Yale University will remove a portrait of its earliest major benefactor, Elihu Yale, that depicts him being waited on by a black servant wearing a metal collar, after years of controversy over the painting, which some critics see as a bigoted image at the center of power on the Yale campus. The portrait has hung for a century in the room where the university’s governing board meets. According to the Yale Daily News, a student newspaper, the controversial portrait will be replaced with one showing Elihu Yale alone.

The university’s decision is a rare step in academe, many of whose oldest institutions were founded, financed, or led by slave owners or people involved in the slave trade. Last year, Brown University released a report on the slave connections of its founders that said Brown should acknowledge its ties to slavery, build a memorial on the campus, and establish a center on slavery and justice — but not to pay reparations or to apologize.

At Yale, three graduate students released a study in 2001 that documented how many of the university’s benefactors profited from the slave trade, and financed some of Yale’s oldest scholarships and professorships. The study noted that eight of Yale’s 12 residential colleges were named for slave owners. The irony is that Elihu Yale himself owned no slaves, according to Yale officials.