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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.

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Procedure for Consideration of Renaming Requests


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Yale to Rename "Calhoun College" to Honor Computer Science Pioneer Grace Murray Hopper 40 comments

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: 3, Interesting) by linkdude64 on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:29AM

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:29AM (#436741)

    ...are doomed to repeat it.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:37AM (#436743)

      I see that they do not want to "honor" someone who was pro-slavery, but it really sounds like a version of this:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:54AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:54AM (#436758)

      We can start by renaming Washington DC. I can think of a few more descriptive names.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday December 04 2016, @06:06PM

        by linkdude64 (5482) on Sunday December 04 2016, @06:06PM (#436936)

        I'm not sure if DC was named after THE Washington, but assuming it is, I'm not sure you're thinking about him in the correct light.

        George Washington was a murderous, whiskey-brewing, gun-running, freedom-loving, anti-government terrorist leader.

        The violence waged to birth this country - just like the violence that birthed the Emancipation Proclamation - is being actively, but quietly silenced by a sinister group whose agenda is sedation of the minds of Americans. George Washington is not a figure to forget, but a figure to remember, in these times.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:29PM (#436908)
      Those who remember history are often forced to repeat it anyway ;)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:42AM (#436744)

    I suggest [chicagotribune.com] calling it [breitbart.com] Trump Tower [independent.co.uk].

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:05AM

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:05AM (#436745)

    You cannot just revile everyone who grew up in different cultures than you do. There is not a single historical figure, their is not a single other culture past or present, that does not appear evil by our cultural standards. Hating someone because they where born into the wrong culture is almost as absurd as erasing the past because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:25AM

      by edIII (791) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:25AM (#436749)

      It's not a fucking culture, it's slavery. To say it's a cultural issue is to vastly understate the evils of slavery.

      I guess WWII and fighting the Nazi's was about a cultural difference? We shouldn't have reviled them killing millions of Jews, because that would have been a cultural judgement on our part?

      Ridiculous. It's entirely appropriate to revile the man, just as it is the Confederate Flag.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:29AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:29AM (#436751)

        It's not a fucking culture, it's slavery. To say it's a cultural issue is to vastly understate the evils of slavery.

        So you're saying the culture of the time didn't influence people's perceptions of slavery? What nonsense. I do think it's okay to revile them for having a bad culture, but removing statues and renaming buildings isn't going to change anything and is just silly.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:36AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:36AM (#436842)

          So you're saying the culture of the time didn't influence people's perceptions of the holocaust? What nonsense. I do think it's okay to revile them for having a bad culture, but removing statues and renaming buildings isn't going to change anything and is just silly.

          So does that minor revision to the target of your statement mean Germany never should have removed statues of, and structures named after, Nazis?

          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:22AM

            by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:22AM (#436856) Homepage

            Exactly. History is history, and even bad history should be remembered.

            Besides, Hitler was a good man who cared about his people. And the "holocaust" was overstated bullshit.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:30AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:30AM (#436752)

        On the last day of the presidency, Jackson admitted that he had but two regrets, that he "had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun."

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:46AM (#436814)

        What nonsense. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves/ [wikipedia.org] and then ask to rename all streets, universities and hospitals that bear the name of these people. Some of them are on Your banknotes.
        To revile a historic man for things that we condemn as inappropriate today makes You pretty much hate all past, as there were almost no people in the past who acted in accordance to current standards. And similarly, proposing that people follow this will eventually make You into a monster for reasons You are incapable of knowing -- as they are part of the future yet to come -- which I do not believe that You are.
        I don't really know a country or a public opinion 70 years ago that wouldn't be shocked by the death of millions of Jews. Murder and genocide were a crime back then and are still. The reality of the concentration camps is that they were going on since 1933 -- 8 years before USA joined the war. They were not really publicly thought of as death camps (even in Nazi Germany!), until America had been long into the war -- do not forget that Americans also built concentration camps for people of Japanese descent, and they were accepted by the American public enough not to want to wage war on their own government. The casus belli to join the WWII was Pearl Harbor -- and not freedom, liberty and justice for Europeans.

        And why would You revile the flag? You have a strange fetish for flags -- it's just a symbol. Do not accept the idea for which it stands for: slavery, segregation and oppression. There is no reason to hate (or love) a piece of cloth for scribbles made on it with paint.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:34AM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:34AM (#436829) Journal

        It's not a fucking culture, it's slavery. To say it's a cultural issue is to vastly understate the evils of slavery.

        Actually, no -- it WAS a different culture from today. It's not understating it, because there were vast other differences in cultures too. I think it only seems to be an "understatement" if you view "culture" through the modern lens of "multiculturalism," whose primary tenet often seems to be, "We must respect other cultures which may be different from ours."

