The Trump administration recently went on the offensive against some of the nation’s top-tier colleges and universities, threatening to withhold billions of dollars in annual federal grants, especially for research, if the schools do not comply with a series of demands. Some of the leaders of socalled Ivy League schools capitulated.

But more than 220 administrators and academicians signed a letter denouncing the government’s move “against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education” and expressing opposition to “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Hundreds of Jewish academics signed another letter criticizing the administration for canceling $400 million in federal money to Columbia University because it “failed to protect American students and faculty” from what, as HuffPost put it, “antisemitic harassment, in addition to other unspecified legal violations.”

The more than 350 signers of this second letter stated, “History teaches us that the loss of individual rights and freedoms for any group often begins with silencing scientists and scholars, people who devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge – a pursuit that is core to Jewish culture. … Moreover, destroying universities in the name of Jews risks making Jews in particular less safe by setting them up as scapegoats.”

But while this state versus accademia face-off is taking place, another issue is, as usual, being ignored, the “S” word: how some of universities and college came to be.

“The academy never stood apart from American slavery; in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage,” Craig Steven Wilder wrote in his 2013 book “Ebony & Ivory: Race and the Troubled History of American Universities.”

Katie Reilly noted in Time that Princeton’s first nine presidents, from 1747 to 1854, “owned slaves at some point of their lives, many during their tenure as president.” Some 40 percent of Princeton’s students came from slave trading families in the years before the Civil War. A month after the death of one president, Samuel Finley, his slaves were auctioned off at his house on campus.

Georgetown University profited from the sale of 272 enslaved people in 1838 by Jesuit priests to pay off its debts.

At least five of Columbia’s 10 presidents between 1754 and 1865 owned slaves.

Slavery, Reilly reported also, was part of the curriculum of many universities, with the lessons tailored to justify it. She cited a 1916 report from Rutgers researchers that there and at other universities, “The faculty and curriculum … reinforced the theological and scientific racism that provided the ideological and spiritual justification for the free labor of Africans, the absolute power of slave owners, and the separation of the races.”

American Public Media (APM) noted that there has not been a “full accounting of how money flowed from the slave economy into the coffers of American higher education” but it cited Wilder as stating that “most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery.’”

Some universities have apologized, APM noted, and have taken actions such as renaming buildings but some critics have called for scholarships and monetary reparations. However, some see such steps as publicity stunts that do “nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality.”

Brown, APM noted, was the first “to confront its ties to slavery in a major way,” when its president, Ruth Simmons, appointed a commission in 2023 to study the issue.

At Harvard, a professor and his students who probed their school’s history reported, “Slavery and the slave economy thread through the first 150 years. … Slaves made beds and made meals for Harvard presidents,” APM reported. “The sons of wealthy Southern plantation owners became prominent men on campus. And many of the school’s major donors in its first centuries made their fortunes in industries either based on, or connected to, slavery.”

Jesuit priests who founded Georgetown in 1790 “were among the biggest slave owners” in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize slavery, in 1641. It rented or hired enslaves people, Georgetown historian Adam Rothman told APM.

Samantha Johnas, writing for the Global Black History digital repository for African Americans, named other schools as having had ties to slavery: Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rutgers, the University of Cincinnati, Sweet Briar College, Furman University and George Mason University. Others have identified other colleges such as Dartmouth, Brown, Barnard and William and Mary.

That issue should be in the forefront of any discussion of the role of higher education and government intervention. But that has never happened in a meaningful. Some donors who are withholding funding to some schools accused of encouraging antisemitism are not known to take it into consideration.

There is indeed a lot at stake for all Americans as the Trump-Ivy Leagues confrontation plays out. But, for the 41 million African Americans, “the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality” needs to be addressed.

According to reports, 452,760 African Americans graduate from colleges and universities annually, comprising 11.1 percent of the overall total; for the Ivy League schools, it is seven percent. Ivy Coach, a New York City-based admissions consulting firm, reported the following African Americans admission rates for some top schools for the class of 2027: Harvard, 9.4 percent, slightly up from 9.3 for the class of 2025; Yale, 8.8, 8.0; Princeton, 8.6, 8.3; University of Pennsylvania, 8.5, 7.8; Brown, 8.2; 7.4; Columbia, 7.5, down from 8.3; Cornell, 7.4, 7.3; and Dartmouth, 6.1, 5.3.

“An Ivy League education is the key to upward social mobility for disadvantaged high schoolers,” Ivy Coach states on its website.

The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) has been playing a key role in helping to fill that gap. While Historically Black Colleges and Universities and (HBCU) — which it represents – comprise only three percent of all colleges and universities, they “enroll 10 percent of all African Americans students and produce almost 20 percent of all African American graduates,” Brian Bridges, a former UNCF vice president, wrote on the UNCF website. Bridges, too, cites the economic barriers facing African Americans wanting to attend college. “Even before graduating high school, many Black students lack the resources needed to get into college and to succeed there,” he noted. “Only 57 percent of Black students have access to the full range of math and science courses necessary for college readiness, compared to 81 percent of Asian American students and 71 percent of white students.”

Bridges reported that a recent UNCF study found, in his words, “that African American students are more likely to take remedial college courses than other student groups. The resulting lack of preparedness shows up in standardized test scores. Sixty-one percent of Black students who took the ACT in the 2015 high school graduating class met none of the four ACT college readiness benchmarks, nearly twice the 31 percent rate for all students. Low test scores make the rest of the college application process more difficult. Getting accepted to a school, earning scholarships and succeeding in later studies becomes more of a challenge.”

Bridges added, “Barriers to graduating from college for some African American students is evidenced by the relatively low retention rates of Black students across the nation. Among students enrolled in four-year public institutions, 45.9 percent of Black students complete their degrees in six years—the lowest rate compared to other races and ethnicities. Black men have the lowest completion rate, at 40 percent. This high dropout rate is partially due to the fact that 65 percent of African American college students are independent, meaning they must balance pursuing a degree with fulltime work and family responsibilities.

The UNCF reported that students at HBCUs borrow more than others because “African American families generally have lower assets and incomes that limit their ability to contribute toward college expenses.”

Therein lies the rub.