Are there racist buildings at UCLA?

Most buildings in the United States are named after white men. At UCLA, this is no exception. And, given that racism was unadulterated and rampant for a vast majority of this country’s history, it follows that some of these buildings – including many at Ivy League schools and universities in the South – were named after racists. But is this the case at UCLA?

This issue has gained new attention with a recent protest at Princeton University, where black students occupied the president’s office to demand that buildings and schools named after former President Woodrow Wilson – who, depending on how you looked at it, was an unrepentant racist or a committed but flawed progressive – be stripped of his name.

It also brings up a burning question: How many buildings at UCLA are named after racists, if any? Here’s a selection of buildings and the positions on race taken by the men whose names grace them.

Hitch Suites

We start from the westernmost part of the Hill. These residential suites are named after Charles Hitch, who was the president of the University of California from the protest-happy years of 1968 to 1975. He succeeded the massively influential Clark Kerr, an early casualty of Ronald Reagan’s leadership of California who is commonly regarded as an “architect” for the UC.

Hitch presided over the creation of the UC’s first affirmative action policies, during a time when they were sorely necessary – this was a time when more than 90 percent of UC Berkeley’s student population was white. Hitch fought to retain the faculty appointment of Angela Davis, the radical anti-racist feminist professor and known communist who was also in Reagan’s cross hairs at the time. He also oversaw the appointment of the post-Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse, an icon of the New Left whose writings served as the ideological catalyst for the protests of the era.

Verdict: Not Racist.
Hitch’s public defense of leftists at the university does not make him an anti-racist per se, but the scholars he defended most certainly openly decried forms of oppression, which of course included racism. To host faculty of such ideological persuasion on campus during the Cold War era took guts.

Murphy Hall

How about the building that houses UCLA’s administration? Would it not be outrageous if it was named after a racist?

Probably not. According to at least one account, Franklin Murphy, who was chancellor from 1960 to 1968, invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak at the campus. His historic speech was delivered at Janss Steps about 50 years ago despite security concerns.

Verdict: Probably Not Racist, or at least, less racist than the UC Regents who decried the civil rights leader’s visitation.

Read more: Alumni reflect on Martin Luther King’s 1965 speech at UCLA

Carnesale Commons

Not one bit of Albert Carnesale’s leadership of UCLA has been without controversy, and naming a commons area after him – yeah, the one with your beloved Bruin Plate – was no exception.

Carnesale was hired as chancellor in 1998, right at the cusp of a controversy over affirmative action, which had just been banned two years prior by way of Proposition 209 and began taking effect during the year of his appointment. He had a chance to publicly condemn the ban right then and there, but consistently and adamantly refused, believing that he could not simply break the law – one that had just been passed, after all – because of demands from progressives on campus. Despite this, Carnesale stated that he was a supporter of diversity initiatives and outreach programs – yet he never budged on his refusal to act on affirmative action.

Read more: Throwback Thursday, Week 6: Affirmative Action

This permanently marred his reputation among those who believe that ending affirmative action was unjust to minorities in the state. Undergraduate Student Association Council members protested his appointment; earlier this year, an anonymous posting on “Racist Bruin” stickers on Daily Bruin newspapers included a clear message: #CarnesaleMustFall.

Verdict: Not Really Racist, but Racist if you fervently support affirmative action.

Royce Hall

The crown jewel and icon of the UCLA campus is named after Josiah Royce, one of the UC’s earliest and most prominent graduates. He got his degree in classics 140 years ago when the only UC campus was in Oakland (now the location of the Office of the President) and went on to become a professor and chair of the philosphy department at Harvard.

Royce is known for his objective idealist philosophy – which, to butcher something immensely complex, is the idea of “what you see is what you get” – and is credited with significant advances in mathematical logic. Yet, being the polymath he was, he also wrote about race.

And write about race he did.

A review of Royce’s commentary on race by Jacquelyn Kegley uncovers a scholar who thought about race critically during a time where most educated Americans believed race was a real phenotypic phenomenon among humans. In a 1906 essay, Royce cogently deconstructs the falsehoods of race: “We are likely to take for an essential race characteristic what is a transient incident or a product of special social conditions.” (Modern scholars describe this as process as racialization.) He also exposes white institutional roles in creating inequality, saying that “We are disposed to view as a fatal and overwhelming race-problem what is a perfectly curable accident of our present form of administration.”

Verdict: Definitely Not Racist. Kegley concludes that “I believe Royce makes every effort to avoid racism.” I agree. Royce was ahead of his time, in fact. By calling out race as a social construct and assailing white supremacy, Royce’s views on race are more progressive than those of some millennials. That should make us a little bit more proud to be Bruins.