Council delays vote on building names
College president, student government, diversity panel favor removing monikers of families that owned slaves
The College Council at SUNY New Paltz has delayed until February a vote on renaming six buildings on campus that bear the names of founding members of the community who also were slave owners.
The council was to vote Thursday on a resolution to change the names of buildings bearing the names Bevier, Crispell, Deyo, DuBois, Hasbrouck and Lefevre. But Eli Basch, the council’s interim chairman, said action was delayed because it appeared the seven-member body would defeat the resolution.
“I would say it was ... very highly likely not to pass,” said Basch, a Kingston-area lawyer.
“The real swing votes would [have been] undecided,” he said, “so this opportunity to postpone it gives the opportunity to people to digest the meeting, to see the sentiment of the students in person, to understand the issue from the perspective of the college ... [and] what’s best for the college going forward.”
The buildings in question were constructed in the 1960s and named after Huguenot families that were original settlers of New Paltz. The college’s Hasb-
rouck Dining Hall is among the buildings.
SUNY New Paltz President Donald Christian, who supports changing the names, wrote in a letter to the campus community after Thursday’s meeting that he was “deeply disappointed that the council did not pass this resolution.”
Christian said the resolution “has the unanimous support of the student government, faculty senate, the senior leadership of the college, and myself as president.”
The resolution was submitted on behalf of N’della Seque, the Student Association president and a member of the College Council.
Despite the delay, Christian said he was “immensely proud of the students who spoke so passionately at [Thursday’s] meeting ... about the imperative to change these names. I am grateful to the faculty who also voiced their support for this change and for our students.”
Also expressing disappointment in the delay was
Reynolds Scott-Childress, who chairs the college’s Diversity and Inclusion Council.
“They had our report [recommending the name changes] for well over three months now,” said ScottChildress, who also is a city of Kingston alderman.
The Diversity and Inclusion Council’s report states that the “current names have a deep impact on the lives of students who reside, eat and create community in the Hasbrouck Complex buildings. There was also consensus that SUNY New Paltz’s mission as an educational institution places upon us a duty to give expression to previously marginalized histories, to approach history through a lens of critical inquiry, and to understand our past in all its rich diversity without simply replacing one history with another.”
Christian, in his letter, encouraged students to “not despair” about the delay.
“Change is hard, sometimes incremental, and often takes time,” he wrote. “I encourage you to continue advocating for this change.”
Basch said the change is more likely to be approved
after College Council members have had an opportunity to digest concerns voiced by all parties.
“I just think that persistence overcomes resistance,” he said. “There is no question that our state and country [are] becoming more and more diverse, and there’s very much a sensitivity to the issue of slavery.”
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.
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.
The college’s Diversity and Inclusion Council was tasked later in August 2017 with investigating objections to the building names that were raised by students.