Yale Women: Renaming Calhoun College for Feminist Icon ‘Perpetuates White Supremacy’
Not everyone is happy about Yale’s decision to rename Calhoun College from a slaveowner and white supremacist to a feminist icon, Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper. The loudest outcry comes not from anyone wishing to preserve history, but from the Yale Women’s Center, which claims that choosing a white woman ignores Yale’s history of slavery and perpetuates white supremacy.
The university organization is displeased that Yale chose the accomplished alumna and computer science pioneer instead of a woman of color. On Facebook (via Yale Daily News), the center said the choice of Hopper doesn’t reflect the issues and values raised by Yale students.
In the self-contradicting post, the center said that while they were “happy with the decision,” and hoped Hopper would inspire future generations of women in STEM education, it wasn’t good enough. They declared it an “act of whitewashing” that “silenced” student voices.
“We had hoped for a name change that acknowledged the years of activism by students of color and New Haven activists. We feel the decision to change the name from a white supremacist to a white woman, as amazing as she may be, is an act of whitewashing.”
It went on: “[T]he decision to rename the college after another white person seems like an attempt to end this discussion on the history of white supremacy and its active and continued role in this institution and on our campus.”
A PR person for the women’s center, Vicki Beizer, told the student newspaper that the administration let them down by ignoring names that would have “carried the dialogue further,” and that “renaming the college after a white woman doesn’t put the cork in the bottle.”
Members of the organization also published an op-ed for the Daily to argue that “white femininity has often been used as a tool to enforce racist and colonialist structures,” and that naming the college after Hopper was a “continuous perpetuation of white supremacy.”
Last year, the women’s center objected to a visit by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was set to lecture on “Islam and the West.” Ali, a Somali-born women’s rights activist and fierce critic of religious extremism, has faced blowback from social justice activists for being critical of political Islam.
The women’s center, along with several other student organizations, urged the university to disinvite Ali. They argued that she “does not hold the credentials” to speak as an authority on the religion despite being a scholar and researcher on political Islam.
The women’s center also urges the university to “immediately develop a protocol for making itself a sanctuary campus,” which would allow illegal immigrants to seek refuge at the university.
