UC Berkeley to rename buildings
Students and staff called for the change because of the racist legacies of founding faculty members.
Two landmark buildings at UC Berkeley will be renamed because of the controversial legacies of the founding faculty members they honored, officials have announced.
For now, Barrows Hall will be called the Social Sciences Building, and LeConte Hall will be known as Physics North and Physics South.
Their original namesakes were prominent scholars who also promoted racist rhetoric and colonialist ideas. Brothers John and Joseph LeConte were from a slaveholding family, and David Prescott Barrows was a supporter of colonialism, said a Wednesday news release from the university.
Workers have placed boards over the building names, and a process for selecting permanent names has begun.
The renaming comes amid a nationwide reckoning on racism. Because of its namesake’s racist writings, UC Berkeley’s law school is no longer known as Boalt Hall. Also this year, USC removed the name of Rufus von KleinSmid, a prominent eugenicist, from one of its buildings.
After calls for action from student organizations at Berkeley, a 12- member committee of students, faculty and staff members unanimously approved dropping the LeConte and Barrows names.
Polls conducted by the committee showed overwhelming support for the name changes in the university community. Chancellor Carol Christ and UC President Michael V. Drake both consented to the changes.
“Our buildings should not be another reminder that we are and have long been despised,” said doctoral student Caleb E. Dawson, co- president of the Black
Graduate Student Assn.
The LeContes fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and were heirs to their family’s Georgia plantation, which had more than 200 enslaved people.
John LeConte was a professor of physics and chemistry who served two stints as university president in the 1870s.
Joseph LeConte was a professor of natural science and geology who co- founded the Sierra Club with John Muir. According to the university, he wrote several works “aimed at justifying, through pseudo- scientific language, the inferiority of African Americans.”
“Both men made important academic contributions, but this does not undo or offset the harm done by their racism,” said UC Berkeley physics professor Frances Hellman, dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Science.
Joseph LeConte’s name was removed from a lodge in Yosemite National Park in 2015 and from an elementary school in 2017. Efforts are underway to rename Le Conte Avenue near the UCLA campus.
The building formerly known as Barrows Hall houses departments such as sociology and ethnic studies.
Barrows was UC president from 1919 to 1923 and a faculty member for more than 30 years.
His “words and actions were anti- Black, anti-Filipinx, anti- Indigenous, xenophobic and Anglocentric,” the renaming committee said.
The university’s Native American Advisory Committee called Barrows’ adherence to colonial ideology the foundation for “multiple violent policies and atrocities against Native Americans and Indigenous peoples around the globe.”