As an admitted student to W&L (though not enrolling), it’s pretty clear to me through interviews that alumni are very prideful of their Southern heritage and do not support a name change. The school also has such a deep connection to Lee (for example, he and other family members are buried there) and severing ties would be akin to revamping the entire university and changing its whole identity.
Part of me thinks this pressure on W&L is quite politically-motivated. For example, UVA was built by slaves and Jefferson certainly held similar reprehensible qualities that Lee is called out for. Yet, we do not see the same outcry. How about Yale, whose namesake is a slaveowner? It’s obvious to see the picking and choosing going on with the hate against W&L.
Overall, my point is that to remove anything associated with slavery and an undeniably poor reflection on our nation would get rid of a majority of our institutions and leaders so associated. Why aren’t Yale and Harvard, who have their fair share of racist history, treated the same way as W&L? Political bias is in play as W&L is truly the only highly-selective institution associated with conservatism and the white-male image. If you do not wish to associate yourself with W&L or support them, you don’t have to! Thus is the freedom of the United States of America.
Disclaimer: I applied to all four of these schools and would have loved to attend any of the four, I simply utilized them to prove a point.
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There is no double standard. Yale and Harvard have taken concrete and decisive actions to provide comfort to minorities that they will be as protected as everyone else when there. They have removed names (ie John Calhoun’s name) from residential colleges, and thoroughly succeeded at creating environments that make minorities feel welcome. The “you don’t have to come if you don’t like it” says “we don’t really care if you come, and perhaps rather that you don’t.” And by the way, the University of Chicago, Duke, Notre Dame and Georgetown are plenty conservative. And by the way, every coed non-historical-minority institution of higher education in this country is associated with the male white image, as white male professors dominate all faculties. No one is unfairly or underservedly picking on WandL; they have been asking for it forever all on their own through their actions and inactions.
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So, unless we get rid of all cases, we can’t get rid of the more extreme cases?
Ah but where do you draw the line? Almost all of the founders had problematic ties to slavery
Lee fought on the wrong side but was viewed by his opponents as in a different class than Jefferson Davis et al. Grant had a high opinion of him. Agree or not history is complex.
More important is that his stance after Appomattox was viewed as critical to ending the Civil War. He discouraged all attempts to continue the war by guerilla methods and refused to support the KKK and other Southern resistance. He strongly discouraged any monument to himself. Jay Winick’s April 1865 makes the point that Lee’s messaging stood out among other Southern leaders in convincing the South to accept the Northern victory.
And his post war role at the college was undeniably critical to its survival
Does that make him a saint? Is it his fault that posthumously he was turned into one in the Jim Crow era that began in the late 1870s and 1880s ?
It is better to study the past than to erase it And I invite a rereading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural where he was quite clear on the dangers of judging others on the other side.
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My S decided not to apply largely Bc of the history. It’s a great school in many ways but he felt there are so many other great schools, and thus, super easy to drop them from the list.
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Completely understand. I have no connection there by the way. My daughter got in the class of 2013 and would have gone but for a compelling alternative
It really is a great college
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Again, “where do you draw the line” leads to inaction.
And nobody is saying we forget history. We study it, we own it, we learn from it. We don’t forget the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, but we don’t celebrate (or continue to celebrate) the people who conducted it.
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It’s all a matter of politics, who has the power to decide, and what those people think is reasonable or not. Right now the W&L Board of Trustees is composed mostly of centrist and conservative white folks, and they are still basically OK with the Lee name. Most Yale grads are still basically OK with the name Yale, even if Mr. Yale was a slaveowner.
There may come a time a century or two from now when mainstream American opinion decides that no slaveowner should be honored in any way, and the majority will support renaming the nation’s capital etc. That’s a radical idea right now, but radical ideas sometimes become mainstream ideas over time (same-sex marriage, etc).
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There is much in the history of W&L to cause justifiable concern and controversy. Not only for POC but other disenfranchised groups. Some of the decisions of the BoT are disappointing and missed opportunities to send a positive message of change from the top down. I can only hope they follow through with the promise of bringing more diversity to the Board and that we see more changes in the not too distant future.
