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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
To those who would cleanse the University of the names John C. Calhoun, Timothy Dwight, Ezra Stiles, and others because these leaders from a bygone era do not meet our oh-so-sanctimoniously (and retroactively) applied social standards (“The Slavery Legacy,” Feb.), I say: Franklin D. Roosevelt, that great progressive, commanded a segregated army less than a lifetime ago. Shall we expunge his name from the history books and monuments as well? I note with approval that, having suddenly discovered slavery in their background, some members of the Yale community have reacted by proposing to purge the names of any leader associated with the practice. However, this commendable effort should not stop with slavery. There are many other moral outrages in the University’s history that deserve similar censorship. I am disturbed that Yale continues to honor the heritage of Puritanism. Puritans were religious bigots—the Taliban of their day. They practiced a form of theocratic totalitarianism in which any form of dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. Lucky dissenters were forced into exile. Those less fortunate were tortured with cruel and unusual punishments—or hanged as witches. Yale should immediately remove from public view the commemorated names of its Puritan forbears—or, at the very least, post disclaimers rejecting everything that Puritanism stood for. Inconvenient truths must never be allowed to contaminate the University’s righteous self-image. The politically correct practice of attempting to impose today’s social and ethical mores upon persons long dead has reached new lows. Are we seriously expected to rename portions of the campus because the persons so recognized were slave owners? If this be done, should we not also rename the Jefferson Memorial, remove Jefferson’s name from the history of the University of Virginia, and, perhaps, cause the authorship of the Declaration of Independence to be ascribed to an anonymous genius? Without in any way endorsing the institution of slavery, let us simply recognize that these persons lived and acted with propriety as viewed by their society. We should hope that future generations will accord the same courtesy to us as they review the gamut of our historical contributions—the inspired, the pedestrian, and the ugly—in the light of their own standards. While I enjoyed “The Slavery Legacy,” by Mark Alden Branch, I could not understand why many members of the Yale community were surprised to learn that nine of the residential colleges were named for persons who supported slavery. Branch writes, “The news came as a shock to many who thought of slaveholders as Southern plantation masters—not New England clergymen.” The “shock” at such news is more of an indictment of American education than of the slaveholders who participated in a system of labor that (as horrible as it was) has existed since the earliest history of humanity and was not seriously challenged until the era of the American Revolution. Apparently, several generations of Americans have been led to believe that white Southerners were the only people in the world who owned slaves. Some 12 years ago, when I assigned Antebellum Natchez, by D. Clayton James, to a U.S. history survey class, I gave no thought to the fact that it included references to ownership of slaves by free African Americans. Most students, regardless of race or ethnicity, registered amazement that some African Americans participated in slavery. Indeed, a few students refused to believe it. Likewise, most of them had never heard of slavery in Africa or the crucial role of some African slave merchants in the spread of slavery into the Western Hemisphere. One can take heart in the mission of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition: to not only work to advance the state of knowledge about slavery as an American institution, but also to raise awareness of slavery’s role in world history. The center’s success will contribute greatly to the cause of racial reconciliation in the United States and the world. The judgment of people out of historical context is academically reprehensible. Life should be told as it was lived. “The Slavery Legacy” serves to highlight an ongoing debate about the impact of slavery on New World societies. In Barbados, the debate is over the removal of a statue of Lord Horatio Nelson. As admiral of the British Navy, Nelson was credited by his Caribbean contemporaries with saving them from the French. Today, a more discerning historiography argues for his displacement on the grounds that he was a supporter of slavery.
