On American college campuses, money talks. That empowers two very different groups: today’s fee-paying students, and graduates of yesteryear, whose affections (and wallets) are sought by their alma maters with an ardour that might make Casanova blush. Pity university chiefs, then, as a wave of campus protests breaks out involving the past. From the Ivy League to the great public universities of the South and Midwest, student demonstrators have called for the renaming of buildings and academic departments, removal of artworks and even scrapping of sports team mascots that celebrate controversial aspects of history. The loudest opposition often involves alumni.
As befits an academy that has sent former students to Congress after every election since 1789, grandees have had much to say about a row at Princeton. That was sparked when students demanded the renaming of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a residential college named for the 28th president, who ran Princeton before entering the White House. Protesters cited Wilson’s white supremacist beliefs, and his moves to resegregate the federal government after taking office in 1913. An editorial in the New York Times urged university bosses to purge the name of Wilson, an “unapologetic racist”.
The Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, told the Washington Post he was “disappointed” that Princeton’s board of trustees is to consider expunging Wilson’s name.
On November 23, the Democratic mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, said he “absolutely” backed student protesters at Yale — including his son Dante — who want the university to rename a dormitory that currently honours John C. Calhoun, a senator and vice president from South Carolina whose vocal support for slavery and states’ rights helped pave the way for the civil war. Some days earlier, authorities at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, agreed to rename two halls of residence named after school presidents who sold Jesuit-owned slaves in the 1830s.
Nor are works of progressive art immune. On November 23, the University of Kentucky announced the shrouding of a large fresco depicting the state’s history, commissioned by the Depression-era Public Works of Art programme. Painted at a time when the university was all-white, the mural shows black people working in tobacco fields and black musicians playing for a white audience. Two dozen black students said that they found the mural “painful and degrading”.