Yale isn’t proud of its history, but it doesn’t seem ready to face up to it, either.
Two years ago, the university pledged to remove a stone carving from the entrance to its library. Created in 1929, the edifice depicts a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American.
At the York Street entrance to @yalelibrary, a Puritan has been disarmed. More at https://t.co/hzyPGKUCg6 pic.twitter.com/aXwLs5eDPi
— Yale Alumni Magazine (@yalealumnimag) August 9, 2017
In August 2017, Yale’s alumni magazine reported that the carving on the entrance, repopularized after becoming the front door to a new center, would be hidden.
“The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone” that reportedly “can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving,” it reported. Now it’s just an American Indian with a bow and a settler with his hand inexplicably crushed in a large box.
Perhaps reconsidering the move, Yale released a statement about the work a couple weeks later. “The decorative piece will be made available for study and viewing, and written material will accompany it and place it in historical context,” it said, adding, “The university has an obligation not to hide from or destroy reminders of unpleasant history; at the same time, the university chooses the symbols and depictions that stand in places of honor. The prominence of this carving changed when its location became a main entrance to the Center for Teaching and Learning.”
The school avoids charges of art censorship by committing to place the artwork elsewhere instead of hiding it in supposedly nondamaging stone. If Yale chooses to remove a potentially offensive artwork and contextualize it so it makes sense of its own history, it has every right to do so.
But Yale, for one reason or another, appears to be dragging its feet. Now a blue box surrounds the stonework, and no efforts to remove and recontextualize it appear to have been made. According to the College Fix, multiple requests to learn what the university is now doing with the stonework have gone unanswered.
Yale’s decision is just one of many recent missteps in social justice-oriented art censorship, and a similar issue recently arose at a high school in San Francisco earlier this summer. Political correctness has come for a wall depicting George Washington’s life, which attempts to project realism by showing slaves as well as settlers standing over the body of a dead Native American man.
Despite a majority of students appearing to support it, the city’s board of education voted unanimously to paint over the mural. Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the high school’s alumni association, told KQED Arts that the discussion had become heated, with the censors launching verbal attacks on his, the anti-censorship, side. “Anything less than whitewashing, for the opposition, would be a compromise,” he said.
National Review’s Kyle Smith called the censorship at Yale part of its “determination to take a giant jar of Wite-Out to history.” He wrote:
Yale and George Washington High School in San Francisco may earn political points by covering up their past, but they’re not doing their students any favors. By acting as if racial tensions didn’t exist in the past, they limit our understanding to the scope of the present. As one Twitter user responded to Yale, “You can’t learn from the past if you erase it.”