        If you remove that element of assumed "respect," then saying it's part of a different "culture" doesn't minimize it at all... it's a simply statement of fact.

        I guess WWII and fighting the Nazi's was about a cultural difference?

        Yes, it was. Nazi-era Germany had a different set of cultural standards which would be unacceptable to most people today. But part of the reason they got away with their anti-Semitic policies at the beginning was because most of Europe (and Americans) were somewhat anti-Semitic at the time. Obviously most of these people wouldn't necessary have approved of extermination of Jews, but Hitler's rhetoric was not THAT shocking to many at the time. Why? Because the culture WAS different at that time.

        We shouldn't have reviled them killing millions of Jews, because that would have been a cultural judgement on our part?

        Yes, and there's the slip in argumentation was a statement of fact -- these WERE different cultures -- to a modern "multiculturalist" assumption of "culture," i.e., we must "respect" anything called a "cultural difference."

        Same thing with racism and slavery. Most people tend to forget that even most abolitionists at the time of the Civil War would likely be viewed as holding horribly racist views by today's standards. Many of those who were against slavery still viewed Blacks as an inferior race (and were often quite ambivalent about "equal standing" in society) -- they just didn't think it justified slavery. I'm always rather amused when this fact is rediscovered again and again, particularly by liberal-leaning folks who project their modern views back in time and assume "If you were anti-slavery, you must be like a modern 'liberal' with respect for all races." That was FAR from the case. And many if not most other Northerners at the time of the Civil War were rather ambivalent about slavery, preferring more of a "NIMBY" approach to the issue -- it's okay if the South keeps doing it, just "not in my backyard." And even those who weren't rabid racists against Blacks by today's standards often had very derogatory perspectives on Asians, supported official U.S. policies against Native Americans that basically committed genocide, etc.

        I think of this as the To Kill a Mockingbird effect. Most people who read that book apparently assumed Atticus Finch was some nice modern liberal, even though there were clear statements in the original book that he was nothing of the sort. (At a few points in the original book he excuses racism and even tells his son that the KKK was merely "a political organization" that basically just needed a good "talking to" by a neighbor to get 'em to go home. I distinctly remember having a discussion about these moments in my high-school English class where we read the book -- my teacher clearly realized Atticus had a complicated set of political views.) Anyhow, when Harper Lee's other book came out recently, suddenly all these people were up in arms about how "OMG -- Atticus was NOT a racist!" Heck yeah, he was. Like most Southerners of his generation. However, he believed that Blacks still deserved fair protection under the law. That's a sort of nuance most people can't seem to make sense of today, but it was actually a dominant historical position.

        Thus, returning to the question at hand, we have to realize that America was positively steeped in a profoundly racist culture in its early days, by today's standards. It was a MAJOR cultural difference -- not a reason to "excuse" actions, but something to keep in mind. If we remove Calhoun's name, do we remove Washington's or Jefferson's or other slave-holding "Founding Fathers"? They were lucky enough to be spared the indignity of having to "choose a side" in the Civil War, unlike later generations, and I think we might be really disappointed in which one of them some of them may have chosen.

        And what about the profoundly racist actions of U.S. policy against Native Americans, Asians, etc. even well after slavery was abolished? Shall we tear down every statute named after a U.S. leader who was around and didn't object strongly during the "forced relocation" of Native American and the later "Indian Wars" that often included what would clearly be called massacres, if not outright genocide today?

        Well, what we tend to do is acknowledge that "those were different times" and yes, that was a "different culture" that accepted different moral premises, and we thus ignore most of the everyday folks who were involved in supporting what would be summarily decried as "evil actions" today.

        None of this is an argument IN FAVOR of keeping Calhoun's name on a building today. Obviously there are lots of arguments to be had on what the policy should be for historical naming, monuments, etc. But if we're going to summarily just start declaring entire segments of history were just "evil" (and thus cannot be understood as part of the predominant assumptions of culture at the time?), we should probably be prepared to tear down a LOT of monuments and rename just about everything.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:56AM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:56AM (#436833) Journal

          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.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:48AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:48AM (#436863) Journal

        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
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @10:15PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @10:15PM (#437413)

        if you can't keep your freedom, you're a slave. Whining not withstanding.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:07AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:07AM (#436760)

      On the one hand, you have some practices from the past that are so heinous (owning slaves, sex with children, doing the Macarena, etc) that maybe we don't want to be celebrating people who performed them, even if under the cultural norms of the time, by naming buildings after them. On the other hand, there seems a tendency to reduce people to a very selective one-dimensionality. Can I still enjoy, or even laud, the comedy of Bill Cosby even though there is a good chance he was a serial rapist?

