Yale Gets A Guide To Rename Calhoun

A panel of historians has given Yale a scholarly basis for renaming a residential college named after a leading slavery advocate if it chooses to— while stopping short of recommending that it actually do so.

The basis was laid out in a report Yale released Friday from its Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming.

Yale President Peter Salovey established the committee amid ongoing campus and community protests calling for renaming the residential college named after former U.S. Sen. John C. Calhoun because of his influential support of slavery — and amid equally vociferous critiques in the national conservative media and from some alumni of the idea of ​“erasing history” in order to bow to ​“political correctness.”

The report’s authors, who include Yale historians, argued that institutions can rename — and always have renamed — buildings in order to better reflect their values without trying to suppress history in the style of the old Soviet Union. But they concluded that institutions like Yale must take care to rename cautiously and sparingly, with an eye to ensuring that the history conferred by the original name not be lost.

Now, a three-person committee named by Salovey will now study the Calhoun question in light of this report and present a recommendation to the Yale Corporation in coming months. Yale officials said in a conference call with reporters Friday that they hope to have that recommendation by early 2017 and a decision soon after.

Click here to read the full report.

The authors faced a daunting intellectual challenge: To establish honest principles to guide university decision-makers through the stormy renaming debates erupting on campuses nationwide.

They concluded that renaming is a bad idea if the motive is to hide history. They cited the Soviet Union for doing it on a regular basis.

They concluded that renaming is a good idea if the motive is to better align a building with the institution’s core values — as occurred in South Africa after the fall of apartheid, in West Germany after World War II, and at Columbia University after it became Columbia University, not Kings College.

The report noted that it can be relevant to revisit why a name went on a building in the first place: For instance, The University of Texas named a residence hall after a Ku Klux Klan member in apparent response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ordering the racial desegregation of schools. The university decided to change the name in 2010, followed by similar renaming efforts for white supremacist-titled buildings at Duke, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Oregon.

The authors noted that Yale leaders separated themselves from John C. Calhoun’s pro-slavery views when he died in 1850, and didn’t name a building after him at the time. They noted that Yale leaders’ ​“sensibilities” had changed in the early 1900s: ​“the University took part in the process by which many early-twentieth-century American institutions set aside the struggles of the Civil War generation for freedom and equality. The University remembered the Confederate States of America by inscribing Confederate soldiers’ names alongside those of Union soldiers on the marble tablets lining the corridor between Beinecke Plaza and Memorial Hall. Soon thereafter, the construction of Memorial Quadrangle on the site of present-day Saybrook and Branford Colleges featured John Calhoun not once but twice, in a statue on the Harkness Tower and again as the name over an entryway in the Quadrangle.” By the early 1930s, when Yale built new residential colleges, Yale leaders considered Calhoun ​“an ideal choice” for memorializing because of his ​“unrivaled statesmanship” among Yale graduates.

“Ironically, the Calhoun name was attractive for some precisely because in the 1930s he seemed unlikely to engender controversy among the University’s students, faculty, and alumni. To the extent the name would be able to help draw students from the South, it seemed to hold out the prospect of a certain kind of diversification of the student body. Moreover, the committee charged with developing nomenclature for the new colleges aimed for names that would serve as unifying symbols for the student communities,” the report states.

“… Outside Yale, however, the memory of Calhoun remained a vivid reminder of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. In his famous dissent in the Slaughter-House Cases, decided in 1873, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field singled out Calhoun and cited his doctrines as the epitome of the proslavery view of the Constitution that the Civil War and the subsequent amendments to the Constitution had decisively rejected. The African-American editor T. Thomas Fortune spoke bitterly of the continuing and pernicious racial effects of ​‘John C. Calhoun’s States’ Rights theories.’
Even as Yale was building Calhoun College, the country’s leading black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, excoriated Calhoun as the founder of the view that ​‘slavery is a positive good.’”

