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posted by martyb on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the Watt's-in-a-name? dept.

Should Calhoun College (christened in honor of pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun) be renamed?

Yale adopts a new approach to decide whether university properties need new names. Some favor a rule of no renaming at all, some are worried about the excessive 'PC'.

On Friday, a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, convened earlier this semester at Yale University, issued its final report. This group was not charged with deciding whether or not to rename Calhoun College, the residential unit christened in 1933 in honor of the influential pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun, which has been a focus of renewed public controversy in the past year. Instead, the committee produced a framework for any and all future renaming decisions. The Yale Corporation has adopted the principles that the committee put forth, and the university's president, Peter Salovey, has appointed a smaller committee to reconsider the Calhoun case in light of this group's recommendations.

Full article

Procedure for Consideration of Renaming Requests


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:10AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:10AM (#436762) Journal

    1) Censorship doesn't destroy bad ideas, it merely drives them underground

    2) How will people know what they're being "protected" from if they aren't told it?

    3) This reduces Calhoun down to a single issue, a caricature. I'd probably have hated his guts, but can at least acknowledge that he was a full, complex human being, even if most of those complexes have thiol groups in them.

    This is the precise wrong way to go about this. If anything, evil should be dragged kicking and screaming into the sunlight and dissected coldly and logically, piece--by--piece, so that thinking persons can see for themselves WHY it is evil. All burying it does is admit we're too weak to face it.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15AM (#436776)

    Sounds more like a spot to teach why he was wrong. If you follow populism history you get what you deserve. A view of history that is just as distorted (if not more so) as the one you are trying to replace. To whitewash your history means you do not actually care about the actual issue and think sticking your head in the sand is a better way to solve issues. Bad ideas should have a good spotlight on them.

    I would challenge them to spend the waste they are about to put forth and donate it to a school a few miles down the road in say inner new york city. THAT would be a better use if they actually wanted to make a difference in peoples lives. Instead of playing the virtual signal game.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:22AM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:22AM (#436835) Journal

      Sounds more like a spot to teach why he was wrong.

      Absolutely agreed. That's what I'd do -- and in fact, I guess I already tried to do it in a post above about the culture surrounding Calhoun. It's very easy to condemn people or declare them to be "evil" or whatever. It's a LOT harder to try to understand their assumptions and then LEARN how to avoid going down the bad paths they did.

      On a related subject, I experience this a lot in my own work (which partly has to do with the history of science). The way we teach history of science -- when we do at all -- is generally to highlight the "great innovators" while often presenting an oversimplified and distorted picture of their opponents. It's easy to make fun of strawmen, after all. I personally think we'd do a much better service to students if we sometimes tried to show the complexity of historical scientific controversies, since they show us how scientific progress really happens, how the deprecated theories we tend to make fun of today came to be dominant, why it often took so long for them to die off (because they often had an "intuitive" sense about them within scientific assumptions of the time), etc. That would teach lessons on confirmation bias and other social "human" perceptual elements that are important in shaping scientific discourse... and how "good science" has to be on guard to avoid letting these things get in the way of objectivity.

      But it's much easier to just point to a "genius" of the past with almost religious reverence and portray everyone else as bumbling (and sometimes even ignorant) fools.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:48AM (#436845)

    1) Removing someone's name from a building is not censorship. If at some point those who own the building feel the honor is no longer worth bestowing on the individual then shouldn't they have the right to name it whatever they want?
    2) No one is suggesting that anyone be removed from the history books, just that the legacy of the individual may no longer deserve the honor of naming a building after the individual.
    3) No it doesn't. See #1 & #2.