Renewed debate over renaming Calhoun (Yale Alumni Magazine)

[struggle4progress]

After Charleston, some say Yale shouldn’t honor a white supremacist.
By Mark Alden Branch | Sep/Oct 2015

... It wasn’t long before the debate came to Yale, where one of 12 undergraduate residential colleges is named for John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804 ...

... A 1997 report by a trio of graduate students highlighted not only Calhoun’s ties to slavery, but also those of eight other men for whom Yale colleges are named. In the 1990s, after an undergraduate complained, a stained-glass window in the Calhoun common room depicting a shackled black man kneeling at Calhoun’s feet was altered: the image of the black man was removed ...

... “The historian in me still sees with alarm our national propensity to forget ugliness for the convenience of the modern moment, but the citizen in me just keeps seeing example after example of an inability to imagine that African Americans have a humanity that ought to be respected,” Holloway wrote.

For its part, the Yale administration has so far been noncommittal ...

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4153/calhoun-college-renaming

[Angry Dragon]

1. I wonder how soon the Civil War will be wiped from the history books

[awoke_in_2003]

2. Not honoring slave owners...

is not the same as wiping the Civil War from the history books. That is like saying "I wonder how soon WWII will be wiped from the history books" because people won't tolerate naming things after Adolf Hitler.

[CTyankee]

3. IIRC, weren't all of the residential colleges at yale named after slave owners, even

going back to Jonathan "sinners in the hands of an angry God" Edwards? How about Timothy Dwight?

[struggle4progress]

4. Calhoun College was established at Yale in 1933, nearly seventy years after the Civil War ended

and over eighty years after Calhoun's death

Reading some of his statements -- such as “Many in the South once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world” -- will suggest that perhaps the honoring of Calhoun was motivated in part by bigotry

[CTyankee]

5. OK. Hmm, I thought most of the residential colleges were built sometime in the 1930s.

I should know this. I drive past some of them on my way downtown New Haven...

were you a "hounie?" I know Paul Krugman was...now there's trivia...