The Foro Italico is a large sports complex in Rome that was built between 1928 and 1938 at the behest of Benito Mussolini. Originally, it was called the Foro Mussolini, and, at its entrance, a towering obelisk bears the inscription “MUSSOLINI DUX.” Nearby, a stone timeline commemorates great moments in Fascist history. Statues of nude, muscled male athletes line the track; the central piazza features a vast mosaic celebrating various Fascist triumphs, including Italy’s 1936 invasion of Ethiopia. (It depicts, among other scenes, an Ethiopian man performing the Fascist salute.) After the Second World War, Italians attended sporting events in the Foro and tried to overlook its Fascist elements. But then, in 1955, Rome won the competition to host the 1960 Olympics. The Foro became an urgent political problem. What was to be done with the inscriptions, statues, and mosaics, some of which had fallen into disrepair, and all of which were soon to appear on the world stage?
The Italian Olympic Committee, which was already building a new soccer stadium at the Foro, decided to restore Mussolini’s decorations. They added the fall of his regime and the creation of the Italian Republic to the Fascist timeline; they attached fig leaves to the nude statues; and—most controversially—they rehired the original artisans to touch up the Fascist mosaics. In an essay called “Fascism as ‘Heritage’ in Contemporary Italy,” the historian Joshua Arthurs describes the controversy that ensued. The left wing protested; the Communist magazine Vie Nuove argued that it was humiliating and offensive for the Olympics to unfold amidst Fascist slogans like “Many enemies, much honor.” Vie Nuove launched a campaign to catalogue Fascist monuments, which it called “L’Italia da Cancellare” (“The Italy to Erase”). In the end, though, nothing was erased from the Foro; moreover, in the decades following the Olympics, Italian neo-Fascists argued, successfully, that the Foro should be preserved as a historical monument to a moment of Italian “modernization.” They were aided by architectural historians, who argued that the grounds, buildings, and statues were, while morally unsettling, beautifully designed. Essentially, the Italian response to the Foro has been to shrug and move on with life. The Italian Ministry of Culture has designated the site protected, “notwithstanding its ideological orientation”; today, it hosts tennis tournaments and other live events.
Scholars have many terms for the kind of challenge presented by places like the Foro Italico. Such places can’t be razed or forgotten, because they are too significant, massive, useful, or valuable. At the same time, they remind us of a history we’d rather forget. Often, they are monumental places, designed to instill, in future generations, a sense of heritage—heritage that is now unwanted. In the nineteen-nineties, the sociologists John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth described these places as embodying “dissonant heritage.” Their term plays on the fact that “heritage” is supposed to be better and purer than “history,” which is always less pleasant than we wish it were. Heritage is the part of history that we want to identify with. Places like the Foro Italico offer dissonant heritage—heritage with too much bad history mixed in.
Heritage is not an inevitable product of the passage of time. It’s a story that has to be told, a worldview that has to be constructed. Mussolini built the Foro Italico for precisely that purpose—to construct, for his regime, a heritage. Sometimes, as in the case of the Foro, would-be heritage becomes dissonant because it collapses under the weight of real history. In other places, it’s the reverse: undesirable history threatens to become elevated into dissonant heritage. Arthurs cites a fascinating article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, by the anthropologist Sharon Macdonald, about Germans living in Nuremberg after the Second World War. During the war, Hitler constructed an enormous complex near Nuremberg; it included a vast “Congress Hall” and a series of rallying grounds, famous the world over as the site of Hitler’s terrifying mass speeches. The Germans reasoned that destroying the rallying grounds would be a pointless and dangerous denial of the past; at the same time, they worried that the grounds, with their huge, shoddily-constructed buildings, might crumble into a picturesque ruin and achieve, by that means, the grandeur of heritage. Likewise, the construction of a museum might turn the area into what we would now call a heritage site.
In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create. When, in the late nineteen-nineties, the Nuremberg City Council decided to build a visitor’s center, they did so in a trivializing or profane way: they used a deliberately disruptive design (it looks like an arrow piercing the side of the Nazi Congress Hall), and called it a “documentation center” rather than a museum, to avoid elevating the status of the building in which it resides.
There are, in short, a range of ways in which we can respond to dissonant heritage. We can try to erase it, by launching cancellare campaigns, or decide to preserve it, hoping, perhaps, that its dissonance will diminish with time. We can also invent creative, even inspired strategies for recontextualizing the past—although doing so requires uncommon patience, thoughtfulness, and unanimity.
