Yale to rename Calhoun College after protests

The decision reverses one made last spring, when the university said it would keep the name Calhoun College, saying it would encourage the campus to confront the history of slavery.

Salovey held a different opinion a year ago, when he said the name would be kept, despite protests. The college is named after former Vice President and Yale attendee John C. Calhoun, a former senator from SC and supporter of slavery, the Hill reported.

“It is time to put this issue behind us and move on”, Wilkins added at the time.

Thank goodness that’s changing now, and it was only to be expected that so heinous a creature as John C. Calhoun, slave owner and, disgusting dictu, apologist for slavery should finally get his comeuppance.

The school, now known as Calhoun College, will take on the name of Yale alumnus Grace Murray Hopper and will go by Grace Hopper College. Students’ T-shirts will have the Hopper name. To that end, other mentions of Calhoun’s name throughout campus, as well as a statue of the man, will remain.

In July of 2016, a Yale University worker destroyed a stained glass window depicting slaves in a cotton field.

Students and alum were upset about Calhoun’s support of slavery and white supremacist background, Yale News reports. “I have asked Jonathan Holloway, dean of Yale College, and Julia Adams, the head of Calhoun College, to determine when this change best can be put into effect”. He graduated from Yale College in 1804.

Protesters arrested in one last demonstration before the renaming. “They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that”.

In Germany, an educational institution is experiencing a parallel struggle over their own contested namesake. By August, he was reconsidering that decision and created a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming from among staff and alumni.

In a almost 2,000-word memo announcing the decision to the Yale community, Salovey made no mention of the months of student and faculty advocacy that preceded the University’s renaming decision, although he did note that “community input was indispensable” to the choice of Hopper as Calhoun’s replacement.

Yale is not alone in changing names or symbols that honor people whose bigotry was once tolerated but is no longer.

Hopper earned Yale degrees in the 1930s and became a US Navy rear admiral. She enlisted in the U.S. Navy and contributed her mathematical skills to help the effort in World War II. 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. But at age 60, Hopper was called back to active duty where she served until she retired at age 79. Hopper died in 1992 but received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.

Salovey said he looks forward to promoting Hopper’s accomplishments on campus. “You can always apologize later'”.