Some buildings' names will be removed

ucbalumnus
Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:05:45 +0000

https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/11/18/uc-berkeleys-leconte-and-barrows-halls-lose-their-names/

Gretchen Kell of media relations:

The names of the University of California, Berkeley’s LeConte Hall and Barrows Hall will be removed, campus officials announced today. The decision, capping a formal review process, was made in response to growing awareness of the controversial legacies of the halls’ namesakes — all of them early, prominent members of the UC faculty — that clash with UC Berkeley’s mission and values.

Brothers John and Joseph LeConte came to Berkeley in 1869 from a Southern slave-holding family, fleeing post-civil war Reconstruction; Joseph LeConte, who, like his brother, served in the Confederacy, used scientific language to promote racist ideas. David Prescott Barrows, UC president from 1919 to 1923, was a colonizer of the Philippines’ education system in the early 1900s and wrote, reflecting the U.S. “humanitarian imperialism” of his time, that “the white, or European, race is, above all others, the great historical race.”

[…]

Of the 634 responses solicited by the committee about the proposal for LeConte Hall, home of the physics department, 87% favored unnaming the building. For Barrows Hall, 518 responses were collected; 95% approved of unnaming it.