Washington University has taken another step to reconcile with its own history.
The private and highly selective university in St. Louis founded in 1853 aims to address its ties to people with problematic legacies with a Naming Review Board. The adjudicatory board provides a venue for university and community members to challenge what the board calls “named features,” including buildings, scholarships, professorships and lectureships.
Wash U professor of History and American Culture Studies Peter Kastor is the board’s inaugural chair. He said the new effort stems from Chancellor Andrew Martin’s earlier initiatives.
“One thing he knew was that universities have the responsibility to understand their own history and to have processes in place to deal with that,” Kastor said.
People who want to challenge a named feature can submit a written report. That initiates a process in which the Naming Review Board evaluates the report and makes a recommendation to the chancellor. The chancellor is responsible for submitting final recommendations to the chair of the board of trustees.
According to the board’s guidelines, one key component is evaluating whether the individual or entity in question engaged in “slavery, genocide, or discrimination based on race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status, or age,” among other factors.
The board’s goal is to review each submission quickly and thoroughly.
“Those two goals are not always the same,” Kastor said. “Sometimes you need more time to do something thoroughly. Some of these I think might be cases that I could imagine might be quicker than others.”
Each person who submits a report will be informed of the final decision. While the decisions cannot be appealed, the outcomes could range.
“The decision might be that a request does not merit a change of any kind. It might be that a submission merits renaming something,” Kastor said. “It might be that the decision is to preserve the name, but to perhaps include some text that explains this person and really identifies those issues — or uses any one of a number of other steps.”
This is not the first time Wash U has grappled with its history and connections to the institution of slavery. In 2021, a group of students and faculty uncovered the true legacy behind Wash U co-founder William Greenleaf Eliot. For years, he was falsely touted as an abolitionist. He also held racist ideologies about Black people and their place in St. Louis.
In a 2021 interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Iver Bernstein, a professor of history and African and African American studies, highlighted that Eliot made his views very clear.
“You only have to read about 15 minutes into the Eliot letters, and his published articles, his sermons, to realize that not only was he not an abolitionist, he was vehemently opposed to abolitionism and saw the abolitionists as a great threat to the plans he wanted to develop for St. Louis, and by extension Washington University,” Bernstein said.
When that revelation came to light, the university did not have a process in place to address it in a meaningful way. Kastor said this board gives people the opportunity to do that.
As it stands, there are several things named after Eliot including William Greenleaf Eliot Residential College, a large plaque underneath the Brookings archway, and the William Greenleaf Eliot Society. During fiscal 2022-23, the society brought in more than $28 million in unrestricted gifts.
Chancellor Andrew Martin declined to talk about the new board and how its work could affect the university.
In the 2021 interview, history student (now graduate) Nkemjika Emenike wanted the university to acknowledge and address its co-founder’s complicated legacy.
“It's that Eliot was very, very complex — and [it’s important] to understand what that means for an institution that was founded in some of the country's most stark periods of racial violence and racial reckoning,” Emenike said. “Eliot wasn't just this philanthropist who built up all these institutions in St. Louis, but he also had some very problematic, at best, views of where Black people who made up a good amount of the city, what their place would be in St. Louis.”
Wash U joins several universities across the country that have established boards to examine ties to problematic figures. In 2023, Johns Hopkins University’s name review board announced its first de-naming recommendation. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill renamed one of its residence halls after its first Black professor in 2021. The University of California, Berkeley removed the names of several buildings on its campus.
The board at Wash U does not have an expiration date.
