You would think that universities would be places where history, warts and all, would be remembered. Not so at the University of California, Berkeley.
On Sept. 10, a committee within the Berkeley School of Law announced it will recommend the removal of the name “Boalt” from the building which houses the law school, according to the Daily Californian. The committee also plans on recommending the removal of the name from various student groups associated with the law school and an end to all colloquial usage of the name with regard to the law school.
What could prompt this rather drastic measure on the university’s part?
The commission takes issue not with Elizabeth Boalt, who provided the funds for the building, but her husband, John Boalt, after whom the building is named and an outspoken advocate of the Chinese Exclusion Act – more than 130 years ago.
It goes without saying that this recent development is an example of political correctness gone too far.
But it’s not that this specific incident occurred at my alma mater that has me concerned for academia more broadly – it’s the trend of erasing history on college campus more generally which raises significant alarm.
According to the Daily Californian, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky established the Committee on the Use of the Boalt Name in Sept. 2017 to evaluate the practice of naming buildings and groups after Boalt and to issue recommendations moving forward. The committee used principles established by Berkeley and Yale in determining its recommendations.
That is, the Boalt decision was determined by precedent, rather than setting one.
Undoubtedly one of the aforementioned precedents consists of concrete steps Berkeley took earlier this year to rename multiple buildings across campus because of their “different histories of racism, colonialism and exclusion.” This included the establishing of a dystopian-sounding “Building Naming Project Task Force” in order to “[make] steps to remove those histories.”
The other precedent? In Feb. 2017, Yale controversially decided to rename a residential college bearing the name of prominent historical figure John C. Calhoun over his racist views. This was a reversal of the university’s previous decision in spring 2016 to keep the name.
But these official precedents are hardly the only resource upon which the Berkeley committee had drawn. Recent history provides a myriad of examples of similar cases.
In the past two years, this movement for erasing history has gained greater momentum in the English-speaking academic world, even if it hasn’t always succeeded.
By way of enumerating a few examples, if anyone should doubt the prevalence of this trend:
In early 2016, Princeton University refused to rename its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs after notable protests the previous year. However, the university did give into demands that an “unduly celebratory,” wall-sized photo of Wilson be removed from one of its halls.
In Jan. 2016, Oxford resisted giving into the demands of the student-led Rhodes Must Fall campaign on campus, which agitated for taking down a statue in the likeliness of colonialist Cecil Rhodes. The university explained that they received “overwhelming” support for keeping the statue honoring Rhodes in place.
And in the same week as Berkeley’s decision to “dename” Boalt Hall (it’s not technically a “rename” since it isn’t replacing the Boalt name), a Stanford committee also announced its recommendation that the university rename certain parts of campus currently named after the Catholic saint and missionary Junipero Serra.
What these past incidents show is a disturbing trend toward, or more accurately a reversion to, the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, the condemning of the memory or memorializing of certain figures. The Roman state sought to punish traitors and other perpetrators of high crimes and misdemeanors with obliteration from the public record.
In the cases of Berkeley and Yale, the parallels are easy to see. Not only John Boalt or John Calhoun, but the family names of each individual must be removed from campus – not merely because these names are “offensive” to minority students, but because these names honor an “enemy” of the liberal orthodoxy and represent a time in history in which racism, segregation, and slavery were possible and ascendant.
Here we see the ultimately tribal nature of the Left, for they view all political opponents as existential threats and refuse to let the dead rest in favor of continually drudging up old grudges.
As designated enemies of academia, the memories of these people and the times they represent must be destroyed and ultimately forgotten rather than learned from.
With this practice of renaming, universities have chosen resentment and forgetfulness over acknowledgement and knowledge, even during times in which educators often lament the lack of historical knowledge of their students, particularly when it comes to slavery.
The philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Berkeley appears to be repeating the dark and ancient history of Roman censorship by erasing its own checkered past.
Troy Worden is a recent graduate in English and Philosophy from the University of California Berkeley, where he was president of the Berkeley College Republicans in 2017.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said the building was named after Elizabeth Boalt. She provided the funds, but the building was named after her husband. It also said the building was being renamed instead of “denamed.”
