West Coast Observer: What’s in a name?

By William Silveira

Undergraduates in Yale College who were residing in residential Calhoun College in academic year 2016-2017 started residing in Hopper College the following year. They didn’t accomplish that by moving their stuff from one residential college to another, but by Yale University’s renaming Calhoun College (after John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who served as the seventh vice president of the United States) to Hopper College (after Grace Murray Hopper, an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral).

Rear Admiral (then Commodore)
Grace M. Hopper, 1984

   Why did Yale do that? Yale’s rationale is explained in a long article in Yale News, February 11, 2017. It has to do with racism. The Yale News article labels Calhoun a “white supremacist.”

And why did the University of California at Berkeley recently rename its law school from Boalt Hall (after John Henry Boalt) to University of California, Berkeley, School of Law? Again, racism. John Henry Boalt’s Wikipedia entry says that

Boalt has recently become known for his racist views of Chinese people. He was an influential supporter of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. In 1877 he read a paper before the Berkeley Club in which he wrote that Chinese were unassimilable liars, murderers and misogynists who provoked “unconquerable repulsion.”

I have no problem with renaming public places (schools, streets, buildings, etc.), provided that the motivation for the renaming is not for the purpose of recognizing persons or events associated with racist or exclusionary policies. The Yale group tasked to delineate the principles by which buildings were to be renamed issued a thoughtful report with some excellent guidelines.
    I did not attend Boalt Hall – I went to UCLA School of Law – but the renaming off a law school did bring me face to face with having to define what I would think inappropriate.
    The problem is rather like trying to define pornography. As former Justice Potter Stewart of our Supreme Court once noted, he knew pornography when he saw it, but he had a great deal of difficulty defining it. Many difficulties are created when you start naming public places, things, locations, etc. after persons. Certainly, we should wish to name places after persons who have made noteworthy contributions to the public good, but we should probably be careful about the total historical record pertaining to the person we expect to honor.

Andrew Jackson, the 7th President
of the United States

As for renaming places, things, etc. that were originally named after individuals, we would face a gargantuan task if we were to remove names of all persons whom we might associate with abhorrent past events. How many places are named after President Andrew Jackson, who was a slave owner and broke treaties with Indian tribes, took their land, and exiled them to Oklahoma territory? And then there are those who participated in the rebellion against our Constitution in the Civil War, but are still regarded as tragic heroes – for example, General Robert E. Lee? It’s laughably ironic to me that many still admire Lee, but hardly any still admire President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America.

Henry Ford made a very telling observation when he said that history was bunk. By the way, his Wikipedia entry notes that

Ford was also widely known for his pacifism during the first years of World War I, and for promoting antisemitic content, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, through his newspaper The Dearborn Independent and the book The International Jew, having an alleged influence on the development of Nazism and Adolf Hitler.

Copyright © 2020 by William Silveira