Many colleges and universities have grappled in recent years with a difficult question: Under what circumstances should an institution remove a historical name from a building or other campus space, and what principles should guide such a decision?

Since 2010, institutions across the country have renamed buildings associated with white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members, while others have chosen to retain the status quo. Earlier this month, the University of San Francisco changed the name of a residence hall named for James D. Phelan, a former mayor of San Francisco, U.S. senator and alumnus of the school. Phelan campaigned for re-election in 1920 with the slogan “Keep California White.”

The UC Berkeley School of Law is overdue for an examination of this kind.

Berkeley Law’s main classroom building is named Boalt Hall after John Henry Boalt, whose widow, Elizabeth Josselyn, made a substantial donation to erect a building in memory of her husband, dedicated in 1911. Four decades later, when the law school outgrew this space, it moved to its current, larger building — also called Boalt Hall. To eliminate confusion among outsiders, Boalt Hall has not been the school’s official name since 2008, but Boalt is still everywhere in evidence at Berkeley Law. In addition to the classroom building, it is the name of official student and alumni groups, and provides the name to a number of endowed professorships.

Who was Boalt? Berkeley Law’s website identifies him only as an attorney and the husband of its benefactor. An established lawyer in Nevada, Boalt moved to California in 1871 at a time when Chinese immigration was rising in the state. From the time of the Gold Rush, Chinese settlers had come to California, but the 1870s saw their numbers increase 67 percent. By 1880 a full 8.7 percent of California’s population was Chinese, with few eligible for citizenship. The 1870s were also an era of economic crisis and increasing class tensions. Labor groups — and politicians eager to court them — blamed the Chinese for unemployment, poor working conditions and low wages. The call for Chinese exclusion began to be heard in the Golden State.

Boalt prospered in California and soon was president of the Bohemian Club. In 1877, Boalt delivered an influential address, “The Chinese Question,” at the Berkeley Club. He argued that never before in history have two non-assimilating races lived in harmony unless one enslaved the other. That the Chinese could never assimilate was self-evident to Boalt: Americans look at the Chinese with “an unconquerable repulsion which it seems to me must ever prevent any intimate association or miscegenation of the races.” Boalt invoked the alleged criminality, intellectual differences, cruelty and inhumanity of the Chinese, and mused it would be better to “exterminate” a strongly dissimilar race than assimilate it.

Now that the Civil War was over and slavery was unconstitutional, Boalt conceded the Chinese could not be enslaved and thus had to leave California. Recognizing the limits of California’s power in the federal system, Boalt proposed an unprecedented move — holding an advisory ballot measure to send a message to Eastern elites that California spoke with one voice on the Chinese. The Chronicle praised this proposal and the Legislature agreed; it was signed into law late in 1877, and two years later the voters by large majorities voted to advise Congress to put an end to Chinese immigration.

Boalt’s virulently racist “The Chinese Question” was included in an official report of the state of California, thousands of copies of which were distributed to influence newspapers and elected officials throughout the land. In 1882, largely as a result of California’s lobbying, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law banning a group of immigrants solely on the basis of race or nationality. Boalt was instrumental in catalyzing California opinion in support of this law.

Boalt neither attended nor taught at the law school that bears his name. He made no contributions to the life and mission of the University of California. He was a successful attorney, apparently well liked in his day. But records of his accomplishments are few — and it is noteworthy that a biography appearing in the year of his death pointed to “The Chinese Question” as his greatest public service. Berkeley Law has paid tribute to Boalt solely because in 1906 his wife made a generous donation to construct the first Boalt Hall. If it continues to honor him without acknowledging what he did, then it is either because it has forgotten Boalt’s ardent and influential racism, or because it places continuity and tradition ahead of its own nobler principles and values.

Charles Reichmann is an attorney and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall).