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Yale will rename Calhoun College to honor Grace Hopper
- theparanoid 10y agoCracked me up - "remain concerned that we don’t do things that erase history" Salovey said.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoNo reason they can't rename something more appropriate after Calhoun, like a dumpster or sewage plant or something.
- wyldfire 10y agoI wondered, "Why does GFK_of_xmaspast feel so strongly about this person?" I hadn't known (or recalled) anything about John C. Calhoun. Calhoun himself writes in 1837: > But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good. ... > Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe–look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.
- CalChris 10y agoThe Lost Cause tries to paint the Civil War as about States' Rights rather than slavery. This reinterpretation began immediately after the war, arguably by Robert E Lee himself. The War of Northern Aggression et cetera tries to paint the South as the victims. This revisionism avoids the text of the Constitution of the Confederate States, the writings of Calhoun, the 1860 census of South Carolina, the secession of the Southern States and the firing on Fort Sumter.
- hackuser 10y ago> This revisionism avoids the text of the Constitution of the Confederate States and the writings of Calhoun and the 1860 census of South Carolina. It avoids a lot more than that. The Confederacy themselves could have freed the slaves at any time.
- brightball 10y agoWorthwhile piece of history whenever this comes up: http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/History/Events/CherokeeDeclarationofCauses(October28,1861).aspx http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/History/Events/Cherok... 6 months in when the south was winning
- chimeracoder 10y agoI'm not sure why that's relevant to the parent comment. It's also not particularly surprising if you consider the history of the Cherokee specifically (compared to other Native American tribes). The Cherokee tried to have diplomatic relations with the Union (the United States), and the US stabbed them in the back. Of course they'd want to break up the Union - it was the only shot they had at reclaiming their sovereignty.
- brightball 10y agoHe mentioned the lost cause narrative being something that was created after the war. That document goes into detail about a whole lot that was going on at the time that fit the "narrative". Civil War history is a hobby of mine that developed after the flag stuff a couple of years ago. There were so many factors that went into the conflict it's hard to even know where to begin. Snag a book on the economics of it sometime if you're interested though.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoIt's pretty easy to know where to begin: slavery. Just look at the constitution of the CSA, which requires all member states to have slavery. How is that promoting states' rights? Or look at the ordinances of secession: https://www.google.com/amp/s/aliberalthinker.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/what-was-the-main-reason-for-confederate-secession-in-the-civil-war-again/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/aliberalthinker.wordpress.com/2.... To say the CSA was mainly formed on any issue other than slavery requires conspiracy theorist contortions.
- hackuser 10y ago> Calhoun himself writes in 1837: ... What do you mean to imply by this quote? It's horribly discriminatory and it's actually pro-slavery.
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- Avshalom 10y agoThat's the point, GP was wondering why some one would suggest nameing a sewer after Calhoun and found a quote from Calhoun himself (as opposed to some third party that could be accused of drinking haterade) showing him to be a human sewer.
- Amezarak 10y agoI hope that history judges us more kindly than we judge history. There's no question that today, and for the best part of the past 150 years, we find Calhoun's views absolutely abhorrent and reprehensible. For us, there is no question about it. Calhoun, and most everyone else in human history, lived in a different time. We now "know" that slavery is inherently wrong, but Calhoun, for example, didn't see it that way. He literally believed he was doing a good thing. We now find that paternalistic, condescending, and abhorrent. Even in his own time, Calhoun's views were becoming outdated. But there is not, and never has been, an oracle anyone could consult to find the Truth about what is Good and Right. Even seemingly objective religious oracles of the Truth About Morality are subject to interpretation. We all had to muddle our own way through it. Our consciences were all formed by the society we lived in and, no doubt, by our self interest. I have no doubt that hundreds of years from now, when social norms have evolved in ways we can't imagine, people will find our views abhorrent and reprehensible too. I hope they do not dismiss us human sewers on that basis alone. At any rate, I think that when you dismiss figures of the past as human sewers, you overlook just how past atrocities happened, which makes it easier for them to happen in the here and now.
- yedava 10y agoAll one needed to do was ask the slaves whether they liked being slaves. Looks like some people did listen to the slaves and they found themselves on the right side of history. So you don't need to consult an Oracle. Listening helps.
- mulmen 10y agoNot sure why that's funny? It's a legitimate concern.
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- mlinksva 10y agoRenaming doesn't erase history, it makes history. The previous name and the renaming are part of the history of the named subject.
- thomasahle 10y agoSure, if people look under the surface. However it is still sugarcoating history, hiding the bad people, and making it seem like the good people were always appreciated. Maybe it is a fair sacrifice for the sake of redeeming the past. It certainly is an interesting new kind of cultural war.
- mlinksva 10y agoRather than sugarcoating and redeeming, renaming is admitting that the past is irredeemable.
