UC Berkeley ‘unnames’ 5th building
One of UC Berkeley’s founding fathers was Bernard Moses, a 19th century intellectual who set up the political science and history departments, taught law and economics and died three decades before the campus named its philosophy building for him in 1965.
Moses was also an author. He wrote that lynching Black people was an effective way to “deter the barbarian.” He opined that “neither the Indian nor the mestizo was capable of originating and carrying on great enterprises.” And Spaniards who married people native to Mexico and South America, “fell below the European standard,” in Moses’ opinion.
On Tuesday, UC Berkeley said good riddance to Moses and scraped his name off the wall. The building is now “Philosophy Hall.”
“It was time to take action,” said David Schaffer, a biochemical engineering professor who chairs the campus’ Building Name Review Committee. Its detailed process for “unnaming” Moses Hall took just over a year.
The once revered Professor Moses joins five other figures whose names have been scrubbed from four UC Berkeley buildings since 2020 after winning approval from Michael Drake, president of the University of California system. The others are:
• John Boalt, a Nevada lawyer who inspired the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and whose widow donated money and had the law school named for him;
• Slaveholders John and Joseph LeConte, who fought for the Confederacy, and supplied the surname for the physics building;
• Early UC president David Prescott Barrows, who wrote that “the white, or European, race is, above all others, the great historical race,” for whom the social science building was named;
• Anthropology pioneer Alfred Kroeber, who collected Native American remains and erroneously declared the Ohlone people to be extinct, thus continuing to evoke “exclusion and erasure for Native Americans,” UC Berkeley officials have said. His namesake building housed the anthropology department and museum, as well as an art gallery.
Across the bay in San Francisco, UC Hastings College of the Law became UC College of the Law, San Francisco on Jan. 1, after a long process — and a new state law — to eliminate Hastings’ name from the school after 144 years. However, some descendants of the school’s former namesake, Serranus Clinton Hastings, dispute that he sponsored massacres of Native people and are suing to restore the name or collect the original endowment, plus interest, they say they are owed.
The act of removing the names of people who fall out of “alignment with the values and mission” of a place, as officials say happened at UC Berkeley, is sometimes criticized as “cancel culture,” a too-eager gesture by institutions to erase their past. In fact, a third of people who provided feedback about Moses Hall opposed its unnaming, Schaffer said.
But the university’s process for deciding whether to remove a name is “not canceling out or erasing history,” Schaffer said. “These names are part of our history” and will be recognized for that.
Still, he said, “whether it was because of George Floyd or the #MeToo Movement or other events, we are increasingly recognizing the inequality within our society that has led us to think more deeply.”
To have a name considered for removal by the committee requires a strong, well-documented proposal, according to the committee’s website. If accepted, as all five have been so far, the proposal is posted on the site and the process of letting the broader campus weigh in begins.
Comments are accepted for up to five weeks, as are “position papers with the same level of detail and scholarship as that of the proposal,” according to the rules. After these are posted, there is a second comment period of up to a month.
The committee then writes a report with a recommendation to the chancellor — or multiple recommendations if the committee doesn’t agree.
But so far, the committee has been unanimous in recommending that the names of all five buildings be removed.
As for people who study or work in Moses Hall, “the most striking sentiment is really quite a joyful one,” said Prof. Alva Noë, chair of the philosophy department. “It’s just a kind of uplifting moment.”
Noë wasn’t yet head of the department in summer 2020 when a group of students stumbled on the writings of the building’s namesake and brought it to the attention of then chair Niko Kolodny. Noë said, “I had thought the building was named after the prophet.” Anything but. “When people began to learn about some of Bernard Moses’ views of racial equality, I think there was a certain feeling of horror and injury,” he said.
Even so, “There are a lot of people who feel that by removing the name we’d be whitewashing our own history,” he said. “But he defended lynching! Today, you just don’t want to honor that legacy.”
But in each case, the campus expects to post information, such as a plaque, that tells the history of each unnamed building.
So far, only the law school has done so, said Alex Mabanta, a doctoral student in the School of Law, who has been on the committee for five years.
“There is still unfinished business” around unnaming, he said, noting that the committee hopes to develop a “restorative justice plan to reckon with the legacy of namesakes,” including murals, exhibits and programs. And it wants to figure out how to scrub the names off other places, not just buildings.
For example, there’s a Moses parking lot and Moses lecture series.
“Even at Berkeley Law School, the name “Boalt” appears in dozens of places inside and outside the main law building,” Mabanta said. “UC Berkeley must act with greater urgency to execute campus commitments both to unnaming and to acknowledging the campus’ past for the present and future.”