Student Lunatics

Professor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He recently wrote an article titled “The hypocrisy behind the student renaming craze.” Students, often with the blessing of faculty, have discovered that names for campus buildings and holidays do not always fit politically correct standards for race, class and sex.

Stanford students have demanded the renaming of buildings, malls and streets bearing the name of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest who was often unkind to American Indians. Harvard Law School is getting rid of its seal because it bears the coat of arms of the Royalls, a slave-owning family. This renaming craze is widespread and includes dozens of colleges and universities, including Amherst, Georgetown, Princeton, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. The students have decided that some politically incorrect people from centuries ago are bad. Other politically incorrect people are not quite so bad if they were at least sometimes liberal; their names can stay.

Recently, Brown University changed its Columbus Day celebration to Indigenous People’s Day. By the way, many cities are following suit. There may be a problem. According to publications such as Lawrence H. Keeley’s “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” and Steven A. LeBlanc and Katherine E. Register’s “Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage,” we may have to rethink just how noble and peaceful American Indians were prior to Christopher Columbus. American Indians waged brutal tribal wars long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence. Comanche Indians were responsible for some of the most brutal slaughters in the history of Western America.

Our military has a number of deadly aircraft named with what the nation’s leftist might consider racial slights, such as the Comanche, Apache, Iroquois, Kiowa, Lakota and the more peaceful Mescalero. Should they be renamed? Our military might also be seen as disrespecting the rights and dignity of animals. Should military death-dealing aircraft named after peace-loving animals — such as the Eagle, Falcon, Raptor, Cobra and Dolphin — be renamed? Renaming deadly aircraft might receive a sympathetic ear from our politically correct secretary of defense, Ashton Carter.

Victor Davis Hanson says that changing history through renaming is nothing new. Back in the Roman days, the practice was called damnatio memoriae, a Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory.” It was practiced when the Romans wanted to erase the memory of people they deemed dishonorable; it was as if they had never existed.

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