Controversy over building names and university symbols has become a recurring feature of campus life in the past few years. Debates have broken out at dozens of institutions, mostly about names that connect universities to slavery and racism in American history. An especially thorny question has arisen at Yale, where we teach, and where a residential college named for the South Carolina senator and advocate of slavery, John C. Calhoun, has sparked debate for decades.
How to make sense of the renaming problem? A committee at Yale on which we served was charged not with deciding any particular renaming question, but with establishing a framework for considering the issue. We’ve now released our report. The Yale principles advocate a position of moral modesty with respect to the past — a recognition of the fallibility of our current sensibilities. But the principles also acknowledge that the university must nonetheless make hard decisions, and that those decisions can be made only through careful exercise of our best moral judgment. Our report offers guideposts for future discussions of renaming at Yale, and may prove useful on other campuses as well.
The Yale report aims to strike a sensible balance in the struggles over symbolic politics and culture wars — struggles that have grown more fraught in the wake of campus hate crimes, on the one hand, and a newly salient critique of identity politics, on the other. Along the way to developing these principles, we heard two arguments that helped focus our inquiry — arguments that stem from mischaracterizations of the debate over naming itself.
The first argument is that renaming debates are part of a threat to academic freedom on campus. There is no higher value for the modern university than academic freedom. But the idea that naming questions are at odds with that freedom is a red herring. As the recent PEN America report on campus speech correctly observes, renaming questions are not about restraining free speech. If the Yale experience is any guide, such controversies have been raucous celebrations of the exercise of free speech on all sides.
What the free-speech critique misses is that universities play at least two different but complementary roles with respect to speech. Universities rightly have a sacred obligation to protect the academic freedom of their faculty and students. This duty is at the core of what a university is.
But universities also have the right and sometimes the obligation to speak. In this latter role, they are not regulators of speech but instead speakers themselves. The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized a similar distinction between the government in its role as speaker, on the one hand, and the government in its role as a regulator of speech, on the other.
We would fail in our job as educators if we closed off debate over challenging ideas. Sometimes this will mean that we will raise issues that run up against cherished notions of the alumni. (They should expect no less of us!) Just as we cannot be beholden to the fads or trends in intellectual inquiry, we cannot be captive to the past. The work of the university is ever-evolving. Sometimes that evolution is marked by new theories about the meaning of a text or new scientific discoveries that disrupt existing understandings. Sometimes it is marked by new and critical assessments of values operating across time and space. And sometimes, universities with long time horizons will need to mark the fact that they are places where people from a wide range of backgrounds come together to debate core ideas.
A second argument in the renaming debates has been voiced by critics on all sides of the controversy. This contention holds that renaming questions are a distraction from more tangible concerns about the mission and obligations of universities; naming debates, in this view, are merely symbolic politics in an age of real issues with real stakes.
There is valuable wisdom in this observation, up to a point. But there may actually be less disagreement here than some critics suspect. The Yale report insists that the principal measure of any renaming decision has to be the university’s central mission of producing and disseminating ideas. This is what universities do. It is what they ought to be good at. It follows, to be sure, that if renamings and symbolic alterations threaten these goals, they have gone awry. In particular, such renamings contradict the mission of a university if they efface the past in a way that aims to erase knowledge rather than produce it.
Renaming, however, need not erase history. Moreover, it is emphatically and deeply true that symbols matter. Some of the great battles of the civil-rights movement were fought over symbols. The Supreme Court decided more than 60 years ago that “separate but equal” would be impermissible even if conditions in facilities for blacks and whites were equal — separate was, by definition, unequal. More recently, the proponents of marriage equality rightly rejected civil unions that delivered functional equality without the symbolic equality of marriage itself.
The lessons of these two arguments coincide. Universities cannot pretend that symbols do not matter, because symbols are one of the ways universities speak about their values. Nor, however, can universities allow debates about symbols to interfere with their core mission.
Jonathan Holloway is the dean of Yale College, and John Fabian Witt is a professor of law and history at Yale University.