- mturmon 10y agoYou are reading something into this that is not there. Choosing who from the past that we want to honor is pretty natural. (It's not "redeeming" the past to choose carefully who to honor this way.) Changing an honorary name on a building is different than changing a paragraph on a history book. As a point of comparison, plenty of street names are changed to honor various historical figures, municipal functionaries, now-famous past residents, etc.
- thomasahle 10y ago> As a point of comparison, plenty of street names are changed to honor various historical figures That sounds interesting. Which persons have had "their" streets changed in this way?
- mturmon 10y agoYou will turn up a bunch with an internet search on [street] [renaming]. Proceed from that to [university] [hall] [renaming].
- RodericDay 10y agoI honestly don't understand this argument. People brought up the same kind of snide remarks when BLM pushed to rename some college library after Woodrow Wilson, or to take down an Andrew Jackson statue somewhere. Erasing history means erasing from history books, pretending it didn't happen. Taking down monuments is not the same thing. It is a big, overt statement that the contributions of those people are no longer respected. I don't see why this is so controversial. I presume you are not outraged when statues of Hitler or Saddam are taken down?
- cepp 10y ago> "It is a big, overt statement that the contributions of those people are no longer respected." That's the crux of your argument. In this case, when talking about Calhoun College and the concept of "erasing history" it's not that the concern that Calhoun's name will be lost, but rather than part of the identity of the college and all the events tied to it will be. It's easy enough to think that a name change will be "simple" but it's the question of how you refer to events in the past, how you get the community to reflect this change, and how you are able to respectfully honor the history of the college in the light of this change, without making everything that occurred in the past seem like an error or portrayed in a negative light. Yale's choice to go forward is something that I'm proud of as this has been a point of contention in our community, but it has also spurred new questions of how we deal with the identity and history of the college.
- jessaustin 10y agoThe living owe nothing to the dead. Yale are honoring one dead person more, and another dead person less, without regard for the intentions of the dead but purely for the purposes of the living.
- tyteen4a03 10y ago> She was on the team that developed the first computer language, “compiler,” in 1952 Yup, journalists at it again.
- rhizome 10y agoHow would you explain her significance to laypeople?
- wyldfire 10y agoI think tyteen4a03 is making light of specifically how the sentence was parsed. It was likely an editing or drafting error, because it should have originally been "... first computer language compiler in 1952." The article as presented currently makes it seem as if there's a programming language referred to by the name "compiler" that she helped develop.
- dnautics 10y ago"Grace Hopper invented the concept that computers should be provided instructions that look more like human language instead of forcing programmers to translate their instructions into numbers manually."
- CalChris 10y agoThe Education of a Computer, Grace Murray Hopper. http://xover.mud.at/~marty/iug2/p243-hopper.pdf http://xover.mud.at/~marty/iug2/p243-hopper.pdf I'm not sure what your objection is but she wrote this in 1952 and specifically used the words compiling routine.
- vowelless 10y agoA great choice! Grace Murray Hopper is an amazing inspiration not only for women but computer scientists in general.
- Semiapies 10y agoI do continue to shake my head how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers, when the _actual field_ has figures like Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton.
- denzil_correa 10y ago> how people push Ada Lovelace, someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago, as the symbol of women-working-with-computers I've rarely seen anyone champion Ada as a symbol of "Women working with computers".
- coolgeek 10y ago> someone who wrote a paper almost 200 years ago She didn't just write a paper. Her place in history is at least as well earned - I personally think moreso - as Babbage's. "When Ada wrote about Babbage’s machine, she wanted to explain what it did in the clearest way—and to do this she looked at the machine more abstractly, with the result that she ended up exploring and articulating something quite recognizable as the modern notion of universal computation." She did so 100 years before Turing. http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...
- pjc50 10y agoGrace Hopper on nanoseconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 (excellently presented use of a visual aid to scale) As for the renaming, when people are honoured by having things named after them, from time to time it's appropriate to see whether the things they did would still be considered honourable. Otherwise we'd still be referring to Stalingrad and Leningrad.
- Shubley 10y agoStalingrad and Leningrad are not good examples. They both had other names before the Soviets did exactly what you're advocating and swept away history to make way for their new era of equality.
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- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoKaliningrad still needs fixed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Königsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Königsberg
- jhbadger 10y agoIt should rebuild the seven bridges to get all the graph theory tourism money.
- jwcacces 10y agoDisappointed: http://i.imgur.com/1Z0KC35.jpg http://i.imgur.com/1Z0KC35.jpg
- gargarplex 10y agoI'm doing an Instagram series (#GodsOfProgramming – https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/godsofprogramming/ https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/godsofprogramming/). CoIncidentally, we posted about Grace Hoppper today. :)
- wtbob 10y agoOne wonders how long before Yale changes its name altogether: Elihu Yale was a slave trader.