In recent months, students around the country have been protesting racism on their campuses. Some of the protests—at Georgetown, Dartmouth, and other schools—have focussed, in part, on the names of campus buildings and institutions. Recently, at Yale, activists have asked for a rebranding of Calhoun College, which is named after John C. Calhoun, a notorious proponent of slavery; at Princeton, citing Woodrow Wilson’s well-established racism, they have argued that his name should be removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. (They have also asked that the name of a dormitory, Wilson College, be changed.) The activists have other ideas—they’ve asked for additions to the curriculum, increases in faculty diversity, and new resources for students of color, among other things—and they say they are responding to a general climate of subtle and overt discrimination. But their arguments about names aren’t a distraction from those other issues. They address a central function of the Ivy League: the communication of a certain idea of American heritage, to which the campuses of Yale and Princeton, with their Gothic spires and soaring archways, are monuments.
The case of Calhoun College is the easier of the two to parse. Calhoun, who graduated from Yale, in 1804, didn’t help build the college (or anything else at Yale); the university named the building after him on its own, in 1933, because Calhoun—who had died eight decades earlier—was considered an eminent alumnus. Shortly before naming the college after Calhoun, Yale erected an eight-foot-tall statue of him atop Harkness Tower, along with statues of seven other Yale “worthies.” Only much later did the university at large begin to reflect on the fact that Calhoun was a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Law who had argued, before Congress, that slavery was a “positive good.” (Seen in its “true light,” Calhoun said, slavery was “the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”) Until 1992, a stained-glass window in the college depicted a slave, in shackles, kneeling before Calhoun. Unsurprisingly, the idea of renaming the college has been raised several times; it’s easy to imagine that, this time, Yale will make the change.
It’s harder, though not impossible, to imagine that Princeton will change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School. Wilson’s racism is no secret: A. Scott Berg, in his biography of Wilson, writes that his “thoughts, words, and actions” were “indubitably racist.” Still, Wilson’s bigotry has gone under the radar, and is shocking once you know about it. As President, Wilson resegregated parts of the federal government; he screened “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House (the film quotes him praising the “great Ku Klux Klan”); and he believed that interracial marriage would “degrade the white nations.” The “problem” with this account, as it were, is that Wilson’s political life was hardly defined by racism. He was a progressive politician who—to choose just one example—passed laws against child labor, and he decisively furthered the causes of human rights and internationalism by helping to found the League of Nations, after the First World War. He made the world worse in some ways and better in others.
Another complexity is that, unlike Calhoun, Wilson is deeply connected to the history of his university. He was a professor at Princeton and then, from 1902 to 1910, he was its president; in a Facebook post about the name change, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, writes that Wilson “perhaps did more than anyone else to transform the school from a preppie gentlemen’s preserve into a great research university.” (She is open to the idea of changing the name.) John M. Cooper, another biographer of Wilson’s, told me that Wilson’s relationship to Princeton was roughly equivalent to the one Thomas Jefferson has with the University of Virginia: Princeton, as it exists today, is inconceivable without him. Cooper argues that Wilson’s racism needs to be understood in context: although Wilson was born in the South, he spent his whole working life in the North and was, Cooper said, a “typical white Northerner” of his time: “He basically wanted race to go away.” Often, Cooper said, Wilson “was bowing to the wishes of his Southern colleagues.”
For many people, the ambiguity of Wilson’s legacy is an argument for not changing the name of the Woodrow Wilson School. This argument holds that there’s a slippery slope—that what’s true about Wilson is equally true about many of the other men for whom campus buildings are named. The problem with the slippery-slope argument, however, is the slope. Even if you don’t want to slide down it, you still have to deal with the fact that it exists. To the extent that Wilson’s racism was typical, America was racist. Ultimately, his views are emblematic of the way that, for hundreds of years, Americans could have it both ways, regarding themselves as egalitarian even though they were also white supremacists. This way of thinking has shaped universities, too, from admissions policies to curriculum design. (The connections between racism and American colleges are thoroughly explored in “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.”)
Arguing about the slippery slope is, of course, itself a way of acknowledging it. Earlier this year, speaking to the Yale Daily News, Jonathan Holloway, a historian who is also the first African-American dean of Yale College, said, “I’m no fan of Calhoun, the individual, or his ideas, but I’m not a big fan of the other people for whom our colleges are named who owned slaves or who profited from the slave trade. My point is that, if we are to change the name of Calhoun, we had better be prepared to change many, many names on campus, perhaps even the name of the University itself.” At a panel discussion on the issue, Holloway—who spoke with Jelani Cobb, for this Web site, earlier this month—argued that the Calhoun name was useful as a tool “to hold Yale accountable for the decisions it made.”
