When Universities Really Do Destroy the Past…

by Corey Robin on November 23, 2015

Fifteen years ago, NYU announced a plan to expand its law school by tearing down Edgar Allan Poe’s home on West Third Street, where Poe wrote “The Cask of Amontillado,” revised “The Raven,” and acquired his own literary magazine. The announcement provoked some resistance; 70 scholars signed a letter in protest. They lost. Four years later, a nine-story, 170,000 square-foot Furman Hall was formerly opened. The Poe House was completely gone; a version of its facade was reconstructed a half-block away. According to a historical preservationist:

Walking by, you would never know this was supposed to be the actual remnant of a 19th-century house. It looks tacked on. It’s a facade, literally and figuratively.

Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time. Most of the time we don’t care. For the sake of progress or real estate values, we live with it. Or embrace it.

When politicized university students ask that we revisit the nation’s racial past, however, that we rename buildings not to remove memory but to revise it, we become the most ardent preservationists. Even law professors who said not a word about the destruction of the Poe House.

If the revision in question is for the sake of capitalism, we sigh, whisper an All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, and move on. If it is for the sake of knowledge and anti-racism, we say no, in thunder.

{ 43 comments }

1

kidneystones 11.23.15 at 4:20 am

Corey, you’re one of the people I like and respect, but it’s extremely difficult for me to see any part of the naming issue as just about silliest trivialization of the problems we face collectively at universities and in the education community generally.

I’m not about to quibble about the Poe home, or the lack of historical context. Developments of all kinds, not just universities invariably involve dispossessing local flora and fauna of all descriptions, most often lower-income folks who are either forced out or bought out.

Rich young people complaining about seeing the paintings of other rich people on the walls named after still more rich people would be what I would call the very least of my own concerns, especially in universities. There are only about a billion real inequities, and problems to be addressed that have a real impact on people’s lives both in terms of income and opportunity – high tuition fees being just one.

I am utterly and completely unsympathetic to any of the ‘naming’ arguments and have to say that nothing I read in this post, or your other, does anything to suggest you have much of a grasp of the realities of life in universities not named Princeton.

2

Corey Robin 11.23.15 at 4:43 am

kidneystones: I appreciate your respect, but this — “nothing I read in this post, or your other, does anything to suggest you have much of a grasp of the realities of life in universities not named Princeton” — caught me off guard.

I’m the chair of a department at a urban public university that, already poor, suffered a multi-million dollar budget cut just this year alone. In my department that meant, among other things, a much-needed faculty line in international relations that we were promised got cut; a major attempt on our adjunct budget for this fall (with promise of more to come); and a whole new round of tuition hikes for students, for years to come.

Three weeks ago, I, along with 53 other members of our union at CUNY, got arrested in the hope of trying to force the governor and the chancellor to cough up some money for the institution. Now I’m beginning to talk to fellow members of the faculty in preparation for a possible strike authorization vote in our union — which, if followed through, could result in a strike by me and my colleagues, which would be illegal in the State of New York and could possibly land us all in jail.

Undoubtedly, I could do more. But as these things go, I’m fairly confident that I have a firmer grasp than most on what the realities of life are like in universities not named Princeton.

3

kidneystones 11.23.15 at 4:51 am

Hi Corey. Thanks for this. I see these posts as exceptions that prove a general rule. I really can’t find anything to support in this issue, and I can find about a hundred much more useful and urgent matters that require the attention of motivated, caring students and faculty. Speaking only for myself, these posts sound to me uncharacteristically tone-deaf and you’re just about the last person I’d suggest would manufacture a complaint, or crisis. I think your students and your department are luck to have you. I won’t add more.

4

ZM 11.23.15 at 5:15 am

Something like Edgar Allen Poe’s house being relocated happened to Captain Cook’s Cottage — except Captain Cook’s Cottage it was moved a longer distance all the way from Yorkshire in England to Melbourne in Australia.

5

Sebastian H 11.23.15 at 5:18 am

This isn’t a capitalist vs. non-capitalist issue. Similar issues come up in China or Russia all the time (and did repeatedly even in their clearly communist phases). This is an elites vs. the rest of us issue. It comes up whenever the elites get to try to control perception.

