Be Careful What Committees You Wish For

Royce

From the Bruin: UCLA announced its final plan for the honorary naming, renaming and unnaming process of campus spaces in June. The Campus Honorary Naming Advisory Committee was officially launched in September 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd alongside other major systematic injustices, said Mary Osako, chair of the committee and vice chancellor of strategic communications, in an emailed statement. She added that Chancellor Gene Block wanted the campus to honor the diversity of the community and its values through more representative naming.

Osako added that a building or space will be unnamed if it no longer adequately represents UCLA’s values based on the honoree’s actions. The committee only outlined a report on the process and criteria for unnaming honorifically named spaces – those not named in association with a philanthropic gift – Osako said. “The committee counsels caution in unnamings, and suggests establishing a relatively high bar for such actions,” Osako said in her emailed statement. “Reasons for this include the benefits of stability of the campus environment and honoring past naming processes, even if a person or group honored is not one that the campus would select for honoring at a later time.” ...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2022/08/11/ucla-committee-finalizes-plan-to-address-honorifically-named-campus-spaces.

Note that this process might get, well, difficult. Let's take Royce Hall - the ultimate symbol of UCLA - named after Josiah Royce. Royce taught at Berkeley for four years before going off to Harvard in 1882. He wrote an early history of California. But he also wrote on other topics:

...In 1908 Royce published a collection of essays entitled Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems. The key essay, “Race Questions and Prejudices,” had appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in 1906. This established Royce as one of the most prominent white philosophers of his time to address racial prejudice, drawing upon the leading ethnological research of his day. Royce’s philosophy enters debates about race in another important way, as well. Martin Luther King, Jr. adapted Royce’s concept of the Beloved Community—which King had likely learned through his mentor, Howard W. Thurman—as an important rhetorical and visionary ideal for the U. S. civil rights movement (Jensen and King 2017).

This history suggested Royce’s philosophy as a promising source for contemporary dialogues about race and community. Scholars including Jacquelyn Kegley and Shannon Sullivan have proposed models of egalitarian, anti-racist Roycean “genuine communities” (See Kegley 1997, and Sullivan’s introduction to Royce 1908 [2009].) Tommy J. Curry has argued, however, that Royce’s philosophy is tainted by racist ideas: it does not have a progressive vision of social justice or of resisting anti-Black racism (Curry 2018). The debate over racist elements in Royce’s philosophy has been extensive. Beyond its implications for our appraisal and use of Royce’s work, the controversy illustrates the challenges contemporary scholars face when confronting ugly facts about the historical figures they study...

Full story at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/royce/.