This institutional moment of reckoning has also had a robust public-facing component, whose impact we are only now– after two decades– in a position to critically examine. Several forms of redress have emerged: contrition in the form of university apologies and land acknowledgements; commemoration via memorials and renaming; and restitution through reparative scholarships, tuition remission, and community-based research funds.

The time has come to ask– if not entirely to answer– What might be gained by examining these episodic reconciliations in conversation with each other? How do the conceptual frameworks, sketched above, map onto the unique dual educational and research mission of higher education? And what might it look like to make the ongoing study of university histories more central to teaching and instruction? Finally, can collaborative institutional memory projects help mitigate (rather than exacerbate) our polarized college campuses and repair trust with the public?

For AHA 2024, we propose to bring together scholars from American history, intellectual history, public history, and the history of education to interrogate this movement and its implications. Panelists will draw from both their recent public-facing projects on university histories and their endeavors to bring these insights to undergraduate classrooms, and consider them in light of the conceptual methods and approaches of their distinct fields. Our goal is to bring together perspectives from across the landscape of higher education institutions and to think collectively about this movement’s enduring implications for historical scholarship, institutional change, and teaching.