6

ZM 11.23.15 at 5:25 am

It is also about universities wanting to expand their campus in urban areas. Sometimes old facades can be incorporated into the new building design, but a little home probably can’t be incorporated into a multilevel building, as I expect the law school was.

And it is not just the more elite universities, the Australian Catholic University I went to has significantly expanded its campus — and in an inner urban area where the buildings are older, expanding university campuses is going to mean the loss of some heritage buildings.

And it is something that is not restricted to university campuses, I personally really like heritage buildings, but in Melbourne to create greater density and stop expanding the our urban boundary it is probably better to lose some heritage buildings in the inner and middle suburbs to gain greater density — even though that is not my personal preference for built form, although some newer mid rise apartments can be really nice.

7

Steven Levine 11.23.15 at 6:34 am

So by parity of reasoning, if one was against the appalling NYU action one is entitled to be against the Princeton renaming? This seems a side issue no?

I support the students attempt to generate a discussion about the role of racism in Wilson’s political life. It was quite central. Scholars have known this for a while, and its good that it has become part of the public debate. But perhaps the reason some thunder at the renaming is the sense that Wilson was a quite complex figure, involved in a multitude of endeavors, domestically, internationally, at Princeton, etc. Indeed, as we all know in foreign affairs Wilson is still one of the most important figures of the 20th century, even if he was a failure. It seems moralistic to reduce the man to a single dimension, his racist attitudes and actions. This is a very important dimension, and must be discussed fulsomely, but not the only one. Resistance to this reduction might be part of the feeling of resistance.

8

AN 11.23.15 at 7:12 am

I understand why it appears trivial to outsiders. However, contesting history is rarely trivial. It’s arguable that history is the heart of any ideology– Orwell suggests this. And it’s plausible when you consider that it is one of the first thing those who want to exercise ideological control over others (or eliminate it) go after. What stories we tell about what happened and why–and how we got here–are generally the load bearing columns of the way we think it is acceptable to live. We never got a truth and reconciliation moment, we never got a post-war reckoning after the Civil War and the end to Jim Crow. A lot that happens now–you could almost say most political options in the US–are made possible or constrained by a certain narrative of why we all are where we are right now. I take it this is Coates’ argument in various of those articles everyone shares but most (or maybe it is just me) probably don’t read carefully enough. You don’t need his argument though–you can look at the fights in school boards in Texas to ensure that Cesar Chavez name isn’t mentioned, etc.

Go after the history and you get at a lot more.

That said, it’s hard for outsiders not to wish they’d tie the activism to some of these “urgent matters”–now that they’ve got all this media attention, anyway. It’s entirely in their prerogative to attend to cleaning their own house, which sounds pretty damn dirty. They don’t have to fix the world. Now that we’re all attending to them though, it feels like they have the power to draw this attention elsewhere. Most people really don’t give a damn about Princeton but it’s a little chilling to think about the gravitational pull of these elite schools even when we don’t think they matter. The more I think about these protests, the more I lament the existence of that power and that pull. To explain the students’ thinking, many are writing about a mythos that only people who go to Princeton understand–in order to show us that this matters a lot–because they are the ruling class. It kind of makes you wonder if Princeton itself isn’t part of the problem. I wonder if the students would be willing to go there. Is it all about naming in the end? Is it only the myth that matters or does the power the myth underscores matter also?

9

magari 11.23.15 at 8:25 am

Intentional or not, I think this essay is disingenuous. There is much more politics invested into Wilson’s name than Poe’s house. This obviously transcends “name” versus “house”. We don’t really care about the collection of letters that constitutes Wilson’s name (a W here, an S there) but what the name signifies. Similarly, to kidneystones, while this fight seems trivial, it is better to treat it as an instantiation of a very large fight against racism as well as a certain historiography of America. In itself the event is not terribly meaningful (most will forget or never even know about this fight) but that fight matters. And in aggregate these small local events (some mushrooming via media coverage into something larger) will gradually erode the status quo and shape new forms of thought and practice.

Note, I don’t necessarily think that what will come to replace the status quo will be “better”, just different. On the other hand, challenges to the racial order in the US have over time lead to changes in consciousness and material outcomes for those we previously termed as minorities. And while many in the internet commentariat are ridiculing the students and their ideas/discourse, for not entirely wrong reasons, they are creating a new common sense among their generation that will shift the discussion of race even further.