In suggesting that “the name of the University itself” was up for grabs, Holloway was referring to the fact that Eli Yale, the university’s founder, was an official of the East India Company and a slave trader. Over the weekend, I spoke with Wilglory Tanjong, a sophomore who is a member of Princeton’s Black Justice League, which has spearheaded the effort to change the Woodrow Wilson School’s name. (Gabriel Fisher spoke with other members of the group, earlier this week.) I asked Tanjong what she thought about changing the name of Yale University. “There are so many things tied up in the Yale name which would make it nearly impossible to change, but that doesn’t mean it’s excluded from this conversation. If people want to vote to change the name ‘Yale,’ to push for it, I completely support that,” she said. “It’s not really about changing names. What’s important is that we have these conversations about these people, about this history.” After the students staged a sit-in, Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, committed to starting a university-wide conversation about changing the name of the Woodrow Wilson School.
The notion that Calhoun College could remain Calhoun College, and that its name could become, in some sense, an ironic form of critique, suggests just how different universities are from other places. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Emanuel A.M.E. Church is located on Calhoun Street, and, in the wake of the shootings there, efforts have been made to change the street’s name; no one has said that it would be better to keep it in the hope that it might lead to fruitful conversation. (In fact, because Calhoun’s name is protected by South Carolina’s Heritage Act, changing the name of the street is more or less impossible.) Earlier this year, the third-largest political party in South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters, proposed changing the names of forty towns with European names (Prince Albert, Wellington); they also hope to change the name of the whole country (they prefer Azania). While the E.F.F. reaps political benefits from the debate, their goal is not to start a conversation, but to shrug off the legacy of colonialism. On ordinary municipal grids, the names of streets can’t critique heritage—they can only commemorate it.
College campuses, however, are not ordinary places. They are, in the first place, explicitly intellectual; the whole point of college is to spur conversation. And, from an architectural perspective, colleges are unusual, too. Many campuses aren’t authentic places. Instead, an air of artificiality suffuses them; they are deeply shaped environments, designed to communicate some sort of cultural idea. In a recent essay called “On Pandering,” the novelist Claire Vaye Watkins describes the small Pennsylvania liberal-arts college where she taught for a time. With its gas-lit pathways, red-brick buildings, and trapped-in-amber college town, it is, she writes, “a country-mouse theme park for young people,” designed to give them and their parents a comfortable “sense of being away on a journey.”
The vast Gothic campuses of Princeton and Yale communicate a different idea. Their towers and arches embody a sense of timelessness and power that is profoundly linked to the history of white Europe. At Princeton, the dorms have coats of arms; at Yale, the buildings have been artificially distressed to give them an ancient look. (Windowpanes have been deliberately broken and soldered together; roof tiles have been buried and dug up, to make them look old.) These campuses are more like heritage sites—and the heritage they communicate flows directly from Oxford and Cambridge to New Jersey and Connecticut, skipping over or even whitewashing the troubled history of America. Now, in a moment when many Americans are reëxamining their country’s history, the falseness—the dissonance—of that heritage is becoming harder to ignore.
Almost certainly, the students’ demands for curricular changes, cultural centers, and so on will be met—those are the sorts of things that universities are inclined to do anyway. But it’s harder to say what will happen to Calhoun College and the Woodrow Wilson School. Maybe the school will lose its name. It may end up with the name it had when it was founded, in 1930—the School of Public and International Affairs. (Wilson’s name was added later, in 1948.) Or maybe it will keep Wilson’s name, and a plaque will be installed near the fountain in front of the building—a disclaimer, in effect, saying that Princeton honors Woodrow Wilson, “notwithstanding” his racism. As a Princeton undergraduate, I spent a little time around the Woodrow Wilson School, and I can imagine a small monument bringing some solemnity to that beautiful spot.
My hope, however, is that Princeton does something bigger and more creative. It can, after all, marshall a small army of architects, poets, historians, and artists. Princeton can make whatever it wants out of the space around the Woodrow Wilson School fountain (or out of any other on-campus space). It can plant a garden or build a museum (or a “documentation center”); if it wants, it can cover the plaza with a giant mosaic. It has more options than towns and cities do; it can come up with a way of critiquing, rather than concealing or enduring, its own past. For two hundred years, these universities have used their campuses to create an unreal vision of American history. They should start thinking about what an honest vision might look like.
