Yale and Calhoun

Yale University, an institution that won’t revoke an honorary degree even if the recipient is later shown to be a mass murderer, not surprisingly refuses to rename Calhoun College, named for the architect of secession himself. Instead, it decided to name new colleges after Benjamin Franklin and the civil rights activist Pauli Murray. The esteemed historian and Yale professor Glenda Gilmore says this is not enough and that Yale will eventually cave on this because John C. Calhoun represents evil.

To be sure, there’s something noteworthy about the contrast between these two figures who now sit across campus from each other. Although they lived in different centuries, Calhoun in the 19th, and Murray in the 20th, in many ways, she lived in — and fought against — the world that he built.

Calhoun, a Yale graduate, congressman and the seventh vice president of the United States, owned dozens of slaves in Fort Hill, S.C. Murray grew up in poverty in Durham, N. C., as the granddaughter of an enslaved woman. Calhoun championed slavery as a “positive good”; Murray’s great-grandmother was raped by her slave master. Calhoun profited immensely from the labor of the enslaved people on his plantation; Murray was a radical labor activist in Harlem during the Great Depression.

Calhoun perverted constitutional principles when he shaped a states’ rights doctrine that precipitated the Civil War and set in place a 90-year legal justification for segregation and disfranchisement. Murray fought for four decades against the regime that Calhoun authorized and published “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” the first comprehensive survey of segregation statutes across the nation. Calhoun was a patriarch who whipped his slave Aleck for offending Mrs. Calhoun; Murray was a gay woman who became a founder of the National Organization for Women.

The decision to keep Calhoun’s name overestimates his value for Yale students. Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, argues that “removing Calhoun’s name obscures the legacy of slavery rather than addressing it,” and living in Calhoun’s shadow will make students “better prepared to rise to the challenges of the present and the future.”

That last bit is patently absurd. Calhoun does have plenty to teach us about slavery. But renaming Calhoun College does not get in the way of teaching about slavery. Calhoun College is not retaining its name because it’s a rare opportunity to teach about slavery. It’s retaining its name on the principle of never going back on honorary naming (and no doubt there are wealthy donors who are behind this as well).