Naming buildings after people can prove tricky
Cornwallis Junior High School in Halifax bore the name of Edward Cornwallis, a man who offered a bounty for the scalps of the Mi’kmaq people.

thestar.com
April 10, 2016
By Emma Teitel

Should we honour men and women in death who were dishonourable in life?

This isn’t a new question in Canada and the world at large. In 2011, for example, the board of Cornwallis Junior High School in Halifax wondered why their school still bore the name of Edward Cornwallis, the first governor of Nova Scotia and a man who offered a bounty for the scalps of the Mi’kmaq people. (The school’s name is now Halifax Central Junior High.)

Recently, though, two high-profile situations, one Canadian, one American have again raised the question of the “posthumous blind eye.”

The Canadian instance was the passing last month of Rob Ford, and the subsequent excessive (to some) reverence that graced the lying in repose and funeral of a mayor who had not exactly graced the city he was mayor of.

In short, the guy was a moral question mark - a likeable (to some) moral question mark, but a question mark nonetheless.

The American controversy, evocative of the Cornwallis Junior High situation, was sparked this past November at Princeton University, when a student activist group - the Black Justice League - called for the renaming of that university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

That school’s namesake, Woodrow Wilson, was the 28th president of the United States and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for orchestrating the creation of the League of Nations. He was also, indisputably, a racist.

A stalwart supporter of segregation between black and white people (he insisted when faced by a delegation of civil rights activists that segregation was not a “humiliation” but a “benefit”), Wilson attended a showing of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation at the White House and remarked afterwards how “terribly true” the film was.

Yes, at the time Griffith’s film may have been one of the greatest cinematic feats in history, but it was also an epic love letter to the Ku Klux Klan. In short, the guy (Wilson) was a bigot - an accomplished bigot - but a bigot nonetheless.

Consequently, it made perfect moral sense to me when the Black Justice League called for the school to shed its name ties to the long dead American president, also a former president of the university itself. (He was, unsurprisingly, not keen on black students attending Princeton).

Wilson may have been a great asset and forger of identity at the school a very long time ago, but his unapologetic racism cannot be considered an afterthought in modern days, when black students are actually attending a school whose namesake sought to bar them from it.

Of course Wilson, like Cornwallis, was as they say, a man of his time, and there is nothing wrong with remembering such men or acknowledging their achievements (not to do so would be a kind of blindness on its own).

But continuing to immortalize them with naming honours whitewashes their legacies, especially in the eyes of people who are unaware of the darker elements in their pasts.

Which is why Princeton’s decision, announced this week, to refuse the students’ request to shed the name is disappointing.

Princeton announced that it will keep the school’s original name and institute diversity recruitment programs in compensation - as well as recognize “Wilson’s failings and shortcomings” in the future.

The rationale behind this decision goes like this (and I admit, it’s not unpersuasive): If we were to rebrand every school and park named after a “problematic” public figure, no institution would ever again bear the name of an important person.

President Obama, a former opponent of gay marriage and a proponent of drone strikes, would certainly have a hard time getting his own library.

But what if, rather than a logistical and ethical headache, this is actually a good thing?

Perhaps it’s time not merely to cease the tradition of naming institutions after morally suspect men, but to cease the tradition of naming institutions after people altogether - be they terrifically good guys, or terrifically compromised ones.

The custom is an outmoded and vainglorious effort to turn ordinary people into gods, and their very human, morally complex and historically uncertain lives into simple myths, carved in stone.

I like to think there’s a reason the Starship Enterprise is called the Starship Enterprise and not the Commander _____ Enterprise; maybe because, in the future, we will think better of putting the names of imperfect people on the sides of artifacts that strive for perfection, be they intergalactic space ships or institutions of higher learning.