Student Newspaper at McGill U. ‘Changes Name Due to Namesake’s Colonialism’
“personal accounts from McGill’s colleagues suggest that he was excessively greedy”
The newspaper also wants the school to change its name due to a slavery connection. Of course, no one is calling for Yale to change its name.
The College Fix reports:
McGill U. student newspaper changes name due to school namesake’s colonialism, racism
The McGill University student paper has excised the school founder’s name from its moniker due to his “violence, colonialism and racism.”
And the editorial board of The McGill Tribune — now just The Tribune — wants the university itself to follow suit.
Although the school “frames its founder as a philanthropist,” it skirts around the fact that James McGill’s fortune was “amassed through the exploitation of enslaved people in Canada, the Caribbean, and the slave trade more broadly,” the editors say.
Tribune Editor-in-Chief Madison McLauchlan (pictured) told the Toronto Sun that ditching “McGill” was “long overdue” and since the paper “continued to editorialize against racism, against colonialism, we felt that we couldn’t in good faith continue to publish about injustices with ‘McGill’ on our paper.”
The Sun reports the university website does note that McGill’s wealth was accrued in part due to “engagement in the colonial economic system and the transatlantic slave trade,” and it “acknowledges the deep, long-lasting adverse impacts that these practices have exerted on Black and Indigenous communities.”
According to the 2020 report “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations,” McGill owned the “extraordinary” quantity of five slaves in the late 1700s-early 1800s and supplied the British army with rum and tobacco derived from the labor “and presumed expendability of thousands of enslaved people” in the Caribbean (emphasis added).
Despite the report conceding that “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, any Canadian would have viewed slavery as commonplace,” it contends the number of McGill’s slaves was well out of the ordinary for Canada at the time.
It adds McGill “may have been a particularly harsh master” (emphasis added) given that two of his (indigenous) slaves died at a very young age.
In addition, “personal accounts from McGill’s colleagues suggest that he was excessively greedy,” which stands in contrast to the image the university conveys.
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Comments
By the same logic Planned Parenthood should be shutdown due to its founders history and philosophy.
But we know that won’t happen.
Canada, being the US’s annoying little brother, has uncritically imported the US’ peculiar racial neuroses.
Canada has fewer black people than Indians of either dot or feather variety, and the overwhelming majority of them only arrived in Canada since the 1990s (when immigration from Jamaica and Somalia was expanded to orders of magnitude higher than previously).
Canada certainly has a checkered history with its native population, but they make up less than 4% of the population and were prolific slaveholders themselves until the British Empire put a stop to that.
So, what made these students choose McGill U. in the first place? Ignorance?
“…… acknowledges the deep, long-lasting adverse impacts that these practices have exerted on Black and Indigenous communities.”
Of course! There is money to be made in exploiting AND victimhood.
“we felt that we couldn’t in good faith continue to publish about injustices with ‘McGill’ on our paper.”
Become the “Floyd tribune.”
After all, both racial pandering and fentanyl abuse are currently trendy.
Plus, it will give your descendants adequate rationale to hold you in the contempt you deserve.
What a racket. We send kids to college to get a well-rounded education and be successful and happy. But ‘college’ just turns them into screeching crybabies who are miserable and incapable of logic or rational thought. Then when they fail we get stuck with the default on their massive student loans and they call us racist for it.
What a racket. Turning whiny, self-centered useless adolescents into whiny, self-centered useless adults.
I bet there is a significant group of alumni who worked hard to produce the “McGill Tribune” when they were undergraduates. They are proud of their work and many are willing to make present and future donations to support the paper. Did anyone consider what impact changing the name of the paper would have upon this donor base and its willingness to contribute going forward?
There are no critical thinking skills present on the current staff.