TeacherKen wished for me to turn a comment in his diary into its own diary. So, here goes …
There has been a little fanfare this week (very little, but some) about Yale deciding to keep the odious JC Calhoun as the namesake of one of the residential colleges, and naming two of them for Ben Franklin and Pauli Murray. Residential Colleges are like dorms that have their own advisors, the Dean (who deals more with academics) and the Head of House (formerly Housemaster, who deals with living issues and invites speakers to the Residential College).
See TeacherKen’s diary on Murray or the excellent NYT op-ed by Professor Glenda Gilmore (of Yale), www.nytimes.com/…, for some initial thoughts on the Dr Murray selection.
Many, including Prof. Gilmore, have said that keeping Calhoun and selecting Franklin and Murray does not properly deal with Yale’s checkered past.
As a GenX Yale undergrad, I completely agree, but I also think that’s the point. If we take Calhoun’s name off the building erected in the 1930s with money from those that were weathering the Depression just fine, then we make the place seem less checkered than it was/is. If we take away all the slaveholders’ names, then the Yale version of United States history is made to seem less checkered than it was/is.
However, if we keep Calhoun’s name on, and recognize that intellect and education and authority can be applied to turn mistaken ideas (nullification and slavery) into an edifice of entrenched power and human misery … that’s a powerful lesson. Will Yale students like it? Hell, no. They want to believe everything they will do will be amazing and selfless and beneficial. This is not the case unless the university forces them to see the advantages some of them have had over others, and the folly that all bright young things can self-justify as it twists into a powerful poison for their fellow human beings. Salovey is going to initiate a series of competitions in which submissions will be made to the university (initially, artwork, I believe) to express the dark side of the men for whom the residential colleges are named. Calhoun is first up in the public square.
Moreover, the new colleges’ namesakes have much to tell us. Ben Franklin was both a slaveholder, and then, one of the first abolitionists. He was a man who dispensed moral wisdom while still putting aside the faith of his forefathers, lived in a more libertine manner than almost all of his countrymen, and (with Jefferson) was an advocate of religious tolerance. What a wonderful counterpoint to the fire and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards. What a wonderful counterpoint to the smoke and marble of William F Buckley (who is not a namesake for a residential college, but who gave us “God and Man at Yale”, and lent his education and authority to promote all sorts of misguided notions).
And many writers have been so proud of Pauli Murray’s contributions to civil rights for women and people of color that they often glide over two points, which are equally important.
First, Pauli Murray was made an Episcopalian saint after she passed. This is an aspect that is liberating for women and minorities on the Yale campus who have faith, but in a way, necessitates the Humanist-Deist Franklin being named as well. In an important way, her name on a residential college furthers the object lesson that Yale was founded as a school that would provide a more moral education than Harvard because it would go back to religion as part of the curriculum; for too long Yale has furthered the entrenched power of religion to claim itself as the only source of moral wisdom. Franklin’s name on another college tells us that this was never the only way in America, and that even the violation of one faith’s moral codes does not equate with failing one’s fellow humans; whether the violation of one’s fellow female humans was part of Franklin’s actual failings is open for debate, and is probably only known by the women with whom he had sexual relations.
Secondly, if you blink while reading the NYT piece by Prof. Gilmore, you miss her acknowledging Murray was gay. That’s perhaps an uncomfortable aspect of this selection for some students and alumni, including African-Americans. But that isn’t the whole story (from her Wiki bio):
Murray struggled with her sexual and gender identity through much of her life. Her marriage as a teenager ended almost immediately with the realization that "when men try to make love to me, something in me fights".[58] Though acknowledging the term "homosexual" in describing others, Murray preferred to describe herself as having an "inverted sex instinct" that caused her to behave as a man attracted to women. She wanted a "monogamous married life", but one in which she was the man.[59] The majority of her relationships were with women whom she described as "extremely feminine and heterosexual".[4] In her younger years, Murray would often be devastated by the end of these relationships, to the extent that she was twice hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, in 1937 and in 1940.[4]
Murray wore her hair short and preferred pants to skirts; due to her slight build, there was a time in her life when she was often able to pass as a teenage boy.[58] In her twenties, she shortened her name from Pauline to the more androgynous Pauli.[60] Murray pursued hormone treatments in the 1940s to correct what she saw as a personal imbalance,[27] and even requested abdominal surgery to test if she had "submerged" male sex organs.[61]
She is an inspiration to students throughout the LGBTQA spectrum, and in a broader sense, an inspiration to all Yale students and alumni to live their lives fully and openly.