Defining Patriotism Students at Yale are defining patriotism, says John Lewis Gaddis (“Learning from September,” Feb.). I hope they are having more success than their professor. His characterization—“the desire to stand out and do something”—would fall far short, even if it were not so vague that it could equally well describe, say, flirtation. Embracing patriotism attracts no special attention in this era of strikingly widespread American public support for the U.S. government and military. In the current climate, “doing something” patriotic rarely means more than flying a flag and stifling critical thought. Re: “Learning from September”: A recent “My Turn” column in Newsweek, by Alison Hornstein '02, causes me great concern. She relates that in her September 12 seminar, her professor “did not see much difference between Hamas suicide bombers (who, he pointed out, saw themselves as 'martyrs') and American soldiers who died fighting in World War II.” Her class, following her professor’s lead, nodded in agreement. Hornstein says that the September 11 attack is generally explained on the Yale campus as the result of “different life circumstances,” poverty, and American foreign policy. But the alarming main thrust of her article is that, in her academic experience, nobody has ever seemed willing to make any moral judgments about anything at all, no matter how horrific. This moral vacuum is the result of deconstructionism, postmodernism, and critical theory, ideas prevalent at Yale today. These undermine any basis for moral evaluation, since all perspectives from which judgments could be made are simply points of view. In practice, this seems to mean that any action is understandable and cannot be condemned. So much for ethics classes. During Yale’s 300-year history, astounding advances have been made in the development of ethical standards. Our nation was established with protections of individual rights, slavery was abolished, women were enfranchised, and discrimination was banned. Advances were based on refinements in determining what is right and wrong based on the “self-evident” truths articulated by our founding fathers and the philosophers who informed their revolution. Yale played a leadership role in this process, and its graduates, from Nathan Hale to the soldiers whose names are listed on the walls outside Woolsey Hall, fought and died to establish and defend these advances. When I left Yale, it was with the expectation that the University would continue its leadership role in the constant examination and reexamination of the moral basis for our society. Unfortunately, a faculty composed of professors who can’t tell the difference between risking your life to defend your country from Nazi tyranny and blowing yourself up to kill thousands of innocent people because you don’t like their culture, is unlikely to make much of a contribution to anybody’s moral progress. Fortunately, most of the country has not had the benefit of a recent Yale education and does know the difference between right and wrong on this issue.
Griswold’s Guilt? As a BG (before Griswold) international relations graduate, I of course applaud Yale’s return to the international relations field over the past 15 years or so, as sketched in “A More Global Yale” (Nov.). Thank heavens for Paul Kennedy, John Gaddis, Richard Levin, et al. Your article covers a lot of interesting ground and raises some spectacularly contentious issues. For example, I very seriously doubt that the Seattle brouhaha and the September attacks have any causes in common—which, in turn, raises the question of what our response should be. But let me here point to a much narrower question and ask for some help. You note that “when A. Whitney Griswold became President in 1950, he abolished the [Yale] Institute [of International Affairs].” In fact, Griswold wrecked Yale’s preeminence in international relations studies, which had been built up during the preceding 15 years. It was no longer, as Professor Kennedy asserts, “the place to be.” During almost the entire period of the Cold War, when analysis was supremely important, Yale ceased to be a major contributor. The question is: Why did President Griswold abolish the Institute? Griswold himself was a scholar whose book, The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, had been published by the Institute. He must have known what he was doing. As Yale now returns to distinguished activity in international relations, it is important that we understand why and how Yale failed before, in order that it not happen again.
The Lee Campaign An advertisement in the March YAM contains a photograph of a group of elected and appointed New Haven officials. The ad appears to contend that those photographed endorse the candidacy of Reverend Lee for election to the Yale Corporation. This is a misrepresentation. I received and accepted an invitation to what I believed was a community reception. The evening unfolded as a rally and fundraiser in a church sanctuary. Some of us were publicly requested to rise for a photograph. We complied. But we did not grant permission for the photograph to be published, nor for our participation to be interpreted as implied or tacit endorsement. In fact, I have never had a conversation with the candidate. It never occurred to me that the University should seek my counsel as to its corporate membership. It is, however, my opinion that if a slot for an ombudsman from New Haven were allocated and it were to be filled in concert with the city’s choice, the Reverend Lee’s name would not have been offered.
Corrections “The Slavery Legacy,” February’s cover story, stated that none of the three authors of the report, “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” is a graduate student in history. In fact, J. Celso de Castro Alves is a student in the history department. Also, in December’s “Old Yale,” Camp Devens in Massachusetts was incorrectly referred to as Camp Devon.
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