The College Formerly Known as Yale

Parents Forum
481

And it may very well be that it gets renamed - and so be it. But it would be good to articulate principles by which buildings are renamed so it’s not just “complain/rename.”

Who gets to decide? Who are the relevant stakeholders (faculty, students, parents, alums, donors) and what weight do they all have? Does anyone’s historical oppression give them a heavier weight in the decision? (And btw does that apply to Jews because of the obvious? Muslims, who in parts of this country need fear for their personal safety? Those of Irish descent like my ancestors who suffered from NINA laws? Asians whose ancestors worked on the railroads? How about whites from Appalachia who are hardly in the same privilege class as High WASPs?)

And how do you decide (and who decides) what are flaws in a person who is otherwise meritorious and what are “deal-breaker” flaws? is standing by and saying nothing when something bad was done the same as advocating it? How about other “flaws” - using language we consider unacceptable today, having extramarital affairs, covering up a scandal? Sleeping with slaves a la TJ? Not proactively advocating women’s rights or gay marriage rights? Making money off things that some people consider bad? (Defense industry, robber barons, tobacco) Or simply handling things in a way different from how we would do so today with the benefit of hindsight?

What level of merit / accomplishment / service to the university outweighs the bad? (Still noting that no one is advocating changing Yale’s name, or Duke’s name even though built on tobacco.)

Is the decision more important if it’s a residence hall vs another building? Does the length of time since the “misdeed” matter? Does the debate change if we are talking about a new building name vs changing an existing one? Does the cost of changing a name matter?

That’s why, to me at least, the q isn’t really “should Calhoun at Yale be renamed.” Whatever. It’s about contemplating these larger issues and developing organizing principles. Because obviously no one wants there to be groundbreaking ceremonies on Hitler Hall or Saddam Hussein Hall, but that doesn’t also mean that any protest or objection to any person 200 years ago warrants immediate indulging.

482

Just getting caught back up on this thread… wow! Glad to see Yale is going to rethink their decision not to rename… I hear there has been tremendous outcry from students, and staff, and media …add the employee who smashed the windows re offensive work environment… I think they are going to have no choice but to rename.

Georgetown chose to rename two of its buildings last year and are now doing even more to help make amends for its role in slave trading-

…Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia pledged a vigorous and wide-ranging effort to make amends for the Jesuit school’s 1838 sale of 272 slaves.He said that the university is studying a range of actions that it plans to unveil later this summer, part of an effort to address the legacy of slavery, racism and segregation for the nation as a whole and for Georgetown in particular.

“I don’t think putting a plaque on the wall is going to be an answer,” DeGioia said.

DeGioia announced in February that the university is moving to expand its faculty in African American studies and establish a research center focused on racial injustice. The role of Georgetown’s early 19th century leadership in the slave trade has come under increasing scrutiny in the past two years, a time of racial unrest across the nation and of introspection and student activism at many colleges and universities.

In November, Georgetown announced that it was removing from two buildings the names of two of its 19th century presidents who organized or played an advisory role in the sale of the slaves to a Louisiana plantation to help the school pay off debts. A building once named for the Rev. Thomas F. Mulledy has been temporarily renamed Freedom Hall. Another one named for the Rev. William McSherry has been temporarily dubbed Remembrance Hall.

you can read more here https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/06/23/georgetown-president-is-seeking-to-make-amends-for-1838-slave-sale/

Go Hoyas!

483

And note that Gtown actions are actual ACTIONS. Not merely the window dressing of changing a name on a dorm and proclaiming mission accomplished. But I’d expect no less from Jesuits , who IMO demonstrate nuanced and thoughtful approaches. (That’s not to say Yale isn’t thoughtful. But let’s put actions in context.)

484

Well, if they are going to revisit the idea, especially given the covert pressure that may be felt after these other academic institutions are taking these steps, I vote for naming it after Kingman Brewster, who was president of Yale from 1963-77 and oversaw some notable changes on campus during turbulent times. http://biography.yourdictionary.com/kingman-brewster-jr

485

@jym626 Thanks for sharing his history- clearly was a man ahead of his time! Brewster building it is :slight_smile:

486

Oops, accidental post

487

Thanks, @runswimyoga . Brewster also, with the appointment of Inslee Clark as Dean of Admissions, ended the admissions quotas (which of course they claimed didnt exist)

And the school went co-ed under his tutelage

[quote]
Brewster was known for the improvements he made to Yale’s faculty, curriculum, and admissions policies. He was president of the University when Yale began admitting women as undergraduates.[29] Academic programs in various disciplines were expanded. /quote

love this…

The wiki bio gives a better flavor for his accomplishments, the risks he took, and the benefits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman_Brewster_Jr.