That being said, my D is an incoming freshman. We talked at length about her concerns about campus culture and the makeup of the student profile. To that end, she had countless communications with faculty and students and asked difficult questions. The deciding factor for her was that the faculty and students did petition the BoT for a name change and multiple improvements to make the campus more welcoming to POC, LGBTQ, all religions, etc. These are the people she will be interacting with on a daily basis, not the distant and out-of-touch BoT.
Unilaterally it was acknowledged that much more change is needed. All the increased recruitment is meaningless if students do not feel happy and safe once they are on campus. I do think the positive changes announced this week (and over the past few years) should be acknowledged and used as a catalyst to push for more. This will not happen overnight. So unfortunately, in the meantime, W&L will miss out on many amazing students who simply do not feel comfortable with the school as it is today.
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Inaction is not what is happening. Changes are being made. Lee Chapel, Traveller name changes etc. the board is balancing a lot of factors.
Let me ask: would you drop the Washington name? Where and why do you draw the line?
I have seen it claimed that WLU gives full ride Johnson scholarships to about 10% of its students, and that (unofficially?) Johnson scholarships are mostly used to recruit minorities. If so, then that suggests that it is currently “expensive” to attract minorities to enroll at WLU, even though relatively few (compared to colleges in general and its presumed peers and competitors) do attend despite such efforts. The name and Confederate associations certainly do not help in such recruitment, although that is probably not the only aspect of WLU that could be a barrier to expanding the demographic range of recruitable potential students (a typical goal for colleges in general).
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We were told that “unofficially” approximately 50% of the Johnson scholarships are used to recruit POCLI, but I have not found that anywhere in WLU information about the scholarship. If it is a goal or criteria it should be published and official (similar to the Mosaic at Vandy). But as I mentioned, the campus must feel welcoming to POCLI for any meaningful change. Simply throwing money at the “problem” is not the answer. I see the increase in POC in the student profile as a step in the right direction, perhaps a baby step.
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Yes, although by the standards of their time, it was common for wealthy landowners to have slaves.
However, by the standards of his time, choosing to levy war against the United States and adhering to their enemies whose position was thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery and who fought against the perceived oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States would suggest being much more strongly on the pro-slavery side than most people of the time.
Perhaps WLU should have paid more attention to him…
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What does POCLI stand for?
There could be some tricky legal issue involved if the University publicly changed the goal of the Johnson Scholarship without the express consent of the “Johnson Foundation” or whatever.
Person of Color Lower Income
I agree they would have to work with the Johnson Foundation to make any official change to the Johnson Scholarship. Or they could establish another endowment with that goal. My point wasn’t really about the logistics involved. It was simply that a dedicated scholarship could be used as another part of the increased Diversity Inclusion & Equity initiatives.
As I understand it his name is a candidate for removal because he was a slaveholder. So was Washington. It is not because he fought on the side of the South
His anti monument stance concerned memorials to the leaders of the South in their roles as its leaders. As I understand it the college was named after him because of his leadership of the college although it can get fuzzy in some people’s minds in these times
This is about erasing the past not studying or evaluating it. The Protestants erased Catholic saints, the French Revolution erased everything it could lay its hands on and there are more recent examples which I don’t need to name. None of that is to their credit
Princeton has canceled Wilson. There’s a movement at UVA to remove the statue of Jefferson from in front of the Rotunda. He is next on the list after Lee. And it won’t stop there.
Non-symbolic changes are more important but this debate was tracked so closely because out of all the changes that need to be made to W&L, the symbolic ones are arguably the easiest to implement. If W&L won’t budge on the name, then the concrete, even more “uncomfortable” changes (such as changing the racially segregated Greek culture) don’t have much hope. Also from what I’ve seen during my time here, W&L seems to be most willing to expand their minority recruitment, which is great except for the fact that W&L refuses to listen to minority students on making the campus more inclusive for them. So on its own, all the expanded recruitment is doing is trapping more minority students in an oppressive system for four years.
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Thank you for sharing. It is important for us parents to hear from students.
I agree. If you refer to several of my previous posts I stated that the recruitment is meaningless if once on campus a student does not feel safe, accepted, fulfilled and happy. Best wishes to you.
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