NEWS’ VIEW: Rename Calhoun College | Yale Daily News:
In September 1933, James Rowland Angell, then Yale’s president, welcomed freshmen to a college markedly different from the one prior classes had known: a college sorted into seven residential quadrangles.
“It is your duty to see that Yale turns back to the common weal such men and such a wealth of human values that her stability and integrity cannot be challenged,” he told the class, whose members would apply to join a college after their freshman year. “It’s a great thing to belong to an institution with the traditions and ideals that Yale maintains.”
Eighty-two years later, the colleges, now 12 in number and set to expand to 14, are among the University’s most cherished traditions.
But Yale, and those of us fortunate enough to count ourselves members of this community, will be judged not merely by the longevity of our traditions. We must answer for their moral content. For this reason, we must change the name of Calhoun College, which honors John C. Calhoun, among the fiercest advocates of slavery known to this country. To do so is not to obliterate history but to inscribe different values into Yale’s present and to aspire to a better, more racially just future. The larger question, of course, is how the University, and the students it trains, can move beyond symbolism and challenge racism in a more direct and abiding way. Nothing about answering that question requires preserving Calhoun’s name.
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