Rename buildings, college leader says
Slavery connections led to objections, prompted yearlong study by diversity council
SUNY New Paltz should rename buildings in its Hasbrouck complex, including the Hasbrouck Dining Hall, that bear the names of families that owned slaves, the college president said Friday.
In a letter to the college community, Donald Christian said he reached the conclusion after a yearlong evaluation of building names on the campus, led by the school’s Diversity and Inclusion Council. The council was assigned in August 2017 to take into account objections raised by students at the time and was expected to issue its report by April 15. The 160-page document was released Friday.
“Both the ... council and I have reached the conclusion that the names on these buildings should be removed and replaced,” Christian wrote in his letter.
Student objections to the buildings’ names had been raised in the past, but they became more pronounced after a counterprotester was killed during a white supremacist march and rally on Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va. The heightened objections also came amid a national debate about whether Confederate flags and statues of Confederate leaders from the Civil War era should be
removed from public places in the South.
“Some view these building names as perpetuating the legacy of slavery, and I am aware that some students, particularly students of color, have expressed their discomfort about living in halls with these names,” Christian said in a written statement last year.
Christian said the process of renaming buildings on the campus is not within his authority and rests instead with the College Council and SUNY Board of Trustees. He said
the College Council will be afforded “appropriate space and time” to process the report and his recommendations.
The SUNY New Paltz buildings in question were constructed in the 1960s and are named after Huguenot families — Bevier, Crispell, Deyo, DuBois, Hasbrouck and Lefevre — that were original settlers of New Paltz.
“Like other Europeans who settled in New York and other mid-Atlantic states, they enslaved Africans,” Christian wrote of the local families in
his Friday letter. “... Taking on this task last year coincided with increased national discourse and conflict about stature or building names that commemorate or memorialize slavery in America. This also comes at a time that our country continues to wrestle with racial inequities and injustices and the legacy of our history with slavery.”
Christian also wrote, though, that the move to rename campus buildings should not be an attempt to “erase history.”
“The [council] wrote
that we must work to ‘understand our past in all its rich diversity without simply replacing one history with another,’” he stated. “That includes recognizing and acknowledging the history and legacy of slavery — in particular Northern slavery, and the enslaved labor that was key to the economic success of European settlers and the region.”
Christian noted, too, that many descendants of New Paltz’s settlers “were abolitionists; fought in the Civil War, heavily on the Union side; and played a key role in the establishment and survival of educational institutions in New Paltz that were the forerunners of SUNY New Paltz.”
Town of Ulster John Crispell, a descendant of one of New Paltz’s founding families, said last year that research shows not all members of the founding families owned slaves and that those who did shared quarters with the slaves.
The New York Historical Society says that during the 1700s, about 40 percent of the households in the state had slaves.
Slavery ended in New York in 1827.