Self-reflection is a necessary trait for any healthy society or institution. Grappling with the past empowers us to contextualize our lives, make positive change, and avoid repeating the mistakes of old. There is a fine line, however, between thinking critically about the past and embracing revisionist political fads, the latter of which can mean overcorrecting for past mistakes or causing more harm than good.
A recent article in The Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s student-run newspaper, laments the slow pace of UNC’s building-renaming process. Some UNC students are outraged at the university’s failure to implement the proposals of its George Floyd-era Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward, created in 2020 by then-chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz. The only governing body in Chapel Hill with the authority to approve new building names is the Board of Trustees, and that group has yet to implement many of the changes suggested by building-renaming advocates.
There is a fine line between thinking critically about the past and embracing revisionist political fads.The Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward, composed in large part of professors from the anthropology, social work, and diaspora studies departments, recommended in 2021 that the names of 10 campus buildings be changed. The commission focused on buildings “that are named after men who owned slaves, served in the Confederacy and/or used their positions of power to promote racial inequality.”
The commission compiled biographies of the namesakes of “Avery, Graham, Grimes, Morrison and Ruffin residence halls as well as Battle, Pettigrew, Vance, Bingham and Hamilton halls.” Many of the biographies illustrated irredeemable character flaws of the described men, while others indicated less direct connections to racism and slavery.
In addition to its work on building renaming, the commission has engaged with other campus controversies, including the denial of tenure to “1619 Project” author Nikole Hannah-Jones. During that episode, the commission condemned the UNC Board of Trustees for “enlist[ing] the university in the project of historical denialism that refuses to confront the centrality of race and racism in our national past and in the life of our nation.” Never mind that Hannah-Jones’s scholarly crime was actual historical denialism, from the left.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with renaming a building, per se. Reasonable and principled consideration by involved constituencies may justify a decision to remove names from buildings or institutions. Values can change, and time and investigation can bring new issues to light. However, those involved in such decisions must carefully consider the deeper social and political currents fueling popular desires for change.
There is reason to be hesitant about running head-long into renaming endeavors. The study of history teaches us that efforts to remove names from institutions or dispose of historical figures and ideas that have fallen out of favor often cloak destructive political movements.
Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, for example, entailed the mobilization of youth—including, notably, China’s students—into Red Guards to attack the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits of mind. The Red Guards happily ransacked Chinese culture and abused and killed many of the nation’s intellectuals.
There is reason to be hesitant about running head-long into renaming endeavors.Mao’s act of generalizing the past as simply bad and granting then-current values the presumption of goodness was a mental-gymnastics exercise familiar to anyone who monitors the output of our increasingly corrupted liberal-arts departments. The doctrine of many of them (as of the “1619 Project”) is that America’s true founding occurred when slaves were first brought to the New World and that, as a result, the United States is permanently corrupted. Only by scrubbing it of its past and replacing its values with a new—and inherently superficial—intersectional focus can we make the nation truly fair.
This type of thinking and the behavior it elicits are clearly present on our college campuses. They manifest in a plethora of social-justice actions and rhetoric. Video, from 2018, of a mob of students tearing down Silent Sam, a confederate statue on UNC’s campus, is a clear illustration of the campus unrest that can result from activist fervor. The encampments that followed Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas attacks, at which students suggested that their universities are “complicit in genocide,” demonstrate how campus activists can be spurred to radical action by specious claims.
This same simplistic reasoning is, evidently, shared by proponents of building renaming at UNC. The Daily Tar Heel’s article presents the perspective of UNC professor Claude Clegg, who states that buildings should be named for those who “reflect the intellectual, ethical, and professional values that the University presently embraces” (emphasis added). This standard leaves the university untethered from any transcendent principles or values. If the standard for celebrating ideas and figures consists merely in their alignment with the values presently embraced by faculty and students—i.e., DEI and social justice—then the current effort to rename buildings really is an exercise in straightforward activist revisionism.
The fact of the matter is that those who have dedicated their careers to identifying and dismantling what academics refer to as “systems of oppression” have a powerful incentive to continue finding and exposing more invisible oppressive forces, whether real or fantastical. This is why, despite decades of laudable progress in advancing racial harmony and equality in the United States, such experts and professors have not celebrated our progress but have rather pivoted to fixating on “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and disparate-impact theory.
In much the same way, blindly catering to groups demanding the scrubbing of names associated with racist elements of American history will inevitably fail to satiate the desires of those deeply entrenched in the culture wars. Today, such people may advocate for the removal of those with horrible histories but relatively small cultural significance; however, if the bar for erasure is set such that any connection to racism in early America supersedes one’s positive impact on society, then Washington, Jefferson, and Madison are next on the chopping block.
UNC’s Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward is a bureaucratic entity caught up in perpetual self-justification.UNC’s Commission on History, Race, and a Way Forward is a clear example of a bureaucratic entity caught up in perpetual self-justification. Given that UNC is already a very inclusive, diverse, and progressive institution, charting a “way forward” requires the invention of new problems. Those who sit on such commissions are highly specialized in the field of grievance, and granting them the power to fix the “current thing” will not correct any actual ills.
There are some other noteworthy, though less historically minded, reasons not to rename campus buildings. Alumni, students, and professors associate their campus experiences with Carolina’s famous buildings. Football games in Kenan Memorial Stadium, lectures in Hamilton Hall’s massive auditorium, and the sophomore-year madness of Morrison Hall all connect thousands of Tar Heels to their alma mater. All three have been targets of renaming campaigns. The community loses meaningful tethers to the university when those places are renamed by campus bureaucrats—and it may also lose donations.
It is important to note that UNC isn’t owned solely by current students, professors, or administrators. Such groups should not, nor can they in cases like this one, subject the university to the rule of activist bureaucrats. The Board of Trustees is accountable to the state legislature and, by proxy, to the citizens of North Carolina. It is for that reason that the approval of trustees is a required step for building name changes, and rightly so. The input of the people of North Carolina, who fund the university, as well as alumni, students, and faculty, is essential for making such decisions.
The UNC Board of Trustees should, of course, consider thoughtful feedback on the history of those for whom campus buildings are named. At the same time, feedback should be weighed against consideration of the underlying motivations of name changers, the impacts of name changes on the campus community, and the fueling of destructive bureaucratic entities inherent in the granting of such requests. Sorry, Daily Tar Heel—a slow process is the healthiest course of action for Carolina.
Harrington Shaw is the managing director of the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a former intern at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and an economics and philosophy graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.