Only in the 1960s, did some campus criticisms of Calhoun begin surfacing, according to the report. That’s when Yale started admitting more black students under the meritocratic policies of then-President Kingman Brewster. Those criticisms built over the years, culminating in the past year of protests.

In the end, the committee set forth principles for when and how to rename a building without burying history:

• ​“There is a strong presumption against renaming a building on the basis of the values associated with its namesake. Such a renaming should be considered only in exceptional circumstances.”

• The presumption against renaming is at its strongest when a building has been named for someone who made major contributions to the University.” Note: The report does not argue that Calhoun made major contributions to Yale.

• Potential renamers should consider whether ​“a principal legacy of the namesake fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University.” Note: The authors proceed to note that ​“a principal legacy of racism and bigotry would contradict” Yale’s goal of ​“making the world a better place through, among other things, the education of future leaders in an ​“ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.”

• Potential renamers should consider whether ​“the relevant principal legacy significantly contested in the time and place in which the namesake lived.”

• Potential renamers should consider whether ​“the University, at the time of a naming, honor[ed] a namesake for reasons that are fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University.”

• Potential renamers should consider whether a building’s namesake ​“has a principal legacy fundamentally at odds with the University’s mission, or which was named for reasons fundamentally at odds with the University’s mission, play a substantial role in forming community at the University.” Note: Then the report argues that if a namesake has ​“helped form bonds and connections among generations of community members,” then the name should remain. But — here’s a key ​“but” — ​“it is difficult to encourage the formation of community around a namesake with a principal legacy fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University. Such names may fail to do the work of fostering community. Moreover, assigning students without their choice to a particular building or residential college whose namesake has a principal legacy fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University essentially requires students to form their University communities around such a name. These considerations offer strong reasons to alter a name.”

So the report definitely gives Yale an out both to keep the name as well as to dump the name without having to rename every other building on campus tied to someone with any ties to slavery.

In Friday’s phone conference with reporters, some of the authors were asked whether, though, the report seems to argue between the lines that Yale should go ahead and change Calhoun’s name.

Committee Chair John Fabian Witt, a professor of law and of history, insisted that wasn’t the case. He noted that the members of the committee wouldn’t have agreed to serve if it appeared to be a ​“rigged process.” In fact, he said, the fact that the committee was not charged with making a recommendation about Calhoun gave members the luxury of focusing on broader principles.

Officials said they hope that the resulting report will remain a relevant guide for the university to make a wide range of decisions for decades to come, the way that a report on free speech issued more than 40 years ago a committee led by historian C. Vann Woodward continues to guide Yale today. Including in the formation of this report.

If Yale does change the name of Calhoun College or any other building, the authors wrote, it should make sure to do so through a rigorous process and preserve the historical record.

The three-member committee now weighing the report’s recommendations specifically includes G. Leonard Baker ​’64 (Calhoun College); John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History; and Jacqueline Goldsby, professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies.

Here’s who served on the committee that prepared the report:

• John Fabian Witt (chair), Yale College ​’94, ​’99 J.D., ​’00 Ph.D., Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and Professor of History
• G. Leonard (Len) Baker, Jr., Yale College ​’64
• Tom A. Bernstein, Esq., Yale College ​’74, ​’77 J.D.
• David Blight (advisor), Class of 1954 Professor of History
• Beverly Gage, Yale College ​’94, Professor of History
• Jonathan Holloway, ​’95 Ph.D., Dean of Yale College; Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies
• Lalani Perry, Director of Communications, Human Resources
• Dasia Moore, Yale Undergraduate, ​‘18
• Sharon Oster, Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship; Dean, Yale School of Management (2008 – 11)
• Stephen Pitti, Yale College ​’91, Professor of History and of American Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration; Head of Ezra Stiles College
• Wilhelmina M. (Mimi) Wright, Yale College ​’86
• Wendy Xiao, Yale M.D./Ph.D. candidate (Neuroscience)