Sure, if people look under the surface. However it is still sugarcoating history, hiding the bad people, and making it seem like the good people were always appreciated.
Maybe it is a fair sacrifice for the sake of redeeming the past.
It certainly is an interesting new kind of cultural war.
You are reading something into this that is not there.
Choosing who from the past that we want to honor is pretty natural. (It's not "redeeming" the past to choose carefully who to honor this way.) Changing an honorary name on a building is different than changing a paragraph on a history book.
As a point of comparison, plenty of street names are changed to honor various historical figures, municipal functionaries, now-famous past residents, etc.
>You are reading something into this that is not there.
Whatever your thoughts on this particular decision, there absolutely is a "there" there.
No one actually cares what some sign on a building on a leafy campus says. They care a lot about which way the wind is blowing at an institution that turns out the elites of tomorrow.
The question is (in as equally-offensive terms as I can muster): will we, as a society (or our elites, from whom we'll take our cues),
- finally turn from a problematic figure of the past to one that better exemplifies our values of today,
or
- retain remembrance of what got us where we are, keeping in mind the importance of chronological charity?
If this is really not an important event, why is it posted on HN?
No one actually cares what some sign on a building on a leafy campus says
They do when the name is John frickin' Calhoun, increasingly.
Like Nickelback, we all thought he was cool at the time, but you look back and see that if he wasn't That Guy, somebody else would have, and at any rate the ideas he's known for are played out.
I couldn't find any examples where renaming of a road, with a person's name, hadn't been considered a big deal. Wikipedia had a big section on street renaming, but it seemed to happen exclusively after revolutions or similar situations.
