Some students at Harvard Law School want to eliminate the Royall crest from its seal on account of donor Royall’s slaveowning. Presumably this means they want to repudiate the Royall gift. How much money would that cost the Law School, how would it pay for it, and who should get the money instead?
First, the gift. Mr. Royall left land to Harvard, in a will that was probated in 1786. If Harvard Law returns the value of the gift and all the money it earned for the school along the way now, that's equivalent to asking what was the value of the original gift plus everything it earned along the way.
By 1815, the land's value was $7,593 and the school had kept $432 of its past income, for a total of $8,025. My source says Harvard earned 6% annually. It's 2015 now, so let see what the value would be if reinvested for those 200 years at 6%. That 2015 value is, using the standard future value formula from finance (in which 2.7 = Euler's constant),