Should Yale University change its name?

Just wait, people will be burning books they don’t like any day now.

No
I defy anyone to bring forth an example of anyone in secular human history that did not have “feet of clay”.

Our heroes were in their time

President Kennedy had affairs outside of marriage. This was a Kennedy/East Coast tradition.

But he defied his Dem party tradition of Klan, segregation and black hatred and pushed the Civil Rights Act.

Nobody is perfect. The test is their net positive effect on the evolution of humanity.
Yale has produced many great people. That’s good.

I’m surprised they haven’t banned some of the presidents that were slave owners off of currency.

@ARE_you_kidding_me I’m thinking of burning every book I own written by a white man. :D

/joke

No

That’s up to the administrators, staff and students of Yale to decide.

“One day they are tearing down state-sanctioned statues designed to celebrate owning people, the next day they are burning books.”

- quote by either some great thinker, or a textbook example of intentionally losing the plot and trying to scare people into being white nationalists.

My thoughts are basically Josie’s last sentence. Yale’s namesake is not what Yale represents now at all. You have to separate origin from the new meaning is has taken on over the years. It’s literally just a name, not what Yale represents as a school.

@ARE_you_kidding_me, just a couple of nights ago I remarked to my husband that book burning is going to be a little harder when there’s no paper involved. I still have about two thousand bound-paper books in my house, but I also have hundreds on my Kindle.

Sure, Amazon and other providers can suspend or eliminate access to electronic copies that they control. But if I’ve saved the work on a device that’s offline, or if it exists and is distributed without using the Internet, what then? Seems to me it’s beyond control.

I found this a cheering thought.

Besides, pressing a delete key on an app or running a deaccess program doesn’t have anything like the spectacle and symbolism of an actual conflagration.

I have to agree with @josie that we are not going to find heroes of purely unblemished character, other than in fiction. That’s a risk we take when we make heroes of fellow humans, and it’s also why we need our myths. How would it make things better if we were to tear down everything that’s imperfect? Our Constitutional pledge “to form a more perfect Union” means to build on what’s good and not to demolish everything that somebody happens to disagree with.

This is not an argument in favor of injustice but a call to distinguish the harmful from the merely and humanly flawed. The imperfect can invoke the perfect and shape our aspirations even when we can see that the model falls short of the ideal.