By Michela Moscufo

(Reuters) – Harvard University is setting aside $100 million for an endowment fund and other measures to close the educational, social and economic gaps that are legacies of slavery and racism, according to an email the university’s president sent to all students, faculty and staff on Tuesday.

The email from Harvard President Lawrence Bacow included a link to a 100-page report by his university’s 14-member Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. Tomiko Brown Nagin (a Harvard legal historian and constitutional expert) presided over this panel. Reuters received the email and report.

It is part of wider discussions about how to redress the effects of centuries of discrimination, slavery and racism. Some call for financial and other reparations.

The report laid out a history of slaves toiling on the campus and of the university benefiting from the slave trade and industries linked to slavery after slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783 – 147 years after Harvard’s founding. Harvard excluded Black students, and the report documents its racism-promoting scholars.

While Harvard had notable figures among abolitionists and in the civil rights movement, the report said, “the nation’s oldest institution of higher education … helped to perpetuate the era’s racial oppression and exploitation.”

The report’s authors recommended offering descendants of people enslaved at Harvard educational and other support so they “can recover their histories, tell their stories, and pursue empowering knowledge.”

Another recommendation was that Ivy League schools fund summer programs for students and professors from historically Black colleges or universities. This would allow them to travel to Harvard and send their students and teachers to the HBCUs such as Howard University.

Harvard President Bacow wrote in an email that $100 million had been authorized by the university’s governing body for its implementation.

Bacow said that slavery and its history have been part of American life since more than 400 years. It will take years of sustained, ambitious work to address its persisting effects.

Other institutions of higher education in the United States have also created funds over recent years for remedying slavery’s legacy. Virginia passed a law that requires five universities of the state to provide scholarships for descendants who have been enslaved.