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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, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:48AM
To say it's a cultural issue is to vastly understate the evils of slavery.
It's never quite that clear cut. Slavery in the USA involved a degree of double-think. Many of the slave owners would have been horrified at the idea of human slaves, but they had been brought up to believe that negros were no more human than any of the great apes. They thought that black people were unable to look after themselves and that if they freed the slaves then it was no different from turning domesticated animals out into an environment where they had no ecological niche. If you'd grown up in such an environment, with taught to believe this from an early age, can you honestly say that you'd have been opposed to slavery? If someone came to you today and told you that cows were intelligent and that you should free the cattle from farms, what would your reaction be? From our modern perspective, we can see that there's an obvious difference between the two, but for someone brought up in the south of the USA back then, they'd have seemed very similar.
sudo mod me up