And this doesn’t even touch on the inspiration of someone from the 20th Century who talked openly about their psychiatric treatment as medical treatment that they needed at one point in their life. As a psychiatrist on another Ivy Plus campus, I cannot tell you the power of that part of her biography. As someone who had a brief medical hospitalization for a chronic disease while a freshperson at Yale, I cannot fully summarize the inspiration that this naming selection promises. You are human, it proclaims, and so was she. You will have a life after this setback, after this hospitalization, after this leave, despite ongoing treatment, and you can provide this world with something meaningful.
Nor does it touch on the fact that, when she was arrested in the 1940s for not moving her seat on the bus (yes, she did that first), the NAACP would not defend her. Instead, a Democratic Socialist organization, the Workers Defense League, did so. She worked for the WDL for many years, making things difficult for some of her friends in the more traditional left, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Yes, she was a friend of the former First Lady, who had invited her to one of the New Deal young people’s camps in the 1930s:
She took a position at Camp Tera, a "She-She-She" conservation camp established at the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to parallel the male Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC) camps formed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to provide employment to young adults while improving infrastructure.[19][20] During her three months at the camp, Murray's health recovered and she met Eleanor Roosevelt, which would later lead to correspondence that changed her life. However, Murray clashed with the camp's director who found a Marxist book from her Hunter College course in Murray's belongings, questioned Murray's stance during the First Lady's visit, and disapproved of her cross-racial relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor.[21]
Wow. There’s a ton to unpack there, particularly when one considers this was still in the 1930s.
I sense in the recent paeans to Dr Murray, at least those from older Yale affiliates, a tendency to ignore or glide past these elements of her life. This might be because there’s still a way to go on people seeing them as consonant with her success. But I think it betrays Murray’s attitude of being honest with herself, and using that as a fuel to fight difficult battles in the public arenas.
African-American, Female, Lesbian, Gender-Queer, Democratic Socialist, and a human who needed psychiatric care. Open about these things. Defender of these aspects of her identity. In a time when all of them were considered reasons to stay hidden and keep your head down. So strident in fighting this, that even people who support her today for some aspects erase the others. So determined in fighting this, that she was in danger of being eliminated from popular history. A woman who Justice Ginsburg has cited as her intellectual influence. The actual first African-American to refuse to sit at the back of the bus. So, no, I don’t think Murray College somehow compensates for Calhoun College still being there. That’s not President Peter Salovey’s calculus. His thinking, his really fantastic statement, is to acknowledge that Yale is checkered. It has advanced and continues to advance American society. And that advance is not a pure good, nor does it cause all boats to rise at the same rate. But it can be recognized as a place that has put forward nullification and that has defended Union. A place that has benefitted from slavery and the industrial age bondage that followed abolition. A place for arch-conservatives and socialists. A place for scientists and religious faith. A place for preachers and humanists. A place for the sick and the well, which is each and every one of us. Yale is Good. Yale is Bad. So is America. And one alumni grouping’s Good is another’s Bad. So too in America. That’s where this decision was aimed, and I agree with it whole-heartedly. With these decisions, and the one to change the title of the advisor that lives in the residential college from “Housemaster” to “Head of House,” I have never been so proud of my alma mater as I am this week.