YPEI Highlighted at "Yale and Slavery" Closing Roundtable

On October 28-30, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition held its 23rd annual conference on the subject “Yale and Slavery in Historical Perspective.” Commissioned by Yale President Peter Salovey, a working group of historians, librarians, student researchers, and community members has been conducting a thorough research study of Yale University’s historical relationships with slavery, racism, and their aftermaths, and the conference provided a venue for presenting research findings from their work.

In the conference’s concluding roundtable, Kymberly Pinder, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, began an important conversation about how YPEI mattered to the conference and conversation at hand:

“[The Yale Prison Education Initiative] was one of the things that brought me back to Yale…these programs need to be supported. They need to be incredibly important aspects of these types of reparations in addressing the current fallout and repercussions of so much history that we just looked at for the last three days.”

James Forman, Jr., J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, then built on Dean Pinder's statement with an extraordinarily powerful call for support of YPEI:

“1831: Yale helped to mobilize its resources to eliminate...a potential black college [in New Haven]. And now today we have professors who are teaching in prisons....And the struggle to get credit -credit - for the students who are in classes taught by Yale professors and graduate students….These connections are right here. They’re right in front of us. So what can Yale do? We can’t go back to 1831. But how can we not fully, aggressively, with all of our might, support a program like the Yale Prison Education Initiative?

You can watch this roundtable highlight at the video below: