Yale renames Calhoun College because of historic ties to white supremacy and slavery

Yale University will rename one of its residential colleges, replacing the name of an alumnus remembered for his role in the Confederacy and advocacy of slavery with that of an alumna who was a pioneering mathematician and computer scientist who helped transform the way people use technology.

The decision to rename Calhoun College reverses one made last spring, when Yale President Peter Salovey said he did not want to erase history, but confront it and learn from it.

Colleges across the country – as well as other institutions, cities and legislative bodies – have wrestled with similar questions, as they consider monuments to the past in the context of modern life. Racial tensions and protests have intensified those debates in many places.

At Harvard Law School, officials replaced a shield that was the family crest of slave owners. At the University of North Carolina, officials renamed a hall that had honored a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. At Princeton, university leaders chose not to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson as protesters had demanded, instead pledging to be transparent about his failings such as his support for segregation, as well as his achievements leading the university and the country.

Salovey said Saturday that he still believes in the importance of confronting history rather than erasing it. But a committee led by a historian crafted a set of four principles for considering renaming – starting with a strong presumption against it, but establishing a means for evaluating the idea in exceptional circumstances, such as when the principal legacy of the person is fundamentally at odds with the values of the institution.

That was true of Calhoun, Salovey said, “a white supremacist, an ardent defender of slavery as ‘a positive good,’, someone whose views hardened over the course of his life, who died essentially criticizing the Declaration of Independence and its emphasis on all men being created equal . . .

“I think we can make this change without effacing history. We’re not removing evidence of John C. Calhoun from our campus.”

By the beginning of the next academic year, the name of alumna Grace Murray Hopper will be added to the building, and the residential college will be known by that name. Students’ T-shirts will have the Hopper name. They won’t chisel off the “Calhoun” or remove other traces of him on campus. They have removed stained glass windows from the college – one of which portrayed enslaved people picking cotton – and will display them elsewhere with an explanation of the historical context.

The legacy of Calhoun, who graduated from Yale in 1804 and 1822 and served as a U.S. vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war and senator, becoming an influential champion of slavery, had been debated at the school over the years. But those discussions turned to urgent pleas in 2015 after a white man who revered the Confederacy shot and killed nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, S.C. That led South Carolina lawmakers to take down the Confederate flag that had long flown at the state capitol, and efforts at Yale and elsewhere to stop honoring the name of Calhoun.

That fall, protests over racial issues erupted on campus, and Salovey promised changes including a more diverse faculty and a new center for studies of race and ethnicity. But university leaders resisted demands to drop the Calhoun name.

Last spring, Salovey wrote in a letter to the campus community that deleting the name “might allow us to feel complacent or, even, self-congratulatory . . . Retaining the name forces us to learn anew and confront one of the most disturbing aspects of Yale’s and our nation’s past. I believe this is our obligation as an educational institution.”

But in August, he asked a committee to establish principles to guide university leaders when considering renaming. They concluded with four things to think about: Whether the principal legacy of the person is fundamentally at odds with the university’s mission; whether that legacy was debated during the person’s life; why the person was honored by the university; and whether the building has an important role in creating community on campus.

“In considering these principles,” Salovey wrote in a letter to the campus community Saturday, “it became clear that Calhoun College presents an exceptionally strong case – perhaps uniquely strong – that allows it to overcome the powerful presumption against renaming . . .”

He quoted another alumnus – the namesake of another residential college at Yale – who denounced Calhoun’s legacy even as he mourned his death, writing that he “in a great measure changed the state of opinion and the manner of speaking and writing upon this subject in the South, until we have come to present to the world the mortifying and disgraceful spectacle of a great republic – and the only real republic in the world – standing forth in vindication of slavery, without prospect of, or wish for, its extinction. If the views of Mr. Calhoun, and of those who think with him, are to prevail, slavery is to be sustained on this great continent forever.”

Salovey wrote that, “This principal legacy of Calhoun – and the indelible imprint he has left on American history – conflicts fundamentally with the values Yale has long championed. Unlike other namesakes on our campus, he distinguished himself not in spite of these views but because of them.”

A group of advisers asked to consider the issue unanimously concluded that the name should be changed, and the Yale Corporation voted Friday in agreement.

The Corporation considered alternatives from a short list of the hundreds of names recommended by many students, alumni, faculty and others, and chose Grace Murray Hopper, who had been endorsed by the most people as reflective of Yale’s core values.

Salovey, in an interview, said he was thrilled by the choice of Hopper, who earned her doctorate in mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale in 1934. She left her teaching role at Vassar during World War II to enlist in the U.S. Navy, using math to fight fascist enemies. Her work on the earliest computers and computer languages made it possible to write programs for multiple machines simultaneously, to use word-based languages allowing non-specialists to use computers for the first time and dramatically expanding the ways computers could be used.

Hopper was recalled to active service in the Navy at the age of 60, and retired as a rear admiral when she was 79. She was honored many times, including posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his letter to the campus community, Salovey called her a visionary, and wrote, “At a time when computers were bulky machines limited to a handful of research laboratories, Hopper understood that they would one day be ubiquitous, and she dedicated her long career to ensuring they were useful, accessible, and responsive to human needs.”

Her principal legacy, he wrote, “is all around us. . . . Grace Murray Hopper College thus honors her spirit of innovation and public service while looking fearlessly to the future.”

When she died in 1992, her obituary in The Washington Post noted she had a very strong dislike of intellectual conventions. She once told a reporter, “‘the only phrase I’ve ever disliked is, ‘Why, we’ve always done it that way.’ “‘I always tell young people, go ahead and do it. You can always apologize later.'”