      It's the latter part that really concerns me, as it holds people up to an impossible standard and denies the complexity of the human soul. People are tainted, even ones that perform tremendous acts. Does column A necessarily annul everything from column B?

      Take the recent furor over Castro. Can people come to terms with his legacy, both good and bad, that even as he was murdering thousands of his countrymen, he also probably saved thousands as well?

      That is probably the misgiving about naming buildings and such, as they don't give an accurate representation of the person, and are just whitewashing.

      But still, renaming buildings is just another type of whitewashing. I dislike either given more relevance.

      • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:29AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:29AM (#436827)

        Tell one jewish nigger joke and you're ethanol fueled forever.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:11AM (#436746)

    Rename it Coon College.

    For the same reason Gropecunt Lane was renamed Grape Lane.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by isostatic on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:14AM

      by isostatic (365) on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:14AM (#436854) Journal

      I thought they were renaming Pennsylvania Acenue to Gropecunt lane.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:27AM (#436750)

    If you're going to be like this, just stop naming buildings after people and stop building statues of people. Even a fictional character might be looked down upon in the future. For all we know, veganism might be insanely popular in several decades and people then will look back at people in the past as barbarians and want to tear down any statues and rename buildings modeled/named after people in the present. Society's morals change over time, and sometimes in ways we can't predict.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:41AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:41AM (#436757) Journal

      Society's morals change over time, and sometimes in ways we can't predict.

      This. As the summary says, the building was "christened in 1933." Who in 1933 America could have known that slavery would someday become unfashionable?*

      *except as punishment for a crime, natch

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:23PM (#436957)

      This sort of controversy crops up a lot at liberal arts universities. I remember the brouhaha about university investments in corporations that did certain things back in my day.

      Looking from the outside, it seems overblown, maybe even silly, but folks at these schools consider it a matter of integrity and consistency of purpose, which makes it a foundational matter. They don't want to just talk the talk w/o walking the walk.

      I happen to think it's good ethics training for the students, at least those who look into the matter and don't shrug it off. Because there is no correct answer to be found in the back of the textbook, or the next screen of the online quiz.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:13PM (#436981)

        This is the logical conclusion:

        In 2003, WHO officials coined SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) to describe a novel pneumonia spreading in Asia, partly to avoid a name like “Chinese flu.” SARS did not go down well in Hong Kong, however, which is officially known as Hong Kong SAR, for special administrative region.


        Giving new diseases a number may be the only way to avoid such issues, researchers say. There is precedent. Growing up in China in the late 1960s, Wang remembers that diseases had digits. “I was really scared of number 5 disease,” he recalls. “I don’t know why, you just really did not want to get disease number 5.”

        http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/discovered-disease-who-has-new-rules-avoiding-offensive-names [sciencemag.org]

        A friend works at a school where all the buildings are named after letters: "the P building, the A building, etc". Also they have recently transitioned to unisex bathrooms. I imagine that they are ahead of the curve on these fronts.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:30AM (#436753)

    Just won't stop until everything is renamed to some limp-wristed neutral name that won't offend anyone on the planet. Enough is enough, get over it and STFU.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:34AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:34AM (#436754)

      Dude, rename SoylentNews to PeopleNews because soylent has dystopian vibes, bro.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:05AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:05AM (#436759)

      SJWs never stop. They'll be back. They will just keep coming until . . . they will never stop!!

    • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:36PM (#436895)

      (Score:-1, Troll) for the truth?

  • (Score: 2) by Sulla on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:37AM

    by Sulla (5173) on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:37AM (#436755) Journal

    Great, maybe while we are at it we can rename all of those Roosevelts too, the whole Jesse Owens thing
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205901/Forget-Hitler--America-snubbed-black-Olympian-Jesse-Owens.html [dailymail.co.uk]
    I would say the schools could just claim it was Teddy, but the whole indian thing kind of ruins that.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (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...
    • (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.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:37AM (#436765)

    Only rename it after your cops have long stopped shooting blacks for bad reasons.

    Till then it should serve as a reminder of the country the US still _is_.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @09:35AM (#436841)

    All those Pharaohs were using slaves to build them...

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:48AM

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:48AM (#436864) Journal

    Modern debt, by global financial fraud, is slavery. Partial (or full time, depends) but totalitarian in its pervasiveness, so that people do not even feel the chains.

    "For you are like whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity."

