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Should Yale University change the name of Calhoun College?
Adding his voice to a debate that has been raging for over a year, Yale professor and film historian Charlie Musser, director of the five-DVD box set Pioneers of African American Cinema and author of the new Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s, says yes. He came on WNHH radio’s “The Tom Ficklin Show” to discuss why.
Below is a selection of the interview.
Excerpts of the discussion follow. You can hear the full episode by clicking on the sound file. at the bottom of this story.
Where do we go when we have symbols that might be denigrating to some and glorified by others? Share a little bit about your involvement with the Calhoun College issue.
Well, you know, I was at Yale as an undergraduate, I was at Berkeley College. So Calhoun College was our sort of sister college, if you will. One of the people who was in Calhoun College at the time was [Henry] “Skip” Gates, who has gone on to do many things in African-American studies. I was in the first class that admitted women, of course there was the Bobby Seale trial in May of 1970, there was the Vietnam war going on, so there were a lot of sort of immediate things that we had to think and do about.
I think it’s complicated. Because alumni, when they leave, they sort of like to fantasize that the university hasn’t changed very much. So there’s, I think … some alumni, shall we say, are often very resistant to the idea of changing the name of a college because they know all these people that were in Calhoun. What are they going to call it now? I think that that’s been one of the difficulties … The resistance has been in part to changing the name.
But I was thinking initially that … we should keep the name Calhoun College, but we should change who it was named after. Cause there’s a lot of Calhouns who went through Yale, including a PhD student of mine, Claudia Calhoun, whose father is a black cop in Houston, Texas. So there’s the black Calhouns too. What was interesting was that really didn’t get a lot of response, and I think [the opportunity for that] kind of clever compromise is long passed. I think, actually, I understood things in a deeper way because of Corey Menafee.
Indeed, indeed.
Corey Menafee is a kind of hero for me for kind of clarifying a lot of issues. He’s very courageous … what those windows, and that window in particular, show, is that this is not just about a name. Calhoun College really is a tie to white supremacy. And you know … I have quite a few meals over the years in Calhoun College and never really paid attention to it …
So what triggered you to kind of be involved? You followed Corey? You went to the judicial hearings? What was the kind of trigger for you to lend your reputation, your expertise? Literally a lot of Yale faculty members do not do that, so I was intrigued with your personal involvement.
Well, I don’t want to exaggerate what this entailed. First of all …
But you were there [in court for one of Menafee’s hearings]! Your body was there. I have pictures of it!
I mean, it was interesting that Pioneers of African-American Cinema was coming out at the very moment that this was happening. And, you know, the court hearings were a block from my office, and it was summer. So to not go seemed to me … I didn’t have any excuse. So I would have really had to live with the fact that I was really as ineffective a kind of political activist as I probably am.
But you could have just sat in the public area. You publicly, you were quoted, you’ve been involved.
Well, I was … he’s an extraordinary person. It’s not like he was sort of this Black Lives Matter militant who came in there and wanted to make a political point. I mean, he was just someone who was an ordinary person who … it finally got to be too much. It was sort of … I found his position in this really moving and telling.
What he did was not only understandable … it was totally clarifying of the situation around Calhoun College. And we were going to go through this long back and forth during the school year about whether it [the name] should be changed or not, and I think when he did that … it was really an extraordinary moment in its own way. The real thing was, OK fine, he was a hero in his own way, but he lost his job and that was outrageous. I think trying to get his job back was something that mobilized a lot of us initially.
Let me phrase it this way, Charlie. How many faculty members are employed at Yale? 1,000? 2,000? 3,000? Adjuncts? What’s the ball park figure?
I think there’s a little over 1,000 who are tenure-track or tenured.
And how many faculty members did you see out there?
There were four, five.
Well there you go. So because of that … you now have this this renaming committee.
Right. Well, I think that the university understands, finally, that this is a losing hand. And that it has to change — and it should change it for all sorts of reasons. The other thing that Corey added is, it’s not just the students who live there. It’s the people who work there! And those people aren’t just there for four years. They’re there for a much longer period of time. And you know, the poignancy of it, the blatancy of it was just irrefutable. So he really, I think, changed the conversation.
So where do we go from here, in terms of the psychological impact, the political impact, the alumni impact
I think the university could do a much better job at emphasizing the positive role it played in the end of slavery, starting with the Amistad trials that were going on at the very moment that John C. Calhoun was a senator from South Carolina. … I think we should actually rename Calhoun College Amistad College, because Calhoun College is also the only college that touches the Green. The Amistad trails and Yale professors who were translators … this was a moment when New Haven and Yale certainly came together around the issues of race. Not at Yale but elsewhere in New Haven there’s a lot of things named after Amistad. So Yale has never done that. So that’s what I would like to see happen to that.
I occasionally write the president of Yale, Peter Salovey, about these issues, and I do get a response. I mean, I do think he is interested and concerned and has assumed kind of flexibility even though we can be frustrated at any given moment. You know, more than twice as many Yale graduates died in the Civil War fighting for the Union Cause and for the end of slavery, for a new and better world, than died … than were on the confederate side, and I can’t help but think that those who died must have rolled over in their graves when Calhoun College was named after John C. Calhoun.
That’s the part that really bewilders me. In a way, I could rationalize: OK, you’re going to name something after him in 1870, 1880. But in early 1030s? To resurrect that name … that’s the kind of part that confuses me.
It’s just a reminder of how bad race relations were in this country in the 30s and of course long beyond that. That you would not only name a college after this white supremacist but embed those ideas in the very walls of the college … it’s really hard to argue.
So I just said that when they change the name, which they’ll have to, you can really imagine those dead union soldiers, those Yale graduates, singing “glory glory hallelujah.”
John Brown’s body!
Maybe that too.
For the whole interview, click on or download the audio above, or check out Elm City Lowdown on iTunes or Soundcloud, where this is saved as a podcast.