I like the seasoned wisdom articulated by the U of Kentucky president, on the matters of race and the historical record. And I think that being a born and bred Southerner gives him special credibility on this issue.
Very interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
It truly is time that we talk about these mostly unquestioned things. Murals, building names, etc, especially on college campuses. His decisions isn’t rash and he’s allowing for discussion, but at the same time recognizing that these things are problematic. The murals are not gone but they are now being critically thought about.
It’s an issue I’ve thought about quite a bit. On my own campus here at UMich, there are buildings named after and tributes to people who essentially advocated genocide. But, we don’t talk about these “darker” sides, only the “good” that we did.
History needs to be less sanitized and unfortunately I see us going back to that direction (see the Texas history book debacle for example).
Washington & Lee went through something similar in 2014 when a group of African American students protested the Confederate flag and other issues on campus. Unlike the protesters at Princeton and Dartmouth, they approached the issue as adults.
W&L responded appropriately.
http://www.wlu.edu/presidents-office/messages-to-the-community/president-ruscios-july-8-2014-message
Would love to hear more about this. Which ones? @romanigypsyeyes
Yes, W&L has changed dramatically in recent years. Every W&L black student that I’ve met was sharp, and I’ve known conservative people and liberal people among the black alumni from W&L. From second-hand discussions I understand that in past years the debates over the rebel flag and other aspects of “southern culture” were less acrimonious at W&L than at UVA. I attended a speech by Judge and author Leon Higgenbotham at UVA years ago and the statements by some black UVA law students then were not particularly positive regarding campus life.
C C Little is probably the most prominent one. He was the president of the American Eugenics Society and believed in euthanising and sterilizing certain “undesirable” populations… mostly people of color and the other usual suspects. His papers are housed here and they’re pretty shocking to the modern reader.
There’s also Victor Vaughan who remains as part of the Victor Vaughan Student Society for the History and Philosophy of Medicine. There’s a whole host of irony in that… He was also a eugencist and was one of the most prominent supporters of Michigan’s forced sterilization laws.
Henry Vaughan was another one (who SPH is named after). Not surprising since Eugenics was heavily promoted by public health officials.
Others escape me right now because my work tends to be on the west coast and not local. It’s something I explored a few years ago as I started working in some of Umich’s archives. University of Michigan was intimately tied to eugenics in the early 20th century so it’s not surprising.
ETA: Oh duh, forgot one of the most well-known ones- Kellogg. He and his brother ran a sanitarium and heavily promoted eugenics laws and practices.
Was Dr. Shockley (knee deep in the 1970s eugenics debates) on the faculty of UMichigan? I seem to remember that he taught at one of the elite state universities.
@LakeWashington he’s Stanford but I don’t know much about him because my research tends to be late 19th/early 20th century. I think his papers are housed at CalTech which have a large number of eugenic proponents’ archival papers (but I could be mixing him up with another California eugenics person…) ETA: Yup, mixed him up with Gosney. The google tells me that Shockley’s legacy remains at Stanford.
The people who wrote the Michigan eugenics laws almost all came from the UMich law school faculty but they don’t have buildings named after them.