But as Sam Fulwood III, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who focuses on race and media issues, argues, what may be making students so uncomfortable aren’t so much the icons themselves but rather “the mindset behind defending” those icons. “They want the college to reflect themselves—and the traditions and the symbols of a college experience, in their mind, do not do that,” he told me. “What these students have done has been to draw attention … to those traditions” and what they represent.

This sort of activism—rallying for both the aspirational and the tangible—is also part of being a young, college student, according to Fulwood. “The students who are discovering Woodrow Wilson’s legacy at Princeton are behaving as if they were the first people to ever find out that he was a racist,” he continued. “There’s nothing like a new convert—there’s nothing like getting new information that sets you on fire … [They’re] coming to realize that they can challenge assumptions that sometimes have been deified by institutions, so there is some value in talking about the iconography on a college campus.”

Schools’ gradual withdrawal from certain traditions could be significant in that it indicates a willingness to embrace the new era into which they’re being thrust—an era marked by rapid demographic change, declining numbers of high-school graduates nationwide, and mass mobilization by people whom they’ve marginalized. “In an earlier time, the purpose of a liberal arts college education was to enlighten and educate the most socially advanced members of American society,” Fulwood wrote in a recent paper. It was reserved for white men “who were assumed to be future leaders of government, captains of industry, and masters of the universe”; students of color and women were rarely welcomed.

Nobody thinks—or at least says—this anymore. A visit to any of the elite college campuses across the nation, however, reveals that traditions die hard and that change comes slowly. Debates over the names attached to buildings and the iconography of prominent alumni prove that little has shifted: Sometimes, the past is offensive to the present, leading to conflict and protests … In effect, what we are seeing on college campuses today is the boisterous struggle of marginalized groups who are reshaping the old college life to fit their contemporary realities. College administrators are trapped, flat-footed, and wide-eyed in the middle of a social and cultural shift that they are seemingly unprepared to accommodate. And it is likely to get worse for those who want to retain the norm of the hallowed halls.

According to Fulwood, for colleges, even changing the name of a building is difficult. Conceding to one demand opens the door to conceding to more, which could mean fundamentally changing the role of higher education to meet the needs of one constituency over others.

And ultimately, Fulwood agrees with Williams and others in that erasing certain symbols and traditions could do more harm than good. “Attempting to sanitize [the iconography] and take it away in the guise of ‘This makes me feel better,’ I think, is misguided,” Fulwood said. “Changing the name doesn’t do anything but hide the actual history of what went on on the campus, and that is a far worst place for education because it can pretend that it never happened.”

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