Yale Committee Could Prompt More Talk About Racist Names on Campuses

Bob Child, AP Images

Even if Yale University doesn’t rename its Calhoun College, it may have set itself up to head off further protests over racist names.

After months of debates over the college and its long-deceased honoree, John C. Calhoun, Yale isn’t saying yes or no to changing the controversial name.

Instead, the president, Peter Salovey, formed the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, to set guidelines for when the university should change the names of its buildings and how it should be done.

Tensions on the campus ran high this year when student protesters said the legacy of Calhoun’s pro-slavery beliefs exacerbated racial strain on the campus. In June a dishwasher in the college’s dining hall intentionally smashed a stained-glass window in the college depicting slaves carrying cotton bales.

Yale has rejected calls to change the college’s name, but Mr. Salovey’s letter announcing the formation of the committee said the decision was not final.

The new committee of Yale scholars will tackle a larger question: What justifies changing the name of a building, not just at Yale, but at any college facing racial tensions?

Comprising six faculty members, three alumni, and two students, the group’s scholars have expertise in history, law, and political science.

John Witt, the committee chair and a professor of history and of law. said the panel is strengthened by faculty members who have spent their careers studying race. Instead of having to produce a recommendation on a specific building, he said, they can think about the implications of such names in broader terms.

“It’s the promise of scholarly expertise and serious engagement with questions about history and questions about historical memory,” he said. “We’ll be in a pretty good position to be able to step back, away from the political controversy of the moment, and identify principles that might be enduring and last for the university.”

Mr. Witt said he hoped that the committee would create a model for other colleges.

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David W. Blight, a history professor who is a special historical adviser to the committee, said one of the challenges is understanding what principles were used originally to name the buildings.

The group will try to contextualize why and how buildings were first named, especially those with names that don’t have close ties to donor dollars, he said.

“Every monument or name on a building, every memorial is always to some extent about the moment it was designated,” Mr. Blight said. “This business of naming is not just wholly political or wholly emotional. It’s actually based on some understanding of a historical process.”

Even though it’s important to understand Calhoun College’s history, he said, the building doesn’t have to be named after the 19th-century politician for teaching purposes. What’s important is for students to understand who he was and how he reshaped the country. Calhoun, a Yale alumnus, was a U.S. vice president, senator from South Carolina, and fierce defender of slavery.

“You don’t need a Calhoun as some sort of example of a sort of dark past to teach about that past,” Mr. Blight said. “We’re already doing it. Now, it’s another matter to ask about the symbolism of any given name on a building and the people who live there. That’s a whole different set of questions.”

Seeking Context

Andrew P. Mullins Jr., a former chief of staff to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi and an associate professor of education there, worked on a similar committee to draft language to contextualize a statue of a Confederate soldier at Ole Miss.

When students had approached him to change the names of buildings, he didn’t know what steps to take, he said. It’s a problem many college officials face without definitive guidelines, he said.

The Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina faced similar issues when it renamed a building that once honored a Ku Klux Klan leader. But the board then placed a 16-year moratorium on renaming buildings, signaling a distaste for engaging with the issue.

Yale’s committee may help other private universities when similar controversies arise on their campuses, but it’s trickier to change a name at a public university, especially if the building was funded with state money, Mr. Mullins said.

Jody L. Allen, a visiting associate professor of history at the College of William & Mary, is managing director of the Lemon Project, which blends the university’s history into its curriculum. Too many colleges are caught off guard, she said, when students are concerned about the names of buildings, statues, or a racist past.

Yale’s effort sends a message that the university is ready and willing to deal with these issues when they come up, Ms. Allen said.

In April, Princeton University decided to keep Woodrow Wilson’s name on its residential college and public-policy school. Eric S. Yellin, an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond who had sent a letter to Princeton’s committee assessing Wilson’s legacy, said he hoped Yale’s committee would catch on at other universities.

Princeton’s decision announcing that it would keep Wilson’s name, despite what many see as his racist legacy, was just “happy talk,” Mr. Yellin said, and didn’t sufficiently take on the historical or campus-culture issues that Wilson’s name implied.

The principles that the Yale committee hopes to establish could have helped when Princeton was making its decision, Mr. Yellin said.

“I’m hoping that this becomes a model for realizing that these decisions can’t be made solely by boards, solely by administrators who tend to have short tenures,” he said, but by “people who spend their careers … on the ground in these communities.”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.