I read yesterday that Moses Hall became the fifth building at UC Berkeley to lose its name( because of the allegedly racist views of its namesake, Bernard Moses, a prominent faculty member from 1875 to 1911.
All of the buildings have been unnamed since 2020.
“Disappearing” people is straight out of the Joseph Stalin playbook and I’ve never learned to see Stalin as a role model.
According to the Berkeley news article that I read, Niko Kolodny, former chair of the philosophy department, said he became aware via email that Moses’ name “had been deeply disturbing to several people of color.”
The University of California established a Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture in 1937, and Moses Hall was named in 1965. The fact that it took more than 80 years since Moses was first recognized for the university to familiarize itself with his views (via an email!) and deem them inappropriate suggests that virtually no one has been reading his writings for the past 80 years, thus the number of people (“several”) who might have been deeply disturbed would have to be quite small.
What I find deeply disturbing is that anyone with — or without, but especially with — the benefit of a so-called liberal education would be deeply disturbed to find that people living 100 years ago held views that would not be considered progressive by 2023 standards.
In fact, academics writing in any discipline 100 years ago or more would have espoused views and theories that are now considered obsolete. Why would that surprise or disturb anyone? I don’t think Berkeley should be proud of graduating students who become deeply disturbed by something so obvious.
The Moses unnaming proposal states that while Moses’ perspective might have been common among white academics at the time he expressed it, “it is at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community.”
So Moses was not an outlier. His perspective was common at the time he expressed it. The article doesn’t even say that his work has since been shown to be empirically false, only that “it is at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community.”
Can something be true and at the same time “at odds with the present values of the UC Berkeley community”? If so, which takes precedence?
And finally, given that Berkeley seems to be on a run of unnaming buildings, and that the campus sits on unceded (i.e., stolen) Indian land, I’d like to pose the following to every grinning nitwit involved in the unnaming, up to and including the Chancellor: “Do you feel morally justified in using and benefitting from the occupation of stolen Indian land, while making holier-than-thou pronouncements about people who’ve been dead for 100 years? Shouldn’t the entire campus be bulldozed and the land returned to its rightful owners?”
