Calhoun College at Yale: College Legacies and the Memorialization of a Slave Tycoon

Lily Gordon, ‘17

May 2016

“Ours is a nation that continues to refuse to face its own history...” 

—President Salovey

“Respect for history in the eyes of some is the tolerance of white supremacy in the eyes of others” 

—Protestors of the Yale Student Body

If we are to preserve our histories, then let’s talk about history.

Let me create for you a dialogue that spans from the creation of men, the building of our country’s oldest academic institutions, the construction of the country itself, the tumult of Civil War that led to the Reconstruction of that same country, all the way up to last April, when, after decades of protest, nothing but the preservation of history was accomplished.

The dialogue begins with Romeo and Juliet. Juliet, in the fervor of forbidden romance, asks Romeo, “what’s in a name?”

The answer, of course, is everything.

A name, for a newborn child, is a prayer for everything you hope your child will be. 

A name, for a building, is the commemoration of a person’s good will and, more importantly, their good money, to honor them with the renown that stands in stone. 

A name, for Malcolm X, is a relic of the slave master who uprooted him from his history and chained him to the legacy of slavery, who sent perfectly preserved waves of history into the veiny futures of his children, so that people of color, centuries after slavery was abolished, would still feel its handcuffs each time another Trayvon Martin flashed on the TV screen and each time they were denied a job for someone with a whiter name.

The dialogue continues with a 1776 slave-owning Thomas Jefferson who wrote that “all men are created equal,” to which an 1848 John C Calhoun responded that this was “utterly untrue.” Calhoun was a Yale graduate as well as one of the 19th century most championed white supremacists, a fierce and political advocate for slavery, and US vice president who later inspired secession during the Civil War.

In the 1930s, Yale named one of its residential colleges after Calhoun. Residential colleges are sources of tremendous school spirit and student identity at Yale.

Student backlash against the residual—or sometimes blatant—racism on college campuses has gained public notice in recent months. On April 16, 2016, the New York Times covered an article about the sale of 272 slaves that economically saved Georgetown University. Reporter Rachel Swarns explored the intimate relationship between old, established universities and slavery. She asked important questions about what, if any, reparations are due to the ancestors of these slaves on whose backs a university succeeded.

Yale is far from the only or the worst of colleges when it comes to racism. Most old universities inevitably must have tangled roots with the slave trade, simply because of how long these schools have been around and widespread slavery was.

The presumptive next question, then, is what to do about it.

Brown University’s name honors Nicholas Brown, an avid proponent of slavery who, similar to Calhoun, believed slavery was a “positive good.” One fear that people have when it comes to changing names of institutions is that there seems to be no reasonable cut-off. If Calhoun College should change its name, should Brown be made to change its entire University’s name as well?

People argue that there are blots on most people’s character, that even champions of some human rights might have had stains elsewhere in their beliefs. If we were to remove all of these people’s names every time someone felt offended, then there wouldn’t be many names left. There are other buildings on the Yale campus that are named after slave owners, such as George Berkeley, Timothy Dwight and Ezra Stiles, but Calhoun is unique in that his most prized achievement and his legacy is the oppression of Blacks in America.

Brown has dealt with its historical racism problem with race by creating a committee, by having a large emphasis on the study of slavery and injustice. Its mission is to take part of a “rewriting [of] Brown’s history to acknowledge the role of slavery, creating a memorial to the slave trade in Rhode Island, and recruiting more minority students.....the value of this exercise was to illuminate a history that has been ‘largely erased from the collective memory of our university and state.’”

President Salovey of Yale University announced on April 27, 2016, “Yale is part of this history [of slavery and racism], as exemplified by the decision to recognize an ardent defender of slavery by naming a college for him. Erasing Calhoun’s name from a much-beloved residential college risks masking this past, downplaying the lasting effects of slavery, and substituting a false and misleading narrative, albeit one that 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.”

A Yale Daily News editorial wrote that the purpose of the petition to change the name of the college is “not to obliterate history but to inscribe different values into Yale’s present.”

People of Color don’t need a name on a building to remember that there is racial injustice in America. NY Times reporter Glenda Gilmore argues that students of color don’t need “another teachable moment” because they “feel the legacy of those injustices every day.”

