly white institutions, which means that historically and currently, they mostly serve white students. Further, higher education is often lauded for its role in social and economic mobility in the United States, yet it also engenders the very conditions of inequity that a four-year degree claims to remedy. In Where Did They Go: Retention Rates for Students of Color at Predominantly White Institutions, Kevin McClain and April Perry write about how the higher education system prides itself on its progressiveness, however, “despite appearing diverse on the surface, many institutions exhibit covert microaggressions and controlling images that provoke attrition among students of color at predominantly White institutions” (McClain 1). It is also crucial to note that the founding of PWIs often uprooted Indigenous peoples who inhabited the land, forced removals by white settlers that dispossessed them from their communities, resources and traditional territories. As a student and researcher, as I grapple with the topics introduced in this topic, it is critical that I consider how my own intersecting social positionalities impact the ways in which I conduct my research. My identity heavily influences a question I struggled with throughout the process of my project: How can we conceptualize the process of emancipation in the United States? How do we quantify it? Whose narratives are most often centered when we tell stories about emancipation?
Abraham Lincoln, often falsely heralded as the “father of emancipation,” issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but the process of ending slavery and reaching black freedom is continuous and contested. In Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom, edited by William A. Link and James J. Broomall, Yael A. Sternhell writes, “Emancipation figures in our imagination as an event of mythic proportions, a sea change splitting American history into two. Yet for enslaved Southerners, emancipation was first and foremost a complex lived experience, a daily reality that took multiple, shifting, and often contradictory forms. Slavery, a system encompassing millions of people, fell apart in thousands of different ways” (15). I have been wrestling with this data collection process and how to quantify and qualify emancipation. The state and national ordinances outlawing slavery, which are largely attributed to white, male politicians, are a small piece of a larger and much more layered story of emancipation. I know that merely weighing these political degrees produces a flawed, incomplete and potentially harmful understanding of both our country’s and Bates’ histories. That said, delving into this research process has allowed me to explore how nuanced and intricate emancipation was, and is. It has left me with urgent questions, such as, how can we examine our institutional history with a critical lens in the context of a social, economic and political context deeply intertwined with the labor of enslaved peoples?
