In 2009 the African-American historian Jonathan Holloway, then master of Yale’s residential, undergraduate John C. Calhoun College, invited me to become a fellow there. That was before the university became convulsed by controversy over the name of Calhoun, the pre-civil war US vice president, senator and constitutional theorist but also an ardent and powerful defender of slavery. To make matters worse, the residential-college title of ‘master’ seemed to many to double down on Calhoun’s slave-master legacy.
Holloway’s America and mine was still a country where the folk singer Joan Baez, a progressive’s progressive, had moved audiences of all persuasions by singing Robbie Robertson and The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, a song that enfolds the secessionist Confederacy’s ‘lost cause’ romantics empathetically into a larger US civic culture. If there wasn’t much controversy in 2009 about Calhoun College and the title of ‘master’, it wasn’t because no one was ‘woke’ to history’s cruelties and ironies: it was because, in that first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, there was more hope for a shared civic and political culture. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign that started at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 2015 and spread to Oxford University and Harvard Law School was still some years in the future.
No one was more ‘woke’ to US civic culture’s defaults than Holloway, an intellectual historian of black America. But he had wiser ideas and inclinations, honed since his childhood, about how to confront his country’s racial cruelties and ironies. Yale is stirring again now, as it was in 2015, with discontent over renamings: a somewhat nasty rehashing of what was accomplished and lost in renaming Calhoun College for the late, pioneering Yale computer scientist Grace Hopper, and a rising resistance to the university’s renaming of its historic Commons dining hall as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center, after the billionaire whose donations have already put his name on the flagship building of the New York Public Library, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology College of Computing and Rhodes-like scholarships in China. That makes it imperative to revisit Holloway’s admonition that the real controversy is “not about the name on the building. It’s about a deep and substantive commitment to being honest about power, structural systems of privilege and their perpetuation.”
