Yale Dismisses Demands to Change its Name Following #CancelYale Campaign
“University President Peter Salovey told the News on June 25 that the University is not considering changing its name.”
#CancelYale has been trending on Twitter for a couple of weeks. It was mainly pushed by conservatives, but the sentiment behind it is real, given Elihu Yale’s involvement in the slave trade. Yale isn’t interested.
From the Yale Daily News:
“Cancel Yale”? Not likely.
Amid nationwide calls to remove symbols with ties to racist parts of America’s history, demands to “#CancelYale” have surged across social media over the past week.
Originating on a June 10 post on the bulletin board website 4chan, the call to rename Yale initially began as a way to damage a largely liberal institution by “cheapen[ing]” Yale’s brand. Far-right media pundit Ann Coulter then seized the idea, writing in a June 17 op-ed that “Yale has to go!” and naming Yale’s namesake Elihu Yale as a slave owner and slave trader. Since then, people from across the political spectrum have also grabbed hold of the idea of renaming Yale — some because of Elihu Yale’s ties to slavery, but others as a way to mock political foes.
University President Peter Salovey told the News on June 25 that the University is not considering changing its name. Head of Davenport College John Witt ’94 LAW ’99 GRD ’00 — who led the committee that recommended removing John Calhoun’s name from a residential college in 2016 — also defended the University’s namesake. Unlike the senator who advocated for slavery as “a positive good,” Elihu Yale was “relatively unexceptional in his own time” with respect to slave trade, Witt argued.
Still, debates about Elihu Yale’s past have erupted across the internet in recent days, raising questions about the reach of the ongoing movement to change names and remove symbols that honor individuals with racist legacies.
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Comments
Not surprising: Yale would rather be screaming hypocritical than lose a brand that’s literally worth billions of $. Hey, who’d want a sheepskin that merely says “University of Central New Haven”?
Let them all eat themselves.
Wait until a couple companies that don’t actually hire from Yale announce they won’t hire from Yale until it changes its name.
Then the pressure will build on a few more companies.
Then some parents who would never send their kids to Yake will get interviewed saying they won’t send their kids to Yale because it’s racist and their job prospects would be hurt.
Then that brand won’t be worth quite as much.
See how long they can hold out then.
Princeton is next…a prince is someone with subjects, sounds like racist connotations to me and all it takes is the feels from the wrong faction.
“relatively unexceptional”?
That’s it? That’s the response?
oh gee, the liberal terrorists, and terrorist supporters, don’t want Yale to change its name even though it was named after a slave owner! (shows none of them care about the slave trade because they want the name Yale on their resume for the big bucks – only your history they want erased). And if they really did care about the slave trade they would be all over islam and it being in the slave trade – then AND NOW!!! They pretend to worry about something that was ended 1 1/2 centuries ago!!! BUT NOT THE SLAVE TRADE THAT IS STILL GOING ON TODAY!!! (some were even caught in the USA – some sit in prisons, some were deported in the Obama administration so they could continue their slavery ways in their home countries.)