488

Re Confederate Hall: Contrast with Harvard’s Memorial Hall, erected to honor Harvard students who died defending the Union. No Harvard men who died for the Confederacy are listed on its memorial plaques, since of course they were trying to destroy the Union.

Re Calhoun the historical figure: I think it is very clear that Yale didn’t honor him because he was a proponent of slavery, but perhaps despite it. Why was he also listed as among the great triumvirate with Daniel Webster (A staunch defender of the Union) and Henry Clay? This information from the Wikipedia entry for Henry Clay may give an idea:

"Known as “The Great Compromiser”, Clay brokered important agreements during the Nullification Crisis and on the slavery issue. As part of the “Great Triumvirate” or “Immortal Trio,” along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, he was instrumental in formulating the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850 to ease sectional tensions. He was viewed as the primary representative of Western interests in this group, and was given the names “Henry of the West” and “The Western Star.”[2] As a plantation owner, Clay held slaves during his lifetime, but freed them in his will.[3]

Abraham Lincoln, the Whig leader in Illinois, was a great admirer of Clay, saying he was “my ideal of a great man.” Lincoln wholeheartedly supported Clay’s economic programs.[4] In 1957, a Senate Committee selected Clay as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators, along with Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert La Follette, and Robert A. Taft.[5]"

Re the teaching of history in general: I think a huge problem in this country is that so many of us have been fed a grossly-oversimplified version of events, complete with perfect heroes and a mythology of exceptionalism. When some people are confronted with facts that indicate that every hero was not perfect, and that the motivations and actions of the USA were not always noble or positive, the very foundation of what they believe about their country is affronted and shaken at the core. The response is often knee-jerk rejection. “America: Love it or Leave it” springs to mind. They find it difficult that one can accept the USA as flawed, like every nation, yet love it just as much for its ideals and aspirations, towards which we have made constant progress over the last few hundred years.

Just think of the oft-repeated myth that the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were looking for religious freedom: no, as soon as they arrived they set up a theocracy. It is possible to honor and admire them for their tremendous courage at the same time deploring the effect that their arrival had on the Native American population, as well as deploring the fact that they executed, beat, and jailed people they considered to be heretics, such as Quakers and Catholics.

489

Interestingly Yale’s war memorial, built many years after the heat of the Civil War, honors both Union and Confederate Yalies. https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3279

490

^That is a fascinating article. Thank you. I found this part interesting:

But by the turn of the century, the nation was engaged in what Yale historian David Blight describes as an effort of reconciliationist memory, “disembodied from the causes and consequences of the war.” Racing toward national reunion, the two sides were forced to overlook the specific causes that had torn them apart in the first place. The memory of slavery and emancipation, Blight writes, “never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War.”

…

I have been trying to research and understand what was going on with all these monuments in the 1930s, and would appreciate any insight here:

*Jane Turner Censer, a professor of history at George Mason University, made a similar argument, saying that the earliest attempts at memorializing Confederate soldiers – undertaken largely by white women’s organizations – sought to locate and identify their remains. Over time, the monuments became more and more celebratory, and “glorifying,” boldly moving from the cemetery to public squares and other prominent areas: Davis on a horse, a Confederate soldier standing guard.

Some of the supporters argued that these efforts weren’t political, when they of course were,** Censer said. “White Southerners showed their power by dominating the space with martial monuments.”***

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/08/historians-debate-value-and-place-confederate-monuments-and-other-symbols

Mamie Garvin Fields, speaking about the first Calhoun Monument, said,* “I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue.”** She was right. White Charlestonians used their monuments to Calhoun to justify the system of segregation they worked so hard to impose on African Americans after the promise of Reconstruction. Whites could not re-enslave blacks, but they could raise a likeness of one of the peculiar institution’s most vocal champions to remind them of their “proper place” in the New South. If we do away with monuments like the Calhoun statue, we risk erasing how these memorials reinforced racial inequality in the past. This would constitute a distortion of history, of memory, in its own right. We also risk losing sight of the insidious legacies of these monuments today. *

