Columbia University Taking Medical School Founder Samuel Bard's Name Off Campus Dorm Due To Slave-Owning Past
CBS New York
August 29, 2020
NEW YORK — Columbia University
is taking the name of its medical school’s founder off of a campus dorm
because he owned slaves and once advertised a reward for the return of
one who ran away, the university’s president said Friday.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger told students and faculty in a letter
that the university was not erasing Samuel Bard’s contributions to the
school, but that it became clear amid a global reckoning on racism and
racist legacies that having a dorm named for him was not appropriate.
The building, which is home to clinical students studying at Columbia
University Irving Medical Center, was named for Bard when it opened in
1931. Bollinger said it will be rechristened “with a name that
represents our University’s values.”
Last month, Columbia’s Teachers College announced it was removing
psychologist Edward Thorndike’s name from a campus building because he
was a proponent of eugenics and expressed racist, sexist, and
antisemitic views.
Bard, who lived from 1742 to 1821, was a pioneer in obstetrics,
helped develop a treatment for diphtheria and served as the personal
physician to President George Washington. In 1767, he founded what is
now known as Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Bard owned three people as slaves, according to the 1790 census. In 1776, he placed an advertisement in the New York Gazette offering
a $10 reward for the return of a tall, thin and talkative enslaved man
named James who was believed to have fled toward the East End of Long Island.
Bard’s grandson, John Bard, founded Bard College north of New York City.
Bollinger said a panel assembled in June to study campus names and
symbols associated with race and racism unanimously recommended that
Bard Hall be renamed.
“We all understand how careful we need to be in shaping the
environment, symbolic as well as physical, in which we ask our students
to live and to call home,” Bollinger wrote in the letter announcing the
change.
Excising Bard’s name from the dormitory felt “especially vivid” at
Columbia University Irving Medical Center, he wrote, “where the
contradiction between the egalitarian health service norms they cherish
and slavery’s denial of full human standing is starkly blatant and
offensive.”
1 comment:
Dennis Praeger is fond of saying those with knowledge often lack wisdom. And courage.
I think this might be a case in point.
Post a Comment