Yale is on a task to erase all embarrassing history. Of course, that’s antithetical to both historians and institutions of higher education. Somehow, that’s lost on the academic administration.
Just a little over a year ago, an employee at Yale smashed a stained glass window at the school because he was angry over the image of African Americans carrying cotton. We covered it in this post: Yale employee smashes allegedly racist stained-glass window, Yale won’t press charges
Not only did Yale not press charges, they rehired the employee with much fanfare. Now another piece of campus art has been altered for the sake of political correctness.
Here’s the explanation in the Yale alumni magazine:
Disarmament
If you were especially observant during your years on campus, you may have noticed a stone carving by the York Street entrance to Sterling Memorial Library that depict a hostile encounter: a Puritan pointing a musket at a Native American (top). When the library decided to reopen the long-disused entrance as the front door of the new Center for Teaching and Learning, says head librarian Susan Gibbons, she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.”
So Yale placed stone over the musket in the carving. This image is from the Yale alumni magazine:
Kyle Smith writes at National Review:
Yale’s Disgraceful Whitewashing of History Continues
Yale’s determination to take a giant jar of Wite-Out to history has reached a new level of fatuousness.
This week the Yale Alumni Magazine reported that a stone carving of an Indian and a Puritan over an entrance to Sterling Memorial Library had been bowdlerized, with the weapon the latter was holding covered up. A head librarian, Susan Gibbons, said that she and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces found that the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Yale ordered the musket of the Puritan to be covered up with a layer of stone that Gibbons said “can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving,” the magazine reported.
It’s instructive that even as Yale’s administration rampages through history with a censor’s eye and a vandal’s paint pot, someone like Gibbons can tacitly acknowledge that the hysteria might die down in some future generation and that we should therefore make some of the cover-ups reversible. At the same time, though, it’s impossible not to rue the irony of a period when librarians take on the duties of literally covering up the past. Perhaps the definition of librarian will gradually morph over the coming decades to “one who protects us from the historical record.”
In their haste to preemptively ward off any sudden triggering episodes by continuing to display a carving that has been visible in the heart of the campus for many decades, Yale’s historical-demolition squad appeared not to notice a few things. For instance: Although the Puritan was holding a weapon, so was the Indian. Only the Puritan’s musket was plastered over, not the Indian’s bow.
Via Legal Insurrection. HT: David G.