Story highlights Yale turns down student demands to remove John Calhoun's name

John McWhorter says Calhoun was too ardent a champion of slavery to be honored

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and music history at Columbia University and is the author of "The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) I am generally not a fan of the fashion for demanding the removal from buildings of the names of people of the past whose views about disadvantaged groups wouldn't pass muster with enlightened folk today. Yet Yale University, in refusing student protesters' demand that a residential college named after John C. Calhoun be renamed, has missed an issue of degree.

John McWhorter

For all the excesses of the protests that rocked so many college campuses last fall, there were issues on their slates of demands that made some sense. Questioning the appropriateness of having to walk by a Calhoun College every day was one of them.

Make no mistake: things named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson occasion in me no pious "considerations" that the men were, amidst all else that they accomplished, slaveholders. My life ticks along just fine despite things named after Robert E. Lee. That Yale has decided to name a new building after Benjamin Franklin rankles me not despite that Franklin, as a white man of his time, had some slaves for a while. Most will agree that the volume of the man's accomplishments dwarfs the blight of his slaveowning stint.

Certainly we should know about the injustices of the past -- but this need not require the open-ended shaming of individuals themselves. I do not think, for example, that Lin-Manuel Miranda was remiss in leaving slavery in the background in his musical "Hamilton," contrary to some critics.

A great many people would find it hard to get through dinner with most people now dead, given the seismic and welcome changes in how racism and sexism were treated starting in the 1960s. Few people are able to see beyond the boundaries of their time. In our times, with changing ideas about homosexuality, many people of a certain age are feeling somewhat queasy about attitudes they harbored quite recently but couldn't have helped because it was all they knew. In the future, we may be looked back upon as barbaric in how we treat animals.

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