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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Calhoun 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.

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Some Princeton students wanted to rename the Woodrow Wilson school.

That would be a good thing. Woodrow Wilson, though widely regarded as a progressive icon, was a racist who purged the federal government of blacks. Yale should be ashamed of this man, not celebrate him.

Does the progressivism of decades past need to be measured against the standards of today? I'm not being facetious, I'm asking genuinely because I've never really had the thought before but it seems like that's exactly you're suggesting here. It would seem to me that the progressive progress that we enjoy and push forward today stands on the shoulders of those progressives who came before us, even when their actions would be abhorrent to most people today.

Wilson was racist even by the standards of his time.

I really don't know much about the man other than the big acts that were passed as part of his legacy. Thanks for getting me curious enough to read more about him.

well, to put things into context, three years after wilson, we had a president who called for anti-lynching laws, made several public and private addresses exhorting Americans to protect the civil rights of African-Americans, and gave a commencement address at Howard University. He also very famously and forcefully put down internal party efforts to prevent a black man from running in New York state.

I mentioned in a comment to the other reply, I really didn't know much about him outside of the acts associated with his legacy. Thanks for pointing this out.

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