In this talk, scholar and librarian Lily Todorinova will draw on her recent essay in Higher Education Quarterly that recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, a declarative statement about the purpose of higher education, issued at a crucial time in the development of American colleges. Todorinova argues that the report’s advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven’s social and economic stability.

Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/4dann39

The Yale Report’s vision for leadership and economic success not only excluded African Americans by default, but created a lasting binary that defined Black educational opportunities in the nineteenth century and beyond. The essay considers the near overlap between the writing of the Yale Report and the failed proposal to establish an African American men’s college in New Haven in 1831, placing the document within a key period in the history of American higher education in which education became highly commodified and racialized.

Lily Todorinova is a part-time graduate student and full-time librarian at Rutgers-New Brunswick (MLS, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; MA English Literature, Rutgers-Newark).

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question and answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.