CAMBRIDGE, MA—Insisting any missteps be viewed in the full context of each individual’s contributions to the institution, Harvard University officials defended on Wednesday their decision to keep several confederate generals on the school’s teaching staff.
Last week, Harvard president Alan M. Garber told students in a campus-wide email that he had declined to discipline several dozen tenured professors who held prominent roles in the Confederate army between 1861 and 1865. Despite public backlash, including widespread campus protests and a petition signed by over 10,000 individuals, Garber has reiterated that the faculty members’ involvement in the Stonewall Brigade and the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry did not violate the university’s code of conduct and only contributed to Harvard’s rich diversity of thought.
“We assure you, we do not take our decision to employ professors like Gen. Stonewall Jackson and his fellow commanders lightly,” said Garber, adding that the men had pledged to separate their experience fighting gruesome battles along the Mason-Dixon Line from their academic studies. “We understand that some students feel uncomfortable being taught by Professor Jackson because of his significant role in the First Battle of Manassas. But that was 165 years ago.”
“Professor Jackson is a rigorous academic scholar who has since released most of his slaves,” Garber continued. “While it’s a sensitive subject for many students from the North, we hope they can learn to accept it.”
The generals, many of whom have had tenure at the university for more than a century and a half, faced renewed controversy this week when a student leaked a video that showed professor of economics Nathan Bedford Forrest standing at the front of his classroom in a Confederate uniform, calling a student “dirty Yankee,” and saying repeatedly that the South would rise again.
Although Forrest later issued a public apology stating that his actions were inappropriate, many students, alumni, and donors questioned how Confederate professors could claim to be “objective” while they still openly swore allegiance to Gen. Robert E. Lee, owned cotton plantations, and conceived dozens of children with female slaves.
Several of Forrest’s students, however, felt that their professor was being unfairly persecuted and told reporters he should not lose his tenure simply because he led troops who killed over 300 surrendering Black soldiers during the 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre, or because he was serving as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at the time he was hired as a lecturer at Harvard College.
“Personally, I feel that my Confederate professors are better than most of the non-Confederate professors,” said Harvard senior Zach Weelan, who argued that his classmates were “hyper-fixated” on how many thousands of Union soldiers the educators had slaughtered in cold blood. “So what if my professor was in the Confederate army? I don’t see how that conflicts with his ability to teach me American history.”
“My thesis advisor actually used
to be one of the ‘big four’ slave traders in Memphis, and his perspectives on whipping, branding, and forced family separations have been very refreshing,” Weelan added. “Why should I suffer just because my classmates are overly sensitive Union sympathizers?”
In an open letter to the university, dozens of the Confederate generals’ renowned colleagues, including Professor Heinrich Himmler, Professor Adolf Eichmann, and Professor Emeritus and Harvard Board of Overseers chair Pol Pot, pledged their support, claiming that the administration should not give in to the “woke” and “radical” agenda of a small fraction of students.
“These professors consistently receive rave reviews from many of our top-performing Aryan undergraduates,” Garber said. “It’s a slippery slope. If you fire someone just because they were in the Confederate army, then suddenly you have to fire someone just because they systematically imprisoned and murdered over 6 million Jews and other untermensch in a coordinated campaign across Nazi-occupied Europe. When does it end?”
“As a wise man once told me, ‘I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten,’ ” Garber added. “ ‘Look away, look away, look away, Dixie Land.’ ”
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