Pre-Civil War Universities’ Afterlife of Slavery: A QuantCrit Survival Analysis of Institutional Contexts Predicting First Reparations Engagement

The call for many higher education institutions to atone for their histories of enslavement is rapidly growing. Prior reparations research, however, has primarily focused on reparations at the federal level. Utilizing QuantCrit with the afterlife of slavery and racialized organizations theory, a discrete-time hazard model, was developed to predict whether a higher education institution established prior to the Civil War engaged in university reparations based on time and organizational factors. Results show that Carnegie Classification (doctoral university), endowment, percent of Black faculty, membership in the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium, and time all predicted the odds of a pre-Civil War higher education institution engaging in their first reparation.