10

bad Jim 11.23.15 at 8:33 am

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

11

Anon. 11.23.15 at 9:51 am

>Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time

You had to go there…

12

ccc 11.23.15 at 10:50 am

A video for Corey about people doing things that Corey pays them to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2mGC4zezM
(Re Corey’s twitter comment recently. Off topic? Of course and always, since exploitation of animals is never discussed at Crooked Timber.)

13

Peter R 11.23.15 at 11:27 am

ZM: You went to ACU Melbourne? I lectured there in History and Politics for several years, until it became clear that I’d never get anything beyond poorly paid and insecure sessional work. Never expected to see ACU come up on a Crooked Timber thread, but there you go. Small world.

14

ZM 11.23.15 at 11:38 am

Oh, that is a small world. I studied history there but my history lecturers were Shirley Swain, Patsy Thatcher, and Ellen Warne.

15

Manta 11.23.15 at 12:46 pm

“strike by me and my colleagues, which would be illegal in the State of New York and could possibly land us all in jail.”

Would you elaborate about it? I mean, the being illegal part.

16

Marshall Peace 11.23.15 at 12:59 pm

The sustainability problem with renaming is that you will probably have to re-rename in another 50 years, when whatever of today’s blind spots has reached a certain level of awareness. Possibly even Poe had a bad side. If Spotted Owl-type “flagship species” are the thing that motivates people then that’s a tactical justification and good on the folks for doing the thing, as far as it goes. Personally I’m ghastly at politics; I don’t understand people at all, but I like to think we are going somewhere: from the past, into the future. By way of the present but I don’t want to live here, however sanitized.

17

max 11.23.15 at 1:04 pm

Four years later, a nine-story, 170,000 square-foot Furman Hall was formerly opened.

If they can afford to build a nine-story, 170,000 sq. ft. building, they can fucking afford to move a 19th century house. (Buildings can and have been relocated many many times!) Failing to do so is not an ideological commitment, it’s over-dressed miserliness and greed, solidified as a commitment to being an asshole.

Not least because the thing should have been a tourist attraction which would have provided a revenue stream, plus endless intangible (but bookable!) goodwill!

we sigh, whisper an All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, and move on. If it is for the sake of knowledge and anti-racism, we say no, in thunder.

The alumni and assorted other schmucks might have to change their letterheads and/or reduce their donations.

max
[‘It greatly over-dignifies the acts and failures to act involved – pure laziness and moral cowardice actually – to describe them as commitments to capitalism.’]

18

Corey Robin 11.23.15 at 1:21 pm

Manta at 15: “Would you elaborate about it? I mean, the being illegal part.”

Strikes by public employees in New York State — which is what I am — are illegal under the Taylor Law.

19

oldster 11.23.15 at 1:40 pm

Next to the Yale Campus stands the Grove Street Cemetery, whose bizarre neo-Egyptian entryway bears the inscription “The Dead Shall Be Raised”.

Local wits would add, “when the university needs the land.”

So I basically agree with Corey on this one–if we attack a member of the inner-circle, e.g. an alumnus or a grandee, then the outcry goes, “is nothing sacred?”

But if we decimate or desecrate the homes and lives of those outside the charmed circle, then it’s just a shrug and a “heh, gotta keep up with progress.”

Kinda like “sanctity of contract,” an ideal invoked whenever an executive might lose pay, but notably absent whenever workers’ pensions are plundered.

20

Trader Joe 11.23.15 at 2:59 pm

I don’t quite get the equating of the destruction of Poe’s house with Wilson. Surely Poe’s legacy has rather little to do with any particular place he worked, slept or ate and rather more to do with his works which preserve his immortality in libraries by the thousands.

I wasn’t aware of most of Wilson’s views on racial matters and expect they were a bit backward even for his time which makes it difficult to reconcile an International and Public policy school with such attitudes. I’m not really keen on renaming however, absent some incredibly obvious alternative, as inevitably the replacement name will have its own alternative political motivations (naming everything for MLK, cause hey, he’s an unobjectionable minority seems a little false) – unless its to be the Rainbows and Unicorns school of public policy.

21

divelly 11.23.15 at 4:40 pm

In 1964 the President of Georgetown had to apologize on local NYC TV because the GU cheerleaders at a NYU basketball game dressed as an Arab and Hitler. NY Jew is still it’s non pc nickname.

