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Georgetown University will be offering an admissions edge to descendants of enslaved people sold to fund the school, officials announced on Thursday.


Jesuit priests connected to the private Catholic university sold 272 enslaved people in 1838, to pay off the university's massive debts. The enslaved men, women and children were sent to plantations in Louisiana; the university received the equivalent of $3.3 million, securing its survival.


A working group, created last year to explore Georgetown's historical ties to slavery, says even more slaves may have been sold in the 1830s to keep the school afloat. Hundreds of other enslaved people were owned by the Jesuits who ran the college, and an "unknown number" worked in or for the school.


In their report, made public on Thursday, the working group says much more research is needed to fill in gaps in the historical record. They also call for a formal apology from the university for the school's "historical relationship with slavery."


And, the report suggests, the school should "grant the descendants of those owned by the Maryland Province an advantage in the admissions process," and explore the feasibility of offering financial assistance for those students as well.


On Thursday, the university announced it would be doing just that — specifically, by treating the descendants of those enslaved people the same way it treats legacy students, applicants whose family members attended Georgetown.


The university did not mention scholarships or financial aid for descendants of the enslaved.


The school will also be renaming two buildings — formerly named after university presidents who made the arrangements to sell slaves to fund the school. One will become Isaac Hall, after one of the enslaved men who was sold in 1838, and another Anne Marie Becraft Hall, after a black educator and nun.


"We hope that the two buildings will stand as a reminder of how our University community disregarded the high values of human dignity and education when it came to the plight of enslaved and free African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," the working group wrote in its report.


Georgetown will also establish a memorial to the people whose enslavement funded and built the school, offer a mass of reconciliation and work to promote scholarship in the field of racial justice, it says.


Universities across the country have recently been grappling with 

 and slaveowners — along with the contemporary problems of racism and racial inequity, frequently the subject of campus protests.


But Georgetown's step, to consider the enslavement of ancestors as part of the admissions process, may be unprecedented, 


You can read the statement from the university 


The university's president, John DeGioia, is expected to speak at Georgetown at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday; the event will be streamed 

Education News

In 1838, 272 slaves were sold to fund Georgetown University. The school, grappling with that history, will give descendants of those slaves the same consideration as legacy students in admission.

Georgetown will offer an edge in admissions to descendants of slaves

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