In the first decades of the twenty-first century, hundreds of universities across the United States and around the globe have engaged in studies of their institutional legacies of slavery, efforts that often involve underlying, if uneasy, intimacies with university diversity imperatives. In this article, I examine the institutional proximity of these "repair" and "redress" projects to glean insights as to how those of us engaged in the field and praxis of universities and slavery might navigate this epistemological entanglement amid contemporary political pressures. By focusing on the Scarlet and Black Project, at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, I reveal how the field of universities and slavery and the individuals propelling its growth rhetorically navigate and shoulder the burdens of these concurrent institutional endeavors within the corporate university. I argue that rhetorical perspectives play a vital role in assessing and navigating the tenuous present of diversity in higher education in relationship to the enduring legacies of the university's racial past.
Ashley P. Ferrell (Fri,) studied this question.