22

Bluesmoke 11.23.15 at 4:41 pm

Re funding for public universities.

If academic faculty wants their issues to be taken seriously they need to be the adults on campus.

Do not get involved in student protests involving litmus tests re gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity.

23

Sebastian H 11.23.15 at 5:08 pm

Princeton is a school where you go to become one of the ruling class. You don’t always succeed of course but that is what it is for. Naming rights to buildings is a very ruling class concern, therefore what looks trivial to us is actually very important to them. They are attacking their class where it hurts.

24

Barry 11.23.15 at 8:58 pm

Sebastian, that’s a very good observation.

25

Peter R 11.23.15 at 8:59 pm

ZM: I worked with Ellen, splitting a class on Human Rights History (my particular area of expertise). I know Shirley from ACU and Melbourne, where I did my PhD. I was at ACU from around 2010 to 2012, I believe.

26

bmore 11.23.15 at 11:45 pm

Edgar Allen Poe was a slave dealer so we should erase his memory.

27

Plarry 11.24.15 at 2:11 am

28

ZM 11.24.15 at 3:38 am

Peter R,

I did my BA at ACU from 2002 to mid 2005, so a while before your time. I had Ellen for The Search for Social Justice which was maybe an earlier incarnation of your Human Rights History. She was a really inspirational young lecturer.

It was actually quite funny one time when I was talking to her, I had read the first thing by the historian Greg Dening I had come across, and I mentioned it seemed unusual that he was a professor under an assumed name, and she asked what I meant, and I said that the bio said that he was Max Crawford Chair of History, so he had two names, and then she had the solemn task of informing me that being a Chair didn’t actually mean that he was a professor under an assumed name ;-)

29

tony lynch 11.24.15 at 4:39 am

But what will you do Bluesmoke, to be taken seriously?

30

Ebenezer Scrooge 11.24.15 at 11:43 am

I would like to observe that it isn’t hard to raise a campus protest on issues of gender or race, especially in fancy schools. But class? Not a chance. The campus “radicals” aren’t very radical at all: ultimately advocating a gorgeous mosaic of rich dead white men of every conceivable race, gender and dietary/environmental preference.
That’s why OWS filled me with some hope.

31

Barry 11.24.15 at 12:47 pm

Ebenezer, look at what happened to OWS – massive violence was quite casually used against them. The economic and likes (i.e., the real ones) don’t like that stuff.

32

Trader Joe 11.24.15 at 1:02 pm

@30 and @31
True, and I agree the kids are pikers by comparison, that said at least the kids have an agenda of exactly what they want and are tending to get at least something tangible (at least they have at Yale, Missouri and Dartmouth among others). OWS accomplished some awareness raising, which isn’t a bad thing, but I’d propose that the consensus is mixed as to whether the endpoint was worth the cost/effort.

33

Tom 11.24.15 at 9:04 pm

The claim that the students are raising a trivial problem cuts both ways. If it is so silly, let’s rename it Martin Luther King School of Public & International Affairs and be done with it. What’s the big deal?

p.s.: Good luck to Corey with his fight, I hope he does not end up in jail.

34

Ebenezer Scrooge 11.24.15 at 11:45 pm

I never claimed that the students are raising a trivial problem. Race and gender are not trivial, and the race and gender wars are fought, in part, over history.

But the kiddies selectively ignore class–especially the kids at the fancy schools. I never hear much complaint at Yale about the new Steve Schwartzman(?) egocenter. Listening to the kiddies, you’d imagine that a tenured lesbian of color has drawn far worse cards in life than an unemployed miner in Appalachia. Of course, they’d correct themselves mighty quickly if you pointed this out, but they’d still send dirty looks your way.

I think that the Ivy kids don’t want to spoil a good thing. Race and gender aren’t trivial, but they’re doing their best to trivialize them.

35

john c. halasz 11.25.15 at 1:23 am

@34:

I’m still waiting for the Stanford kids to protest their education at the behest of that numskull. Or the U. of C. kids to demand that all that Rockefeller money be, er, repatriated.

36

ZM 11.25.15 at 2:33 am

“Or the U. of C. kids to demand that all that Rockefeller money be, er, repatriated.”

