“Universities have to be the places where tough conversations happen,” he said. “I don’t think that is advanced by hiding our past.”

Similar heated discussions about historic ties between universities and their racist pasts have inflamed campuses across the country. Princeton’s board of trustees decided this month that the name Woodrow Wilson would remain on its buildings and school, despite vociferous student objections. Mr. Wilson was an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan and reinstated segregation in the federal government.

Yale has long grappled with the legacy of Mr. Calhoun, who advocated slavery as “a positive good,” but the issue found footing last fall after an online petition demanding that the college’s name be changed garnered around 1,500 supporting signatures.

The dispute over Calhoun College, founded in 1933, that ensued soon revealed deeper discontent among students and professors over more substantive issues regarding race, in particular what many saw as the university’s lack of commitment to faculty diversity and the alienation experienced by many minority students.

A group of student activists — operating under the name Next Yale — handed Mr. Salovey a list of demands last year that included increasing the number and tenure of diverse faculty members; increasing the budgets for ethnic and racial cultural centers; abolishing the title of master; and naming the two new residential colleges after minorities.

Those demands were met in part, but students have largely remained skeptical. In November, the university announced that it was committing $50 million to a faculty-diversity initiative, an effort to address the fact that less than 3 percent of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences is black. Among Yale’s roughly 5,400 undergraduates, 11 percent identify themselves as black or African-American.

Karléh Wilson, a senior from Louisiana who has helped organize the Next Yale protests, said she felt the university did not go far enough to meet student demands. “There are more than enough alumni of color who the naming committee could have drawn from,” Ms. Wilson, 22, said.