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How Yale Confronted Their History Without Erasing It | America Inside Out


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] If the battle over monuments has been raging in towns across the country, the early skirmishes started at Ivy League universities like Yale. [Applause] Calvin College was named in 1933 after Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina who later served as vice president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. But that's not all. In the first half of the 19th century, he was the most strident articulator, to use his words, of slavery as a positive good.

He rooted that view, that slavery was a positive, both for slaveholders and slaves, and I give it that I think is deeply disturbing to us today. He rooted that belief in core beliefs about white supremacy. Senior Dasia Moore said Calhoun's name and the images from his time made her uncomfortable, especially in the dining hall. Right across from me I can see the stained glass window that depicts two slaves picking something. It's a symbol that declares you do not belong here, or you were imagined in this space to fulfill a certain really limited role.

The already simmering debate became more heated after Yale dining hall worker Corey Menifee smashed one of the windows. Although a university worker for eight years, Menifee says he had been working in the dining hall at Calhoun College for just six months. While mopping the floors, the 38-year-old took a mop handle to the subject of his disgust. "What was going through your head for him?" I was just sick of looking at that. Wonderful — there we are in the 21st century and I don't think those types of images should be blatantly displayed.

It's culturally insensitive. It's no secret that the majority of the employees who work in the dining hall are of African-American descent. It was a literal and figurative breaking point. Young president Peter Salovey was initially opposed to changing the name. "Our campus, both in the classroom but also outside of the classroom, is a living history lesson and I wanted to make sure that that conversation about the county was one that we could always have between students who thought his decision was wrong-headed and older alumni who felt he should stand on the side of tradition."

So Salovey appointed a committee to come up with a blueprint for who stays and who goes. After all, nine other buildings on campus are named for men associated with slavery, including Elihu Yale himself. John Witt was head of the committee. "We named they ought to be a layer thing on a research university campus like ours, but sometimes renaming might be appropriate. We were supposed to think more abstractly about principle legacies, thinking about whether the idea is contested at the time of the namesake."

"Think about what the motive of the university was in putting the name on the building and then last, how does the building work in helping to build community?" The committee came up with four principles and discovered Calhoun's name was controversial even back in 1933. There were statements written at the time saying, "Really, John C. Calhoun?" So at a ceremony this fall, Calhoun College was officially renamed after the late Navy admiral, computer pioneer, and Yale alumna Grace Hopper.

"Bless those that belong to this College now. Grace Murray Hopper is your home." I was really excited about it because I've always looked up to Grace Hopper ever since I learned about her in high school. So now when people ask me what college I'm in, I'm really excited to tell them I'm in Hopper. Changing the people that we honor helps a wider range of students be able to envision themselves as someone who can make a difference.

Who will be remembered as part of a conscious effort to not sanitize or erase the past? Calhoun's name and image will remain on the edifice. It's no longer the name by which this college is known, but the history and what we need to learn from and about John C. Calhoun is not wiped away. We forget that Yale was a university that once did have a college, a very important part of the campus dedicated to John C. Calhoun.

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