The evidence that this controversy is confected is overwhelming: Yales students and administrators have spent a lot of energy considering Elihus legacy, and have even sequestered two of his portraits in a closet of shame, while displaying a third, with curatorial stress on the enslaved Black child next to him, in the Yale Center for British Art. But almost no one seems to have thought reckoning with Elihus crimes meant changing the name of the university, which has long been divorced in meaning from the life of Elihu Yale. No one was venerating him; no one was trying to live up to his ideals. The name Yale does not belong to Elihu, but to the university, with its faults and virtues, not his.

Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson

The same cannot be said for Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, or John C. Calhoun, whose name was removed from a Yale dormitory in 2017. Wilson was not a casual bigot. He did a great deal to keep Black people down, and unless you are a Princeton alumnus, his name means more as a politicians than as a schools. He should be judged (harshly) as a politician. Lee is known for being a traitoran even easier case. Calhoun, I think, was more complicated. He was a Yale graduate and a United States senator, a secretary of war and of state, and a vice president, and he is one of very few American political theorists of the 19th century whose work repays reading today. He was also a raging racist who worked tirelessly to ensure and prolong the enslavement of millions of Black Americans. Given that he is known now mostly for the last of these distinctions, the balance does not favor him, and Yale has renamed Calhoun College accordingly, after the computer scientist and the Navy admiral Grace Murray Hopper.

But this conversation is a distractionnot because the legacy of injustice at institutions such as Yale and the U.S. government isnt worth discussing, but because it is worth discussing, and #CancelYale is a way to prevent that discussion by replacing it with a much stupider one that will, by proximity, discredit the one that should occur. For years, Yales critics have demanded that it respect and live in harmony with the city of New Haven, which is majority-minority. The university has tried to make students, staff, and faculty from underrepresented backgrounds feel like they are full members of its community. Changing the universitys name would not advance these goals at all.

Some other goals would be served splendidly. You can set your watch by the timing of these diversion campaigns: When President Donald Trump gets caught doing something inexcusable, such as tweeting a video of his supporter shouting White power! from behind the wheel of a golf cart, he will find an adjacent controversy to magnify, in hopes that it will distract from his own. Nitwits will always be ready to assist by pushing the controversy well beyond its defensible limits: ripping down or defacing statues of, say, Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant or Miguel de Cervantes, and claiming the mantle of those who supported the orderly removal of authentic villains such as Lee.

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Yale Doesnt Need to Change Its Name - The Atlantic