Erin O’Connor has a terrific post on Vanderbilt University’s successful effort to remove the word “Confederate” from one of its dorms, Confederate Memorial Hall, which had been built with a $50,000 donation from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to memorialize, well, Confederates. The UDC sued, but Vanderbilt has just won in a Tennessee court.
Erin has been on top of this matter from the beginning (see her current post for earlier links), and I don’t want to repeat her well-taken points about political correctness here. But I can’t avoid screaming about one point Vanderbilt made in court and elsehwere. According to the article cited above in the Vanderbilt Hustler,
The issue was whether Vanderbilt had the right to change the name of a building which the UDC donated $50,000 in 1935 to help construct. University officials said they decided to take “Confederate” out of the name of the building to make the campus more “diverse.”
I don’t have an opinion about whether the Chancery Court Judge’s opinion was legally correct, but I find it both odd and typicial (which is itself odd) that a university can claim to enhance “diversity” by erasing evidence of one part of that university’s and community’s past that some elements now find objectionable.
Although I almost always disagree, perhaps hate speech should be suppressed and objectionable words and symbols erased. There are reasonable arguments for doing so, but enhancing “diversity” is not one of them.
UPDATE — The Bloody Shirt Still Waves!
Stephen Bainbridge writes:
I’m no fan of campus PC, but on this issue I’m on Vanderbilt’s side. First, Confederate symbols have been appropriated by those who oppose desegregation and equal opportunity. Those who complain that the battle flag, in particular, has been hijacked for use as a symbol of racism and violence have a legitimate point. Second, regardless of whatever modern meaning the symbols of the Confederacy have come to possess, there is one meaning for which they have stood since 1861 — treason…. When one thinks of the dire consequences a confederate victory would have had not just for we Americans but for the whole world, a righteous anger against those who marched under the battle flag is the only appropriate response…. I fail to understand why we should prepetuate a tradition of celebrating treason.
I spent part of today in northern Virginia, including some time on U.S. Highway 50, also known as Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway. When I left the area I started out out on U.S. 29, known in those parts only as Lee Highway. I assume Prof. Bainbridge thinks the Federal Highway Administration should erase these monuments to treason.
But now I’m being argumentative, and on another argument. After all, as I’ve just allowed, there are good arguments — indeed, Prof. Bainbridge makes them — why the FHA should rename those roads. My only point here is that such renaming can’t be done in the name of enhancing “diversity.” Even if one were to accept his argument that all those who oppose erasing the word “Confederate” from a building built in part with UDC funds oppose “equal opportunity,” it would not follow that sandblasting words that evoke their position contributes to “diversity.” Quite, in fact, the contrary.
The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend
Erin O’Connor is criticizing Vanderbilt University for changing the name of “Confederate Memorial Hall.” I’m no fan of campus PC, but on this issue I’m on Vanderbilt’s side. First, Confederate symbols have been appropriated by those who oppose desegreg…
Count me among those who want to see the Confederate symbols retired, except for those placed at civil war battlefields and Confederate memorials. And I was born and raised in Mississippi. The diversity thing is idiotic, as you say. That’s not the reason. “Diversity” has come to mean “racially PC”.
Yes, we should erase all symbols of our past that now offend us. We have a right to blow up those Buddhist monuments because we are now an Islamic country. Oh, excuse me. I thought you were discussing the actions of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Let me say that I find the righteous indignation of the good professor a little phony. I guess we must have solved all the problems of our society if all that remains is to remove names that are no longer politically correct.
By the way, I did not grow up in the South. I was born and grew up in New York City and, I assure you that nobody would have ever accused me of being sympathetic to the South.
Richard, I had a discussion about this with my sixteen-year-old daughter the other day. Let me tell you what I told her.
The Confederate States of America was a different country than the United States. Not a region, another country; that was the point of the Civil War. And under the laws of that country, black people (except, in some respects, those who had been emancipated) had no human rights. Not just no civil rights, but no human rights. If the CSA had existed long enough, that might have changed, but it didn’t. Now, I told her, suppose there were another country where, if we lived there, she and her dad and I would be owned by someone; someone who could rape her every night, and neither her dad nor I could do anything about it. Then suppose that she looked at the statehouse, or the courthouse, or the state flag where she lives, and saw the flag of that country displayed there. Would she not feel uneasy? Like she didn’t really belong? Like at any time her rights could be taken away?
We want black people to stop talking about four hundred years of oppression, let go of the past, and get with the program. I think we have to do the same.
“Make the campus more Diverse”?!?
Even I, a cold-hearted, mean-spirited conservative, know the proper pc-speak for such an action: “to foster a non-hostile learning environment.” Methinks these university officials are in need of re-education.
It’s disturbing how eager people are to speak the word “diversity” these days…I’m beginning to suspect it is having an endorphin-inducing effect.
As Homer might put it, “Mmmmm…diversity”
Under Laura’s reasoning, we also shouldn’t ever allow the British flag to fly in the U.S. After all, that’s why the colonies originally broke away from England – because they were the ‘property’ of the crown, and subject to the whims and temper tantrums of King George…
Where does political correctness end? Where in the Constitution does it say that we have a right to be free from all reminders of the past that are unpleasant or that we don’t like or don’t agree with?
So long as blacks keep getting upset by seeing the Confederate Standard, the bigots and klukkers will keep waving it. Ignore it, don’t give them the satisfaction of responding to their childish displays of bigotry. It’s just a stupid piece of colored cloth, after all.
Claire, did you read my post?
“Now, I told her, suppose there were another country where, if we lived there, she and her dad and I would be owned by someone; someone who could rape her every night, and neither her dad nor I could do anything about it.”
This is not true of England.
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