Actually, I have heard more than once students in the climate movement talking about how the Rockefeller Foundation has funded some really good things but that it is somewhat disquieting to know the money was made by oil investments, although last year they announced they were going to divest the foundation from fossil fuel investments.

So if this issue is discussed in Australia, I am sure students in America would be discussing it too, if not demanding repatriation to somewhere (?).

37

Mike Schilling 11.26.15 at 8:04 am

Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time.

Non-capitalists have far greater reverence for the past; just ask anyone between Tsaritsyn, umm, Stalingrad, umm, Volgograd and Saint Petersburg, umm, Leningrad, umm, Saint Petersburg.

38

dax 11.27.15 at 9:34 am

#34. Yes. Class is important. I remember my first and only semester as an undergraduate at Princeton, a member of the lower part of the middle-middle class. Once I got lost and ended up in someone else’s dorm room. On the night table I saw a photo of a young black man about my age and an older woman, I presumed his mother. Then I looked around, and I lost my breath. The room was perfectly arranged, there was a pressed suit across a chair and a single flower in a vase on the desk. And I thought to myself, This is what Money looks like.

39

oldster 11.27.15 at 8:53 pm

dax @38–

You may be right. Indeed, you were there, so you are more likely to be right.

But judging only from your description, what I see is not Money, but Fear.

Fear that if he does not arrange his room twice as perfectly, wear a suit twice as well pressed, and be twice as good in every other way, his trajectory will stall out at Princeton and he’ll never get another chance.

You have seen the statistics. Black kids from the middle class are more than twice as likely to wind up poor at 40 as middle class white kids. The median wealth for black households is about one-thirteenth of the median wealth for white households. When financial troubles arise, there is no cushion. Any small crisis can wipe out the generational struggle to get ahead. In the US, at the population level, race still trumps class.

So this kid, with the photo of his mom, was probably doing his very best to give the impression that “this is what Money looks like.” Maybe, as you thought, because he really was from Money. But more likely, because he was only one slip away from poverty, and lived in constant, obsessive anxiety over that thought.

I mean–there’s almost no point in my saying all of this, since neither of us know that kid’s real story, what he came from, or how he’s doing today. I’m just revealing my own assumptions by telling his story my way, and you reveal yours by telling it your way.

But here’s another of my assumptions–Money usually looks far less uptight. Money can throw its clothes on the floor and wear any damned thing it wants. Money doesn’t give a damn whether you are impressed or not, because it doesn’t have to care what you think. As another ill-at-ease Princetonian put it long ago, the rich are careless people, who know that no matter how badly they make a mess of things they can always retreat into their money or their vast carelessness. That’s not what this kid’s room sounds like.

40

ZM 11.27.15 at 10:13 pm

dax,

“Class is important. I remember my first and only semester as an undergraduate at Princeton, a member of the lower part of the middle-middle class”

When I transferred to my current university from a smaller uni to do my honours I had a similar experience. I had friends that went there, but they had gone to selective schools for all or part of high school, so for me it was the first time that I had really been around such big class differences. I think I might have mentioned a couple of experiences here before, but, for instance, in one class we were talking about Asian women who immigrate to work as maids, and one girl (in a small honours class of under 10 students, maybe only about 3 or 4 from memory) spoke about the example of her family’s maid (she was the daughter of a diplomat), and the professor was very interested in her research for her honours which she was partially undertaking in another country. Although I am used to this now, I found it quite intimidating.

Also the tutorials were much more outspoken and competitive compared to what I was used to — this was actually in a way challenging since I tend to find writing my ideas in an essay easier than speaking in big groups, but from a gender perspective it was a kind of turnaround as I went from feeling there was a general social expectation that it was annoying if girls and women were very loud and outspoken, to an expectation that everyone should be outspoken and compete in tutorials, so I felt like I was not nearly outspoken and opinionated enough, compared to that I shouldn’t have so many opinions.

41

Lawrence Stuart 11.28.15 at 12:29 am

Apropos the posts and comments concerning reappraisals of Woodrow Wilson and the student protests, some thoughts on history, myth and narrative, under the rubric of which I can say why I am indeed grateful for what they are doing.

