STAYING PUT

Yale to Keep White Supremacist’s Name

Says school needs to confront racist past, not erase it.

Yale University refused to remove the name of John C. Calhoun, a 19th century politician and prominent white supremacist, from a residential college despite student protest. “Removing Calhoun’s name obscures the legacy of slavery rather than addressing it,” university president Peter Salovey said in a statement Wednesday. Nearly 1,500 current and former students had asked the university to scrub the name as it displayed “disrespect for black perspectives.” The university also revealed the name of two new residential colleges in its undergraduate housing system. The new colleges are named for Anna Pauline Murray, a Yale Law School graduate and civil rights activist, as well as founding father Benjamin Franklin, a slave owner who was given an honorary Yale degree in 1753. Salovey added faculty leaders of the university’s residential colleges will lose their title of master and instead will be called heads of college.