PC Vanderbilt Whitewashing History

September 25, 2002

It was 1935 when the United Daughters of the Confederacy donated $50,000 to help build a dormitory for women at Peabody College for Teachers.   Their goal was to improve economic and educational problems in the South by providing rent-free accommodations to female teachers-in-training.   The new dormitory was christened Confederate Memorial Hall.

 

Now, 67 years later, a group of politically correct history whitewashers with, obviously, a lot of spare time on their hands, have managed to erase ‘Confederate' from the name.   Why?   As Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Life Steve Caldwell says, “The word Confederate makes many people uncomfortable.”   Is that so?   I wonder if Steve and his band of revisionists know that their beloved university was built on the backs of immigrant laborers working in wretched conditions, some giving their lives to build Cornelius Vanderbilt's railroad.   Does that make them feel ‘uncomfortable?'

 

Does the fact that Commodore Vanderbilt was a less-than-perfect industrialist diminish the fact that Vanderbilt University is one of our nation's finer institutions of higher education?   Absolutely not.   You see, history is never perfect, nor should it strive to be.   I'm certainly no defender of the Confederacy but it is inextricably part of our history.   The cause of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was noble, their money gladly accepted and the dormitory proudly named.   The untold numbers of women who benefited from their generosity and then went on to spread their knowledge is their legacy, not some nomenclature on the front of a building that may offend the hypersensitive.  

 

Before the do-gooders at Vandy go around erasing history they should clean up their campus radio station.   With shows like ‘Wild Sex' and ‘Hell's F***in' Militia' (I substituted the asterisks; they use the real word), not to mention ‘Hot Mammy's Kitchen' (isn't that racist?) it's a wonder they can say that anything else makes someone feel uncomfortable with a straight face.

 

This whole flap over Confederate Hall is just symptomatic of a much greater problem at Vanderbilt.   It is fast becoming the Berkeley of the South.   I participated in a debate at Vanderbilt over racial profiling a couple of years ago and I thought I'd stepped back into the ‘60s.   David Horowitz, noted author and conservative commentator, paid a visit to the campus a few months back and wrote a scathing article about political correctness run amuck on Vandy's campus.

 

I don't have a dog in this fight other than my abhorrence of revisionist history.   It's up to you Vandy alums to address this growing problem before the university you know and love ceases to exist.   Before we know it, this plague of political correctness will ooze out beyond the iron fences of Vanderbilt and these politically insane zealots will be removing the word Confederate from area tombstones.   If the folks at Vandy want to grow this horrendous culture in their own academic Petri dish then so be it.   But for heaven's sake, don't let this bile spill out onto West End Avenue.  

 

And while they're out whitewashing history, don't forget to rub out those bouts of infidelity from the bios of JFK and FDR and Martin Luther King.   Oh, I see they've already gotten to that.