University to rename dorm that honored KKK leader

Decision delayed on another building on campus

The University of Oregon will rename a dormitory that honored a classics professor who was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, responding to student protesters who objected to the name.

It was the latest university to confront its own history, after a wave of student protests last year amid racial tensions nationally.

The University of Oregon’s board of trustees voted unanimously to change the name temporarily to Cedar Hall.

Members of the Black Student Task Force did not respond to messages seeking comment Friday. But since last fall, like students at many universities across the country, the group presented a list of demands to the university’s leaders designed to increase institutional support for black students on campus.

President Michael Schill postponed a decision about renaming another building, Deady Hall, named after a man who played a role in the university’s founding and who was a proponent of slavery.

Schill had commissioned a historical report on both Dunn and Matthew Deady, and wrote about some of the factors that made it a difficult decision, including, “denaming threatens to obscure history and hide the ugliness of our past, which is contrary to our institution’s values of promoting lifelong learning and sharing knowledge. Therefore, the presumption should be against denaming a building except in extraordinarily egregious circumstances.”

Dunn did not hide his ties to the KKK, Schill wrote, citing the report, which concluded that while there was no proof that Dunn participated in violent attacks that happened in the state, “including threatened lynchings and a probable murder of an African-American,” it was certain that he was aware of them and continued to lead.

At the board of trustees meeting, according to reporting in the Register-Guard, the student body president called on university leaders to take action in the wake of the death of a 19-year-old black man, Larnell Bruce, in Oregon. Bruce was run over by a man with white supremacist views, according to police reports.

Many colleges are reconsidering the names of buildings, statues and other symbols on campus, debating whether the names are important signs of current attitudes that make the campus unwelcoming, or whether they are part of the history of the place that cannot be eradicated simply by erecting a new sign, or that should not be “whitewashed” away.