When the virtue signaling is cheap they're all over it. Giving up a recognized valuable brand like Yale? Way too expensive.

I don't see the problem here. Even public displays of principle have a cost/benefit ratio. Meanwhile, what do you think it would imply, if they didn't even do the cheap stuff?

That's called hypocrisy in my town.

It's called picking your battles in mine. Any proposal to rename the university itself is likely to run into more opposition than a proposal to rename a building.

Sorry, we will have only binary & atom-thick appraisals of historic figures in the US today. John Calhoun == Bad; Grace Hopper == Good. And that's all you need to know.

The ones doing the renaming have no independent convictions of their own. Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.

What they do have instead is a hyperactive self-righteousness gland, which is easily tickled to orgasm by the thought of them being on the right side, the side of the angels, in any conflict. It is what passes for their conscience. This explains the drive to cast all historic conflicts in the most reductive & simplistic way possible. So much the easier to spooge over how progressive they are for hating on the wrong side

John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete. Yet, he can be dismissed with infantile invective ("human sewer"), as though he, like all antebellum Southerners was a monodimensional cartoon villain, like Decepticons who had an abiding interest in...cotton.

I am cheered by the fact that more and more normal citizens are seeing this performative outrage pantomime for the chauvinism-of-viewpoint that it is.

> John C. Calhoun is a person without mention of whom any history of early 19th century America would be incomplete.

No one's stripping him out of the history books. Why does he deserve the honor of having a college named for him?

> Or for that matter, much insight into or sympathy for, the differing views of others, let alone others from different times or places.

I guess I can't pass up the irony of this statement. I grew up in the South. I'm old enough to remember a time when Confederates were seen as noble. Old enough to have people tell me quite sincerely that "those people had it good as slaves."

Attitudes have changed since then and in part because enough white people attempted to learn about and gained sympathy for a group of people very different than themselves: the enslaved black Americans of the 19th Century. Without the understanding and empathy which crossed cultural and racial boundaries, there would never have come a time when Calhoun's name was considered a negative by the majority.

You're complaining about binary, infantile invective whilst employing it yourself most blatantly. The stench of inadvertent irony is near overwhelming.

The "Pol Pot Memorial Library" does have a nice ring to it.

Then change that name too! It's not like there is some divine mandate that decrees colleges to never change their names.