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/-confederate-monuments-flags-south-carolina/396836/

*A Yale tercentennial brochure, published in 2001, summarizes Yale’s relation to slavery:

From James Hillhouse 1773, the leader of the anti-slavery movement in the First Federal Congress, to Josiah Willard Gibbs 1809, who befriended the captives of the Amistad, to John W. Blassingame '70 PhD, who edited Frederick Douglass's speeches, Yale graduates and faculty have had a long history of activism in the face of slavery and a modern history of scholarship about it. Today the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, located at Yale, is the first of its kind in the world. Three figures--Hillhouse, Gibbs, and Blassingame--stand for Yale's "long history of activism in the face of slavery.

It is true that these three Yale leaders stand in a tradition of strong opposition to slavery. But a story that begins and ends with them does not tell the full story of Yale’s relationship to slavery.

This essay attempts to complete the picture: In the 1930s and 1960s, Yale chose to name most of its colleges after slave owners and pro-slavery leaders. In 1831, Yale leaders helped stop an effort to expand higher education for African-Americans in New Haven.*

http://www.yaleslavery.org/Resources/summ.html

I am pretty sure I know what white folks meant when they put up Confederate monuments in the South during the 1930s. I have no idea what Yale meant when it named Calhoun College at the same time. I wish I could find some more information, but just can’t find very much written about it all.

491

@alh, I was also reading from the yaleslavery.org site. Not a pretty history.

492

I’m reading about social movements of the 1930s in the US, about migrations and Hoover and Roosevelt and New Deal policies and the Communist Party and labor unions. And who benefited from it all and who didn’t. I wish someone would post a bibliography or guide or excellent summary.

My grandparents taught me what happened in the South, or at least taught me their version of what happened. I have no idea what happened in the rest of the country.

ETA: I hope it really isn’t off topic, if the context makes Yale’s decisions during the 30s on naming colleges more understandable to modern day sensibilities. Now that I’m thinking about Calhoun College, I can’t really think about it in a vacuum.

493

Yes thank you @alh for that interesting article. I did not realize that 9 (!) of Yale’s 14 Residential Colleges are named after slave owners (I include Franklin), and 1 (Morse) for a person advocating slavery. Only Pierson gets off as a non-owner during slavery years and Murray was born in 1910 and herself African American. 2 colleges are named for towns – probably the safest picks.

494

I’m hoping a historian of the period shows up to explain it all to us.

495

Well…looks like racism. :wink:

496

So is Calhoun worse because he was a southern racist, and the northern racists are more palatable?

497

@DoyleB, I think that we have established that Calhoun was not merely a person who happened to own slaves because of the circumstances in which he was born and lived. (And this is an excuse that pertains to many: some free blacks also owned slaves.) He was not only a proponent of slavery as an institution, but perhaps THE proponent. Whether he hailed from the north or south is immaterial.

498

Too late to edit, but I think what reading through the two appendices to the Yale slavery article illuminates is how likely well-to-do and influential men, even in New England, were to own slaves in the time up through the 18th century. Fortunes were built on it.

My church has a brass plaque on one pew placed there by the Daughters of the Confederacy, memorializing Jefferson Davis. When he was Secretary of War, he spent a summer in Portland overseeing the building of forts in the harbor. He was a Unitarian–much to the chagrin of the Boston abolitionists who lead the movement, I would venture to guess–and sat in that pew with friends who owned it. My church was also involved in the Underground Railroad, probably at the very time that he sat in the pew. As a center of civic life, it was also the scene of a near-riot when abolitionist speakers were attacked by men in the crowd. One was beaten severely, and the other only managed to escape because women of the congregation sheltered him between their hoopskirts and managed to get him out f the building. One of the 17th or 18th century Congregational ministers owned a slave.

History is messy.

499

At what point does renaming things become ‘1984’ esque history rewriting?

500

If Yale renames Calhoun College, history isn’t rewritten. All written records, and photos, and film, up to the time of the renaming remain. There will be written records about the renaming. This doesn’t erase Calhoun or Calhoun College from memory or the history books. The historical record of a Yale with a Calhoun College will continue to exist. John C. Calhoun won’t be written out of the historical record either.

Who decides to study John C. Calhoun is a different story. Textbooks are rewritten all the time with all different kinds of emphasis depending on the writer and the intended audience.