Yale University is following the lead of South Carolina — taking a look at whether it should withdraw an official symbol of the Confederacy.
South Carolina stopped flying the Confederate flag in the wake of the massacre of African-Americans inside a Charleston church by a white supremacist.
Now Yale President Peter Salovey and Dean Jonathan Holloway have launched an “open conversation” among students, faculty and alumni about whether one of the university’s residential colleges should still be named after one of the most prominent Confederate defenders of slavery — John C. Calhoun (pictured).
“As an institution of higher learning, we … hope to educate not just the public — but ourselves,” they wrote in a public notice released Saturday. Click here to read the message — as well as related addresses on the subject in the web page’s right-hand column.
Click here to read an article by Carole Bass on the revival of this issue.
As yale re-visits Calhoun in the context of naming the two new colleges, may I throw into the mix a long forgotten but courageous woman: Ann Eaton. She happens to have been not only the wife of New Haven founder Theophilus Eaton and a hero for religious and women's liberty by facing down not only her husband but John Davenport (another college!) on freedom of expression in religious matters when to do so risked excommunication (her fate), she is also the grandmother of Elihu Yale, without whom, no Yale, no Calhoun, nothing. I know that Ann Calabresi, wife of law school professor Guido Calabresi, and one of the city's great contemporary benefactors, endorses the idea, in some part because she's a direct descendant of the remarkable other Ann!