Be Careful with Denaming
Harvard Crimson | Ian D. Svetkey ’25
Svetkey ‘25 argues that denaming (removing names) from Harvard entities might not be the right strategy, arguing that it would set a dangerous precedent.
“Broadly, questions about legacy and memorial should take into account the entire person, assessing actions in both their original moral context and our modern one. There are situations in which denaming is obviously the correct choice — for someone like Robert E. Lee, whose legacy is doing something horrible. But usually the calculus is more complicated…”
“But why should we continue to celebrate these people, when there are surely less controversial figures to uphold? Because Harvard rests on the shoulders of those who have built it. And replacing those names with others — even those whose legacies may have been more upstanding — whitewashes our history. Without them, the next generation will not have an accurate picture of how their new home has developed over time…”
“We would set a dangerous precedent by striking people from our collective memory when we judge that their actions have fallen too far behind a shifting moral line. And, more broadly, we should not define people by their greatest failures, nor conflate the ills of past societies writ large with the personal character of actors born into and constrained by them.”