For decades, students and faculty have protested old symbols of slavery that abound the campus, with recent vigor after the massacre in Charleston and equated their movement to the national removal of the Confederate flag. In fact, this comparison continued in more mainstream media when The Atlantic called Calhoun College the “Confederate Flag” of Yale.

The student petition, which received roughly 1,500 signatures, argued that the complete removal of Calhoun’s name from the residential college was part of the “monumental task of eliminating the vestiges of racism [which] include all monuments and symbols dedicated to people and institutions that fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy.”

The activists argue that, what distinguishes Calhoun from his southern contemporaries, was that Calhoun viewed slavery, not as a “necessary evil,” but a “positive good” and he built his fame on “his vociferous defense of a state’s right to enslave blacks. And during his tenure in Washington, he sharpened racist rhetoric, bolstered the political clout of slaveowners, and drove the nation irreversibly toward dissolution and war. Most pertinently, he was a proud champion of the view that blacks were not equal, could never be equal, and would always be subservient to whites.”

While multinational corporations like Amazon and Walmart may have ceased to sell Confederate flags, universities are comparably powerful capitalist industries that profit from symbolism, that make students compete to have their insignia inscribed upon their résumés. When racism is a part of that symbolism, we have to consider each of our roles—colleges as producers and students as consumers—of embedded acculturated racism in the artifices of our buildings, our college T-shirts, our intramural sporting events and school spirit memorabilia, and our diplomas of our graduating class.

Fifty-five percent of students asked for Calhoun College’s name to be changed. Only 39% of students predicted that the University administration would listen to this plea. Student unrest is far from over. At one town hall, students showered $1 million fake dollar bills on President Salovey. Later in the week, on April 29, 2016, students stood, dressed in all black, on the lawn of Calhoun College, holding up signs for potential alternative names for the residential college. Julia Adams, the head of Calhoun College commented that the demonstration was “impressive and beautiful.” Overall, the faculty and the president have been open to student expression in the midst of racialized conversation and promote discussion. It is relevant to clarify that Yale does not seek to honor Calhoun, but rather not erase history.

Yale has made great efforts to move in the direction of a better approach toward race conversations on campus. The university is starting an interactive history project to examine Calhoun and other lesser-known figures and the history—both those worthy of pride and those that are cringeworthy. Additionally, titles for the role of the leaders of residential colleges have been changed. In the past, the heads of colleges were called “masters.” Although the origins of the term “master” do not stem from slavery, but rather from old Oxford and Cambridge traditions, President Salovey recognized that some people feel the title “carries a painful and unwelcome connotation that can be difficult or impossible for some students and residential college staff to ignore.” He justified the change by saying that he felt it was not intrinsic to the university’s history. 

They have decided to name two new residential colleges after Benjamin Franklin and Anna Pauline Murray. Murray was an American civil and women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was a gay black woman who forged her way through oppressive 20th century values. She founded the National Organization for Women, participated in sit-ins to protest segregation in restaurants, was arrested for pulling a Rosa Parks and not moving to the back of a Greyhound bus, and was a leader of the nonviolent protest committee in Randolph’s March on Washington Movement. She was rejected from institutions because of her race and her gender, yet in a 1976 interview, two hundred years after Jefferson said all men were created equal, she said, “In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious...I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”

It seems almost fitting that Yale honor Murray, a woman of found lost causes, when students informally rechristen Benjamin Franklin College as “Aretha Franklin College” and stand, dressed in black solidarity, demanding that the love of history not be placed above the love for social progress.

There are ways of remembering, of recording history, without placing memory on a pedestal, without forcing black students to live in the shrine of a man who thought they would never be his equals.  

There was, at one point, a proposal to hyphenate the residential college as Calhoun-Bouchet College, in honor of Edward Bouchet, the first African-American to attend Yale College.  The whole tension, between history and present, between oppression and inclusion, lies in that hyphen. The answers are still unclear, the conversation still heated, and the history like unfading and picked-at scar tissue, a constant reminder of pain for People of Color in America. 

As uncomfortable as I (a white girl) feel about the preservation of this monster's name, I can only imagine the exclusion, the isolation, the discomfort, and the pain for students of color who have to walk into that college to sleep at night and are told they can call Calhoun College their "home away from home."