After repeated delays, a committee assembled by the University in early 2016 to establish principles for renaming campus buildings and landmarks expects to release its conclusions by the end of fall quarter.
However, in what the committee chair describes as an effort to move an unexpectedly challenging process along, the group’s mandate has changed. At the request of University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the faculty, student and staff members of the eight-person committee are no longer aiming to form a recommendation on the issue that jump-started the renaming debate: the street and three campus buildings named after Junipero Serra, a Catholic saint who ran several California missions that have come under scrutiny for their treatment of Native Americans.
Instead, as of spring quarter, the committee is formulating general principles to guide any future renaming deliberations, said the committee’s chair, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus David Kennedy ’63.
Committee members are “still trying to come to a consensus,” he said. If the committee’s deliberations indeed wrap up this quarter, its conclusions will come almost a year later than planned.
“The task has been more complicated than I think any of us anticipated going in,” Kennedy admitted. “I think honestly [Tessier-Lavigne] was trying to simplify things for us since we were having so much difficulty.”
Full story at Stanford Daily.
The liberal and atheist establishment promoting hate and lies to denounce the Roman Catholic Church’s involvement in California’s historical development are behind this. They hate God and are out to obliterate His Holy Name and those of His Saints.
Leland Stanford, the founder of the university, as governor of the state, often lectured on the inferiority of nonwhite populations, while Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan (co-founder of the racist “Human Betterment Foundation”), was an unapologetic eugenicist who feared the effects of miscegenation, as Victor Davis Hanson, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford has pointed out. Why not rename the entire university?
Not to mention the falsehoods about Padre Serra that abound.
The university is named for Stanford’s son, Leland junior, who died too young to have any political reputation I’m aware of.
I stand corrected. Thank you. I did know that! So, maybe tearing down the statue and renaming the mascot to “robber barons,” as students suggested when it was changed from Indians to Cardinal might be sufficient penance? Although a beneficiary of white privilege, young Leland was not the racist his father was. I think my point about a double-standard, however, remains valid.