Daniel D. Tompkins, the sixth vice president of the United States, has long gazed impassively from an oil portrait hanging in the residence of the president of Columbia University, his alma mater. But on a recent afternoon, he might have been tempted to smile a bit. Chloe Hawkey, a junior at Barnard College, was summarizing her research on attitudes toward slavery among Columbia’s early students. As an undergraduate in the 1790s, Tompkins had written passionate essays denouncing the bondage of “the unhappy Africans,” but he seems to have been an exception. “Few students felt the need to comment at all on its presence or its justice,” Ms. Hawkey said. Slavery “was simply a fact of life.”

May 13, 2015 ・ From The New York Times