Renaming is all the rage today. Yale University can claim credit for being a trendsetter: It renamed freshmen “first years,” stopped calling the heads of colleges “masters” (even though the derivation of the term, like the master’s degree, has nothing to do with racism or slavery), blessed the physical destruction of art so long as it depicted uncomfortable subjects, and, of course, created a follow-on Committee on Arts in Public Spaces, and then got into the renaming business by forming a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, the logic of which channels Orwell’s dystopia. Of course, Yale also exposes the hypocrisy with renaming. Elihu Yale, for whom the university was named, was not only a slave owner but also a slave trader and, beyond John Calhoun, whose name was stripped from a residential college, many other residential college namesakes owned slaves — theologians John Edwards and John Davenport, for example.

But enough about my alma mater’s hypocrisy. That’s too easy.