- Haven_Monahan 10y agoBrown as well. You really can't talk about the slave trade in colonial RI w/o mentioning John & Nick Brown. Of course, the brand names of these colleges are too valuable to dump.
- jgalt212 10y agoand then we also must consider what kind of society are we if we look for and act on every opportunity to white wash our history?
- bbanyc 10y agoNicholas Brown Jr., for whom the university was named, was an abolitionist.
- Haven_Monahan 10y ago...who got his money from his parents and uncles. Moe Brown was also a quaker && robustly antislavery, but that did not stop him from bailing out his brothers during the war. Trying to extricate the triangle-trade money from the Brown family is like trying to wring the pink from a sunrise.
- chimeracoder 10y ago> Elihu Yale was a slave trader. That's an understatement! He was a president of the East India Company and an absolutely brutal slavemaster: > The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in [Chennai], a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement
- Haven_Monahan 10y agoIn fairness to JCC, I'm sure he'd look at the sort of things that go on at Yale these days, and insist that all mention of his name be removed from anything on campus. The South, the South...God knows what shall become of her.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoThe shopkeepers schooled the landowners big time. Sic transit.
- panic 10y agothe sort of things that go on at Yale these days What do you mean by this?
- jonwachob91 10y agoProbably referencing the students that act like spoiled children b/c not everyone has the same opinions as them... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new...
- jtedward 10y agoWell it's more effective then griping on the internet. The spoiled child approach has done wonders for Trump and the Republicans.
- toehead2000 10y agoThis can be interpreted two, opposing ways. Very clever
- mjmsmith 10y agoWon't someone think of the pro-slavery opinions?
- Avshalom 10y ago
- pje 10y agoGrace Hopper is a great choice. John C Calhoun was unambiguously a reprehensible piece of shit, as is anyone—from any time—who works to maintain slavery.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoYou're so enlightened! 99 good boy points have been deposited into your account. Edit: when you are able to demonstrate as deep a knowledge level of the USA Constitution as Calhoun did in his writings on e.g. the concurrent majority, let us know. Or is virtue signaling all you need?
- dang 10y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread even worse. Especially please don't post personal attacks.
- throwawaycc424 10y agoAh, yes. Another example of 'progressive' historical erasure. When will the book burning start?
- dang 10y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not political troll comments. Also, please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts; that's not a legit use of throwaways, and we ban them.
- redthrowaway 10y agoElihu Yale was a slave trader, might as well rename the whole damned school. Or we could stop freaking out that historical figures didn't have 21st century values, but that proposition is clearly too radical.
- Haven_Monahan 10y agoSorry, we will have only binary & atom-thick appraisals of historic figures in the US today. John Calhoun == Bad; Grace Hopper == Good. And that's all you need to know. The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places. What they do have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the right side, the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how progressive they are for hating on the wrong side John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest in...cotton. I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.
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- inopinatus 10y agoYou're complaining about binary, infantile invective whilst employing it yourself most blatantly. The stench of inadvertent irony is near overwhelming.
- mjmsmith 10y agoOh good grief. I'm sure you'll still be free to wave your Confederate flag and wear your white hood in the comfort of your own home.
- bpodgursky 10y agoIn a hundred years, there will be campaigns to rename any buildings named after non-vegetarians. There won't be a lot of names left if you take only the purest of the pure as names. Naming a building means celebrating the good things that a person did, not condoning the bad. People are complicated and it's a disservice to college students to suggest otherwise.
- tesselatum 10y agoSocieties' values change and evolve, there's nothing wrong with that.
- Teever 10y agoI question the value of throwing out all mention of the past simply because the people in the past don't meet today's societal standards.
- pasquinelli 10y agothe past is mentioned in ways other than the names of buildings.
- panic 10y agoThere's a lot of room between the "purest of the pure" and a pro-slavery segregationist.
- rayiner 10y agoCalhoun college was so named in 1931, and the only reason seems to be that he was a Yale alumnus who was Vice President. I'm not seeing the big offsetting factors. It's not like they're trying to rename something named after Thomas Jefferson, who also owned slaves.
- hkmurakami 10y agoSome Princeton students wanted to rename the Woodrow Wilson school.
- boona 10y agoI'm glad. It would be a shame to challenge students with the realities of our past. College isn't about challenging students, it's about creating a safe space to ensure that upper middle class pathological narcissism is fostered and that students never mature into adulthood.
- littletimmy 10y agoIsn't this much ado about nothing? If not for slavery, the African American population that enjoys 1st world comforts in the USA today would be languishing in some underdeveloped African country. Even for the time, slaves who were not in the USA might just have been slaves in Africa or Arabia. To prove that slavery was categorically bad for African Americans, we need to prove via counterfactual that a better possibility could exist. I've never seen anyone prove that.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't start political flamewars. That's not what this site is for.
- littletimmy 10y agoI thought my reply relevant to the discussion at hand. It literally addresses the cause behind the name change.