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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.
Procedure for Consideration of Renaming Requests
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:56AM
By the way, just note that I AM aware that Calhoun was also not technically "forced to choose a side" in the Civil War, because he died before it began. My point was that he lived into the era of sectionalism in the U.S. where it became about "choosing sides," and indeed he was one of the main instigators of that sort of rhetoric. If anything, I think THAT might be a stronger historical case for removing his name from a building: his rhetoric was instrumental in setting the U.S. on the course toward a civil war that tore the country apart. Pro-slavery folks were a "dime a dozen" in those days and white supremacy was basically the assumption even among most Northerners... but leaders who essentially spearheaded the initial justification for secession? Calhoun's name was basically at the top of that list. (And even that's a problematic question historically: there were plenty of learned folks in both the North and the South before the Civil War who considered the potential legality of secession.)
In the end though, this is NOT a historical question. It is a modern political one, whether we like it or not.