The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Can we go with ‘University Formerly Known as Yale?’
Let’s do the easy part. If Yale University did change its name, it should follow the lead of His Royal Badness, otherwise known as Prince, otherwise known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, otherwise known as the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
I mean, picking an actual name would be so … that is … Muffy, what am I trying to say? One is not Datsun, after all. One does not simply rebrand.
In 1993, Prince announced he would no longer be Prince.
His name would instead be a “glyph,” a drawn symbol that fused the ancient symbols for male and female. There was to be no way of saying this name. It would only be a thing to look at. We found out later that he did this mainly to annoy his record label, Warner. He was trying to get out of his contract, and things had turned nasty.
One of his punishments was that Warner would have to mail out floppy discs of the glyph to anyone trying to write about him.
But as Vox.com writer
Emily VanDerWerff has pointed out, the whole nonbinary symbol thing was very 2020, back in 1993. Nobody ever said Prince couldn’t see around corners.
Anyway, Yale’s only option would be to become the University Formerly Known as Yale.
But we’ve gotten ahead of our story. And I don’t intend to make light of the idea behind the proposal to rename Yale.
Elihu Yale funded Yale with money he made from his leadership of the East India Company, which participated significantly in the slave trade. I believe there is no evidence of Elihu Yale owning slaves, but there are two paintings in which he is shown alongside “servants” who are slaves.
It doesn’t really matter. He helped lead a company that bought and sold human beings, and that is an inescapably terrible thing.
Full disclosure: I graduated from Yale. I have taught there and am scheduled to teach there again next spring.
Also, I have been a newspaper columnist since 1982, and I sincerely believe that in all that time, not one single aspect of the public affairs of this world has been changed because of anything I wrote. I really mean that.
Except … it’s actually plausible that a piece I wrote for Salon in 2015 helped revive the movement to strip the name of the white supremacist John C. Calhoun from one of Yale’s residential colleges. I would maybe deserve 1.5 to 3 percent of the credit for that happening.
That puts me in a weird position if I’m not fully in favor of changing the name of Yale.
Others have argued that Elihu Yale wasn’t — as far as we know — a champion of slavery. He was in the trans-oceanic business of buying and selling, and slaves were an essential part of that economy. There’s a counter-narrative that Yale was actually very directly and quite lucratively involved in the trafficking of Indian, as opposed to African, slaves.
Meh. I never like the “product of his times” argument when it comes to basic moral questions. There really wasn’t an Anglo-American abolition movement until the 1780s, but how could a reasoning, feeling person fail to know in 1700 that this was wrong?
It turns out Elihu was a bit of a scoundrel. He married a rich widow and built his fortune up from her money. Then, still married, he took up with a Portuguese-Jewish diamond and coral merchant named Hieronima de Paiva, lived with her in India and had a son. There may even have been a third quasiwife, plus accusations of financial improprieties and possibly even the murder of witnesses.
In sum, he was way more like a Trump interim Cabinet appointee than somebody you would name a reputable university after.
Some of the resistance to renaming Yale is connected to the origin of the current movement. It seems to have started on the troll site
Yale University in New Haven.
4chan and to have been carried forward by conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who is understandably bitter that neither of her adoptive parents, Satan and Dracula, were admitted to Yale, although Dracula was wait-listed. Why Ann Coulter? Why? Do we meddle with the name of alma mater, Scourge of God Vivisection Institute of Middle Tennessee? Not really.
There is also, among Columbus partisans, a tit-for-tat sentiment. You took something we love. Now we will take something you love.
Actually, the best reason for renaming Yale is also the reason it’s not going to happen. It would be really hard work. It would disrupt an iconic culture. It would be a shock felt ’round the world.
I’m fine with getting rid
of statues, but it’s really not that difficult to do. People fuss a little. The statue goes away. The pigeons get used to the new one. It’s kind of a cheap date with our consciences. And, if we’re honest, toppling statues is really fun. You can’t beat virtuous mayhem.
Renaming Yale would really mean something. That’s the reason to do it.
Of course, if we went through all that pain, and there was still something called the Washington Redskins, that would gnaw at some of us.