What’s In A Rename?

This weekend I had the extreme misfortune of being in New Haven, and the shock of the experience, no matter how often I visit, is never diminished. Indeed the freshness of it, the absence of any inoculation, made me rehearse in my mind my various previous trips, and a Yalie’s offhand mention of Grace Hopper College brought me to February 2017.

That was when, one Saturday afternoon as I was hastening to Union Station to escape back to Cambridge, Yale announced that this name would serve thereafter in place of Calhoun College, which had lately been causing protests on account of the eponym’s vigorous defense of slavery.

This in turn reminded me of the recent announcement that portraits of former University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, will not hang in the dining hall when the relevant House reopens in the fall. Which then made me reflect on the other legacy problem — i.e., the legacies of persons whom we honor in public places, which might one day cause us to stop so honoring them.

A friend of mine pointed out to me, as I was ruminating aloud — my mother used to yell at me for doing that at the dinner table — that regardless of whether I liked the renaming, the renamers were acting in logical consistency with their Weltanschauung. I was about to concede the point when I thought that in fact, while they are being consistent, they are also being awfully slow, which ought to be from their point of view extremely incriminating.

I shall explain what I mean. Calhoun was probably a high priority for the renamers, since his enthusiasm about the “peculiar institution” renders him uniquely ineligible for the excuse that he was merely a man of his times, going along with the current. Than Lowell, however, I can think of many people more loathsome, or at least just as loathsome, which would make silence about their eponymous buildings a culpable offense.

Former Dean of the College Chester N. Greenough, Class of 1898, for example, Lowell’s man Friday during the purge of gay students in the 1920s, has been allowed to keep his dorm, although that may be because few people have ever seen it. A bit of a movement is beginning to accumulate around former University President Increase Mather, slave-owner and witch-hunter; perhaps he will be the next major target of neonomania.

But all this is really child’s play compared to the enormous wealth of grievances that accost the eye, no matter which way one turns. That the renamers even have time to attend class is a testament to their ignorance of how offensive their surroundings actually are. (Consider, as your Irony of the Day, the proposition that they would be better able to identify and remove glorifications of old, dead patriarcho-fascists if they consented to read about them.) Harvard is profiting off photos of slaves? Pish-tosh. Where is the attempt to remove leering portraits and references to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Class of 1861, the ardent eugenicist? Surely three generations of imbecilic protestors are enough. Why do we tolerate the preservation of the Adams House quarters of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, the zealous jailor of Japanese-Americans?

It would require a degree of subtlety absent in our renamer friends to respond that these men’s legacies are mixed; that Holmes defended socialists’ freedom of speech; that Roosevelt saved the struggling and abused poor with his social programs; that in their failures they were but men of their time, and visionaries in their successes.

But, as I say, the renamers are not subtle enough to think this. They merely demand unconditional surrender, and it remains a mystery how they alight on their targets in the first place. They have not yet demanded that Lowell House be renamed, but they were successful in turning “House Master” sufficiently into a Rorschach test to cause the College to continue the nuclear proliferation of the title “dean.”

Or, to take a more Straussian reading, perhaps the renamers are being deliberately selective in their targets because they know most of the substitute honorees they select will become offensively obsolete in a few decades. The Kennedy School, for example, is a monument to a man whose presidency was one long episode of #MeToo, but nonetheless he remains as violator and martyr in the liturgical books of the Left.

Indeed one of the benefits of the dearth of biographical information about John Harvard is the resultant ignorance of any of his intolerable intolerances (which is not true, for instance, of Mr. Eli Yale). It seems safe to assume, however, that, having lived in the 1630s, he was at least a racist, a fundamentalist, and a gynophobe, pending the discovery of more damning material. Nor can we any longer justify the exclusionary habit of naming things after only Harvard affiliates, a group not at all representative of the world population. I propose, therefore, that Harvard — which as a name will soon be, if it isn’t already, insupportable — hereafter be called Maya Angelou University.

When Yale is correspondingly renamed Gore Vidal College, I do not foresee any drop in ticket sales for The Game.

Liam M. Warner ’20, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Classics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.