I think narrative is necessary to history. Narrative organizes (to use two terms from semiotics) the paradigmatic order of action — the non linear, cyclonic whirl of events, an almost innumerable set of shifting intentions and experiences — into the syntagmatic order, into the coherence of “first this, then that.” Stories bring time to the chaos of events. Meaningful experience, for a mortal being at least, begins, has a duration, and ends. Stories create meaning by ordering events in this way.

But myth and writing history, though both forms of storytelling, are quite distinct. Or at least they can be distinct, particularly from the perspective of the historian. Myth is an effort to bring eternity into narrative, hence it is concerned with the relationship between time and eternity. Biblical narrative, for example, is often ‘historical,’ but human history is really a function of extratemporal agency. We mortals are, more or less depending on your reading, bit players in a divine comedy. Historical narrative, to the contrary, is concerned with human actions, not the relationship between gods and mortals. It is concerned with human relations as they occur in time, as they constitute events with beginnings, durations, and ends. History is much more closely related to tragedy, to mimesis, than to myth. At the same time it also tends to bend back towards myth, almost in spite of itself.

Myth and history are both very concerned not only with time, but with with causality. However for the historian, obviously, ‘God’s wrath’ is not a sufficient explanation for some sort of catastrophe. Good historians stay away from the temptation to invoke a transcendental signified. However, in historical writing there is a temptation to ascribe agency to impersonal processes, historical rivers sweeping the actors toward a fate they cannot seem to influence or escape. This is not myth, but at the extremis it is a genre of history that doubles back toward the comedic aspect of myth — comedic not that the outcome is funny, but comedic in the sense that the ending of the story is a function of forces, not in this case beyond time, but a reification of time itself into processes like progress or decline.

One can see a similar curvature, but in this case arcing towards the paradigmatic, in the genres of historical writing that reject big synthetic narratives. They are keenly aware of and accept the limitations of human agency without filling the void with a reified process. They recognize that people, nations, movements, armies, etc. often intend an outcome but are thwarted by chance, by folly, but most of all by being at cross purposes with other actors. But the extreme tendency here is to construe storytelling as an imposition on events themselves. ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is the familiar refrain, notwithstanding that all traces, all evidence of the past, must be brought, selected, curated, interpreted in the present. And the act of bringing, of selecting, of curating, of interpreting is always a narrative act, a synthesis of infinitely heterogenous facts into a coherent story. Moreover, historical actors themselves invoke stories, to rally support, to justify choices, etc. Which means that the material of historical writing, from the driest document to the most dramatic witness testimony, is itself always already a syntagmatic construction. The idea of a narrative free history is as absurd as the idea of a singular narrative that resolves all paradigmatic messiness and complexity.

So what of these radical (or as some would have it, simply over privileged) youth? What of their alleged dogmatism and desire to reshape the past? Certainly, some lack humility, in the sense that their story cannot simply be the story, any more than their facts can simply be the facts. But let the historian or observer who is without sin cast the first stone. All history writing, to say nothing of historical action, is prone to over-valuations of process, or of fact, or indeed of both. There is no sacred ground here. This is not to say there isn’t higher and lower ground. It is fair to point out that the students sometimes seem to be mired in some pretty swampy places. It is also fair for them to push back and point out the low points in any established historical topography. But this is the kind of teachable moment, for all concerned, that comes around far too rarely. People are engaged, passionate, and in action. It is not just a debate over canonical history. They are actually making history by challenging how it has been made manifest on the campus landscape. They are challenging established stories, stirring up sedimented facts, all from within the position of Ivy League privilege — and are no less remarkable for it. To assume that they are simply playing at politics is a big assumption, more than a little whiffing of resentment. I would argue that this eruption of controversy at these elite levels is a very good thing, a sign that power is not monolithic, nor easily reproduced.

Anyway, this is why I agree with the assertion of the initial post, why I am grateful for their actions, even if I disagree with some these actions at the extremes.

42

Val 11.29.15 at 8:38 pm

Apologies for coming to this a bit late, but it appears students at Melbourne University are also concerned about similar issues

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/heart-of-darkness-melbourne-universitys-racist-professors-20151127-gl9whm.html

43

ZM 11.29.15 at 11:30 pm

Val,

That is a disquieting article; I wonder what decision will be made about the names next year. I’ll feel like shivering when I go in some of those buildings now I have read that.

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