It’s an old problem, one that this blog has followed with concern for many years: How do you handle it, public-relations-wise, and logistics-wise, when a politician or money man whose name you’ve plastered all over campus buildings goes to jail for corruption? Certain schools – Seton Hall, most prominently – experience this problem over and over again.
There’s an interesting sort of time-sensitive aspect to it. Most cases, to be sure, are after the fact – the name went up, the guy went to prison, the name got sandblasted. Rising action, climax, denouement. Some are before – Georgetown was going to name Douglas Ginsburg, but the SEC named him first. And a few are sort of during – Nevin Shapiro’s little student lounge plaque had just gone up when when Nevin went down.
Many and varied are the problems associated with de-naming. If, like U Miami, you’ve only done a little plaque, piece of cake. Just take it down. When we start moving in the direction of engraving, however, we’re talking big money. Sandblasting doesn’t come cheap. It’s also embarrassingly loud. You can have some guy steal into Nevin’s room at night and remove the thing; but does this guy look like the quiet sort? Why not just yell We made a terrible mistake or We consort with criminals at the top of your lungs? And try explaining to Seton Hall parents why hundreds of thousands of their tuition dollars went toward pulverizing the names of crooks from three of your buildings. So far.
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Forget trying to see these things coming. No school – up to and including burnished ones like Brown, which will eventually have to do something about trustee Steven Cohen – is likely to scrutinize a politician or a hedgie and decide they’d rather not go there. Money is money, and you don’t want to insult a person from the money class. Word gets around. This is about cleanup.
UD has long proposed the erasure/sheeting approach. Inspired by Hasidic groups who erase images of women from photos (Hillary Clinton is the salient example here), and Muslim or Muslim-sensitive groups who sheet women in photos (Southampton University’s advertising materials are the go-to place here), UD has proposed simply adding or subtracting letters from the name.
So in the most recent case – jailed, disgraced Pennsylvania state senator Bob Mellow – you’ve got a couple of universities there with MELLOW engraved on buildings.
They could sheet/erase, by way of adding, pulling, or shifting letters. MELLOW, without too much work, could be altered to read FELLOWS, which sounds very British (Fellows of All Souls); for less money, they could go in the other direction – down-home and friendly – by dropping the M and W and putting an H at the beginning of the name: HELLO! They could be whimsical and add YELLOW to the name… Joycean, and put an S at the beginning (“He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”)… They could do homage to Saul Bellow by changing only one letter…