I was corresponding with philosopher Lionel McPherson (Tufts) about some of the stuff going on at Yale, and he called my attention to the fact that one of the residential colleges at Yale is still named after a champion of chattel slavery, who happened to be a Yale graduate. How could that still be, one might wonder? Perhaps the bequest that created the college bound Yale legally to the name? In fact, the story of the naming is much worse. As is right there on the Yale webpage, the residential college was named after this "alumnus, statesman, and orator" in 1932! In other words, some sixty years after the end of the Civil War and chattel slavery, no one thought twice at Yale about honoring the leading theorist of the Southern cause, that cause being chattel slavery. Of course, at that time, Blacks still lived under a regime of white terror throughout the South and the Ku Klux Klan was still a national political presence, though heading into its gradual decline. But still, it's telling about the complicity of elite institutions of "higher learning" with wickedness that even in the Northeastern United States in 1932 no one apparently had doubts about honoring one of the preeminent defenders of the chattel slavery of human beings.
One might think that if South Carolina can take down the Confederate flag, then Yale University could change the name of a college that honors someone on the wrong side of the moral arc of the universe.
None of which, let me add, excuses the bad behavior by some students at Yale in recent weeks. But seriously: who exactly is going to object to changing the name? And how could it not have happened already? (I'm opening this for comments, in case anyone knows more about the history here.)
