By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 24, 2016
University students across the country — at Amherst,
Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UC–Berkeley, and dozens of other campuses
— are caught up in yet another new fad.
This time, the latest college craze is a frenzied attempt
to rename campus buildings and streets. Apparently some of those names from the
past do not fit students’ present litmus tests on race, class, and gender
correctness.
Stanford students are demanding the rebranding of
buildings, malls, and streets bearing the name of Junipero Serra, the
18th-century Franciscan priest who some 250 years ago founded California’s
famous chain of 21 coastal missions. The sainted Serra was often unkind to
Native Americans and by our standards racist in his worldview.
Harvard is ditching its law school’s seal because it is
based on the coat of the arms of the Isaac Royal family. Isaac Royal Jr.
donated his estate to create Harvard’s first law professorship, but he and his
family owned slaves, so apparently that cancels out his philanthropy.
For students, politically incorrect actions in
politically incorrect eras mean that otherwise-generous historical figures have
to be judged as bad in all aspects — at least by 21st-century standards. But
why the sudden nationwide-renaming frenzy — and how is it any different from
other campus fads?
Are students aware of the historical antecedents, such as
the fickle ancient Roman practice of the postmortem erasing of someone’s name
from all mention (damnatio memoriae)?
Have they any idea that they are playing roles right out of George Orwell’s
dystopian works Animal Farm and 1984? Do they know the history of the
verb “Trotskyize”?
The renaming craze is not really about race, class, and
gender correctness at all. If it were, there would be no Warren Hall at UC
Berkeley. Before liberal Earl Warren became chief justice of the Supreme Court,
he was the California attorney general who instigated the wartime internment of
tens of thousands of Japanese-American citizens. There also would be no Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
President Wilson was a man of dubious racial attitudes who infamously
re-segregated the federal workforce.
Instead, the “Animal Farm” rules of the current campus
bullies go something like this: Some politically incorrect people from
centuries ago are bad, but other politically incorrect people from the recent
past are not quite so bad if they were at least sometimes liberal.
Or are students even hypocritical with their made-up
litmus tests?
Few students are demanding, for instance, that San Diego
State University drop the school nickname “Aztecs.” The imperialistic Aztecs
sacrificed tens of thousands of victims from among the tribes they conquered —
often ripping out the hearts of their living victims — and enslaved even more.
Should UC–Berkeley students demand the renaming of their
Cesar E. Chavez Student Center, on the contemporary-campus principle that not
being a saint in the past means becoming a sinner in the present? Chavez, the
iconic farm-labor activist, sent his lieutenants down to the southern border to
use violence to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the U.S. He courted
Ferdinand Marcos, the cutthroat dictator of the Philippines, to support his
union. And Chavez tried to implement the Gestapo-like management principles of
the discredited cult Synanon among his United Farm Workers hierarchy.
Is the logic of the campus bullies that some heroes did
not mean to do bad things, and so they cannot be judged by the standards of the
moment — at least not if they were liberal and deemed politically correct?
Students fail to realize that revolutionary tastes change
quickly, and yesterday’s PC hero can become today’s pariah. Based on students’
own expanding definition of sexual assault and the curtailment of freedom of
speech, former president and notorious womanizer Bill Clinton would not be allowed
to set foot on any campus because of his past exploitation of women. Nor would
his enabler, Hillary Clinton, who in the past has sought to demonize her
husband’s female accusers.
There are other hypocrisies in the campus renaming fad.
Why would Stanford students just stop with airbrushing
away Father Serra’s name? The university’s co-founder, philanthropist Leland
Stanford, who was also governor of California, exploited Chinese laborers to
help build the transcontinental railroad. He even dubbed them a “degraded”
people. Today’s students, however, have invested tens of thousands of dollars
into their blue-chip Stanford-branded educations. So far, they have shown no
desire to lose that snob appeal and expensive cachet — or perhaps have their
degrees restamped from Stanford to something more politically correct but less
marketable, such as Ohlone College, which would honor the original pre-Colonial
peoples of the surrounding Silicon Valley region.
In the 1930s, half-educated student faddists swallowed
goldfish. In the 1950s, the silly campus craze was to cram into phone booths.
In the 1960s, students went feral and torched buildings.
Now, they pout and rename things.
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