A stained-glass window of John C. Calhoun, at Yale University. Photograph by Andrew Sullivan/The New York Times via Redux

The Foro Italico is a large sports complex in Rome that was built between 1928 and 1938 at the behest of Benito Mussolini. Originally, it was called the Foro Mussolini, and, at its entrance, a towering obelisk bears the inscription “MUSSOLINI DUX.” Nearby, a stone timeline commemorates great moments in Fascist history. Statues of nude, muscled male athletes line the track; the central piazza features a vast mosaic celebrating various Fascist triumphs, including Italy’s 1936 invasion of Ethiopia. (It depicts, among other scenes, an Ethiopian man performing the Fascist salute.) After the Second World War, Italians attended sporting events in the Foro and tried to overlook its Fascist elements. But then, in 1955, Rome won the competition to host the 1960 Olympics. The Foro became an urgent political problem. What was to be done with the inscriptions, statues, and mosaics, some of which had fallen into disrepair, and all of which were soon to appear on the world stage?

The Italian Olympic Committee, which was already building a new soccer stadium at the Foro, decided to restore Mussolini’s decorations. They added the fall of his regime and the creation of the Italian Republic to the Fascist timeline; they attached fig leaves to the nude statues; and—most controversially—they rehired the original artisans to touch up the Fascist mosaics. In an essay called “Fascism as ‘Heritage’ in Contemporary Italy,” the historian Joshua Arthurs describes the controversy that ensued. The left wing protested; the Communist magazine Vie Nuove argued that it was humiliating and offensive for the Olympics to unfold amidst Fascist slogans like “Many enemies, much honor.” Vie Nuove launched a campaign to catalogue Fascist monuments, which it called “L’Italia da Cancellare” (“The Italy to Erase”). In the end, though, nothing was erased from the Foro; moreover, in the decades following the Olympics, Italian neo-Fascists argued, successfully, that the Foro should be preserved as a historical monument to a moment of Italian “modernization.” They were aided by architectural historians, who argued that the grounds, buildings, and statues were, while morally unsettling, beautifully designed. Essentially, the Italian response to the Foro has been to shrug and move on with life. The Italian Ministry of Culture has designated the site protected, “notwithstanding its ideological orientation”; today, it hosts tennis tournaments and other live events.

Scholars have many terms for the kind of challenge presented by places like the Foro Italico. Such places can’t be razed or forgotten, because they are too significant, massive, useful, or valuable. At the same time, they remind us of a history we’d rather forget. Often, they are monumental places, designed to instill, in future generations, a sense of heritage—heritage that is now unwanted. In the nineteen-nineties, the sociologists John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth described these places as embodying “dissonant heritage.” Their term plays on the fact that “heritage” is supposed to be better and purer than “history,” which is always less pleasant than we wish it were. Heritage is the part of history that we want to identify with. Places like the Foro Italico offer dissonant heritage—heritage with too much bad history mixed in.

Heritage is not an inevitable product of the passage of time. It’s a story that has to be told, a worldview that has to be constructed. Mussolini built the Foro Italico for precisely that purpose—to construct, for his regime, a heritage. Sometimes, as in the case of the Foro, would-be heritage becomes dissonant because it collapses under the weight of real history. In other places, it’s the reverse: undesirable history threatens to become elevated into dissonant heritage. Arthurs cites a fascinating article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, by the anthropologist Sharon Macdonald, about Germans living in Nuremberg after the Second World War. During the war, Hitler constructed an enormous complex near Nuremberg; it included a vast “Congress Hall” and a series of rallying grounds, famous the world over as the site of Hitler’s terrifying mass speeches. The Germans reasoned that destroying the rallying grounds would be a pointless and dangerous denial of the past; at the same time, they worried that the grounds, with their huge, shoddily-constructed buildings, might crumble into a picturesque ruin and achieve, by that means, the grandeur of heritage. Likewise, the construction of a museum might turn the area into what we would now call a heritage site.

In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create. When, in the late nineteen-nineties, the Nuremberg City Council decided to build a visitor’s center, they did so in a trivializing or profane way: they used a deliberately disruptive design (it looks like an arrow piercing the side of the Nazi Congress Hall), and called it a “documentation center” rather than a museum, to avoid elevating the status of the building in which it resides.

There are, in short, a range of ways in which we can respond to dissonant heritage. We can try to erase it, by launching cancellare campaigns, or decide to preserve it, hoping, perhaps, that its dissonance will diminish with time. We can also invent creative, even inspired strategies for recontextualizing the past—although doing so requires uncommon patience, thoughtfulness, and unanimity.

In recent months, students around the country have been protesting racism on their campuses. Some of the protests—at Georgetown, Dartmouth, and other schools—have focussed, in part, on the names of campus buildings and institutions. Recently, at Yale, activists have asked for a rebranding of Calhoun College, which is named after John C. Calhoun, a notorious proponent of slavery; at Princeton, citing Woodrow Wilson’s well-established racism, they have argued that his name should be removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. (They have also asked that the name of a dormitory, Wilson College, be changed.) The activists have other ideas—they’ve asked for additions to the curriculum, increases in faculty diversity, and new resources for students of color, among other things—and they say they are responding to a general climate of subtle and overt discrimination. But their arguments about names aren’t a distraction from those other issues. They address a central function of the Ivy League: the communication of a certain idea of American heritage, to which the campuses of Yale and Princeton, with their Gothic spires and soaring archways, are monuments.

The case of Calhoun College is the easier of the two to parse. Calhoun, who graduated from Yale, in 1804, didn’t help build the college (or anything else at Yale); the university named the building after him on its own, in 1933, because Calhoun—who had died eight decades earlier—was considered an eminent alumnus. Shortly before naming the college after Calhoun, Yale erected an eight-foot-tall statue of him atop Harkness Tower, along with statues of seven other Yale “worthies.” Only much later did the university at large begin to reflect on the fact that Calhoun was a supporter of the Fugitive Slave Law who had argued, before Congress, that slavery was a “positive good.” (Seen in its “true light,” Calhoun said, slavery was “the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”) Until 1992, a stained-glass window in the college depicted a slave, in shackles, kneeling before Calhoun. Unsurprisingly, the idea of renaming the college has been raised several times; it’s easy to imagine that, this time, Yale will make the change.