    --
    Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2, Touché) by SixGunMojo on Sunday December 04 2016, @01:59PM

    by SixGunMojo (509) on Sunday December 04 2016, @01:59PM (#436877)

    What are these snowflakes going to do when they get around to learning that Elihu Yale, the college's namesake, was an active slave trader.
    From his Wikipedia page:

    The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in Madras, a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement.

    Note in the last sentance is says, laws to curb enslavemet, not end enslavement. I'm going to assume he was pretty pro-slavery also.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:35PM (#436882)

      Not only that, but it's not as if only whites owned slaves. Blacks owned slaves as well, and in fact the nature of slavery as an institution changed from predominately indentured servitude to the popular portrayal due to this man:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist) [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @03:58PM (#436901)

    This is actually a well thought discussion that faculty committees are having. This isn't about students signing a petition cause their feelz... They aren't necessarily advocating for the name change, they are discussing the naming policies to make sure they uphold the universities values.

    But hey, don't let me stop the anti-pc hate train!!!

    Full disclosure, I was annoyed by this article thinking that it was just overly PC crap. It isn't reactionary, it is being well thought out with considerations for how it will impact the university long term.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:59PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:59PM (#436917) Journal

      They aren't necessarily advocating for the name change, they are discussing the naming policies to make sure they uphold the universities values.

      Yep -- I agree that the details are important here.

      It isn't reactionary, it is being well thought out with considerations for how it will impact the university long term.

      I'd put an emphasis on that last bit -- "how it will impact the university long term." While I have no doubt that those involved in preparing this "policy" have good intentions, ultimately the effect of such policies in controversial cases like this is simply to clothe any decisions in a bunch of verbose bureaucratic "justifications." All decisions are still likely to be highly politicized, and the biggest factor will always be about the long-term reputation of the university.

      The Slate article that's linked basically shows how this bureaucratic procedure and set of "questions" could still be used to produce various outcomes in the case of Calhoun, depending on how they answer the questions and weight the different elements.

      I'm NOT saying this procedure is a "bad" thing or that the questions they propose aren't important ones to ask (and can bring more nuance into such discussions). But one way of dealing with dissent and controversy is to "bury in bureaucracy" -- if a Yale President or whoever comes out and says, "We're going to keep/change the Calhoun name," then that president will likely bear the public criticism over the action, whichever way it goes. If, instead, the president can say, "We had a committee that deliberated on this issue, filed a 75-page report, and considered the questions established in our official procedure," then public criticism is bound to be lessened. Nobody will actually read the report, but they'll feel better that it's there. And even if the committee was well-chosen to slant toward a particular outcome and a particular way of applying the "procedure," the whole thing is conveniently wrapped in a larger bureaucratic aura of perceived objectivity.

      By the way, I'm not even necessarily against the Calhoun renaming. I think there should be caution in any historical renaming, and I think in most cases it's potentially better to recognize WHY the name came to be there rather than erasing it. But I also recognize the pragmatic issues at play in a case like this -- which mostly have to do with the politics of which Yale thinks will hurt more: ongoing student protests (if they don't change the name), or decreased alumni donations (if they do). Those considerations are likely to loom larger that just about anything else, whether the decision is made unilaterally by one college official or wrapped up in a multi-layered bureaucratic "procedure."

      My take on what's REALLY going on here: Yale President Salovey wanted to talk about the issue of racism, slavery, and its symbols in his freshman address in 2015, thinking it would be a good "current events" discussion relating to the Charleston shootings and subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from the SC statehouse. He himself brought up Calhoun's name in this address and its problematic status at Yale -- and my guess is that he maybe thought it would be an easy target for Yale to show like it was "doing something" in response to various charges that had been raised over the years about Yale (including how its founder was involved in the slave trade, a whole bunch of residential halls are named after slaveholders, etc.).

      Then he opened a bunch of forums for public comment, and I bet he was surprised by the alumni outrage and the potential impact it could have on things like donations (which are HUGE thing for college presidents -- unlike other college officials, college presidents' successes are often focused on fundraising). So, realizing that there could potentially be a large negative impact on Yale financially (and also realizing that this would likely "open a can of worms" that would lead to further protests for more renamings), he announced in April that they would NOT be changing the Calhoun name. That resulted in massive student protests, media outcry, and large numbers of faculty signing a petition for the reversal of that decision.

      Faced with a horrible public-relations disaster of his own making, President Salovey realized the ONLY way out of this conundrum was to "pass the buck" -- hence why we have an extended report [yale.edu] by this committee and a new bureaucratic procedure.

      Again, I'm NOT saying this is a bad outcome necessarily, but I think we arrived at this procedure mostly because the President of Yale made some serious miscalculations in how his actions and speeches would be perceived.