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posted by on Monday February 13 2017, @06:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the excellent-choice dept.

A couple of months ago, SoylentNews covered the debate on whether to rename historical buildings, monuments, and other landmarks, specifically centered on the case of Calhoun College at Yale.

YaleNews now reports that a decision has been made to rename the college after Grace Hopper, a computer scientist who also served as a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, and who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year.

Yale President Peter Salovey announced today that the university would rename Calhoun College, one of 12 undergraduate residential colleges, to honor one of Yale's most distinguished graduates, Grace Murray Hopper '30 M.A., '34 Ph.D., by renaming the college for her.

Salovey made the decision with the university's board of trustees — the Yale Corporation — at its most recent meeting. "The decision to change a college's name is not one we take lightly, but John C. Calhoun's legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery as a 'positive good' fundamentally conflicts with Yale's mission and values," Salovey said. [...]

This decision overrides Salovey's announcement in April of last year that the name of Calhoun College would remain. "At that time, as now, I was committed to confronting, not erasing, our history. I was concerned about inviting a series of name changes that would obscure Yale's past," said Salovey. "These concerns remain paramount, but we have since established an enduring set of principles that address them. The principles establish a strong presumption against renaming buildings, ensure respect for our past, and enable thoughtful review of any future requests for change." [...]

In August, Salovey asked John Witt '94 B.A., '99 J.D., '00 Ph.D., the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and professor of history, to chair a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. [...] The Witt committee outlines four principles that should guide any consideration of renaming: (1) whether the namesake's principal legacy fundamentally conflicts with the university's mission; (2) whether that principal legacy was contested during the namesake's lifetime; (3) the reasons the university honored that person; and (4) whether the building so named plays a substantial role in forming community at Yale. In considering these principles, it became clear that Calhoun College presents an exceptionally strong case — perhaps uniquely strong — that allows it to overcome the powerful presumption against renaming articulated in the report, said the president.


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  • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Monday February 13 2017, @11:39PM

    Follow that idea too far and you'd probably end up with an operating system where the "cd" command was something ridiculous like "SET DEFAULT DIRECTORY" - and that is never gonna happen.

    Hey, at least you can abbreviate it to set def!

    --
    My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday February 14 2017, @10:40AM

    by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday February 14 2017, @10:40AM (#466912)

    Hey, at least you can abbreviate it to set def!

    Surely someone has ported bash to VMS by now? Oh, wait, it wouldn't be able to cat VMS's record-based text files...

    • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:13PM

      by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:13PM (#467000) Homepage Journal

      Check out the gnv project [sourceforge.net] (Gnu's Not VMS). It's one of the major stepping stones for some major porting efforts going on right now to get some semblance of modern tools/software on the platform. That it does the all the directory translation voodoo properly is equal parts amazing and scary. The idea is that with a proper gnu toolchain, you're at least starting from a common base line by being able to run ./configure && make and see what breaks.

      In other VMS news, VSI software has a first beta of VMS running natively on x86-64.

      --
      My VMS box beat up your Windows box.