The board of the University of the South released a statement Tuesday about the university's history.

"At its best, the university has lived up to the humane values it has long professed and acted upon, including devotion to the primacy of reason and, in keeping with our Episcopal identity, to the work of reconciliation and social justice. At its worst, the university has been associated with the most repugnant aspects of our national and regional history. We are not flinching from that hard truth, for the truth, as we were assured long ago, can make us free -- free from the prejudices and the passions of the past," said the Sewanee board. "Therefore, the University of the South categorically rejects its past veneration of the Confederacy and of the 'Lost Cause' and wholeheartedly commits itself to an urgent process of institutional reckoning in order to make Sewanee a model of diversity, of inclusion, of intellectual rigor, and of loving spirit in an America that rejects prejudice and embraces possibility."