<p>Calling P “the only Ivy” to follow that policy was a considerably more dramatic statement and one that surprised me. As we all know, the Ivies were, as a group, practicing all sorts of discrimination up until not very long ago, and so I found it hard to believe that P would be so unusual, in light of the fact that Y also had many Southerners and a fairly astonishing history around Calhoun. </p>
<p>Even recently at Yale there was a movement to rename Calhoun College after James Pennington, a black abolitionist who audited courses at Yale, and Morse College --whose namesake claimed that slavery “is ordained by God and the Bible” – after the abolitionist James Hillhouse. “The university has debated [the issue] three or four times in the last 50 years and decided that acknowledging and understanding our past is appropriate,” President Levin said. “Calhoun College is a place of its own right nowalumni think of Calhoun College with fond memories of their own time there. Changing [the name] now is changing that place that so many have such strong ties to. My view is that we should take the existence of Calhoun College as a fact of Yale’s history, and not solely as a recognition of John C. Calhoun.” I didn’t look up any of the other Ivies, btw, except H and Y, so I have no idea what their policies were. </p>
<p>As for the guide being a Princeton “spokesman,” that’s an extremely unfortunate truth. As I said above, I think Harvard was smart to start paying its student guides so that they can train them and have more accountability. When we had a guide who was an absolute airhead at Columbia – the one who said John Jay had given a lot of money to the university! – we told the admissions office that they ought to know she was an embarrassment. </p>
<p>Personally, I would make a case for not kicking out the Confederate students on the grounds that I believe in the power of education to change minds. (Same reason Harvard admits children of dictators in other countries.) But that is clearly not where your student guide was coming from. And it is not where P or Y were coming from; they just weren’t about to kick out a large percentage of their student body. And I could be wrong about that mind-changing idea – after all, Bush went to Yale! But I digress…</p>