Located in the leftist enclave of New Haven, Connecticut, virtue-signaling Yale University just offered yet another example of “going woke and missing the joke.”
As Margaret Kelly explains, for The College Fix:
Yale University has replaced a controversial stone carving of a Native American holding a bow and shield and a Puritan holding a musket.
The new carving, located at the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library, shows two figures with a book between them, according to images obtained by The College Fix.
No info, yet, on when it was installed, who designed it, or what happened to the old stone carving which was a section of a corbel, itself part of an arch that curves over that library entry. But Kelly notes that, in 2017, the new Puritans at Yale covered the stone Puritan’s musket with a big piece of granite.
Now, the entire corbel has been removed from the sightlines of innocent Yaley eyes.
Yale’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces, which advises President Peter Salovey ‘on ways to better represent the diversity of the Yale community through the art and other symbolic representations found around campus,’ determined that the carving ought to be moved and recontextualized.
In August 2017, Yale published a news release about the planned removal of the stonework, ‘Yale to move stone carving that will remain available for viewing and study.’
And now, all is well for the woke.
Or, perhaps not.
Because, not only is the stone sculpture that Yale removed actually a depiction of the way things were in Connecticut, circa the 17th Century, the “Ivy League” school was founded in 1701 by…
A slave trader.
Whoops.
The woke of Yale seem very eager to cast off the yolk of political-incorrectness.
Yet, at this, the third-oldest college in the U.S., they’ve not gotten around to cutting ties with their founder, Elihu Yale, a well-known slave trader.
As Joseph Yiannelli wrote in 2014:
As an official for the East India Company in Madras (present-day Chennai), Yale presided over an important node of the Indian Ocean slave trade. Much larger in duration and scope than its Atlantic counterpart, the Indian Ocean trade linked southeast Asia with the Middle East, the Indonesian archipelago, and the African littoral.
Indeed, in June of 2020, The Plain Truth reported:
This month, the famous Ivy League University founded by Elihu Yale made headlines for deciding to rename one of its colleges. Calhoun College, named after former US Vice President John Calhoun, would be renamed in honour of Grace Murray Hopper, a 1934 alumnus and US Navy rear admiral, for her valuable contributions to computer science.
And the Yale story is bigger and darker than that.
…Yale University’s President wrote in a letter to the campus community that ‘John Calhoun’s legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately supported slavery as a positive good’ was fundamentally at conflict with Yale’s mission and values. But as political commentators pointed out, Calhoun’s history with racial oppression was nothing compared to that of the university’s founding father. This may explain why Elihu Yale is described as both a ‘merchant and philanthropist’ by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in politically conscious discourse, vilified as someone who encouraged (if not directly profited) from the practice of shipping slaves to remote parts of the English colonies. One of the most telling clues to Elihu Yale’s fondness for slaves may be found in two oil paintings that used to hang at the Yale University: in each of them, a floridly accoutred Yale is flaunting his good fortune with a small dark-skinned boy, a Tamil it would seem, by their side. What makes the image even more distasteful is that the boy wears a collar like a domesticated wild animal, around his neck.
With an endowment totaling over $42 billion as of June, 2021, one might wonder why the Yale administrators can’t shake off the ghosts and get moving, why they can’t change the name and be done with it.
But heck, Yale hasn’t severed ties with alumnus-brigands such as John Kerry, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, so why should anyone expect the “elite” school to do the truly woke thing and disconnect from its slave-trading founder?
It’s much easier to nibble around the edges, than to confront its own hypocrisy.
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