The Universities’ own archives provided much of the basis for understanding the lives of building namesakes. But unearthing the stories of these figures and the process that led to their elevation revealed unexpected clues to the inner workings of the construction of the University’s identity. Documents showed administration and faculty gathering to make key decisions as to what information would be made public, shaping the institution’s public image for decades. The language that surrounded and continues to surround discussions of certain figures reveals a sometimes deliberate attempt to bury unwanted aspects of their past, to recast them as more palatable characteristics, or to deny that their true past has any connection to the institution that is honoring them. And yet digging deeper into the biographies of namesakes also sometimes revealed multiple layers of historical meaning that made it harder, not easier, to draw clear conclusions about the moral status of their elevation as campus icons.

Drawing on examples from other universities and new scholarship in history, cultural studies, and Black studies, each task force drafted its own principles for evaluating the harm caused by racist icons woven into the fabric of the University’s campus. Both strove and sometimes struggled to balance the insights, conceptual framework and technical terminology of this growing scholarship with the public nature of the debate over building names and the need to remain transparent, comprehensible and convincing to a wide variety of University administrators and stakeholders in a formal report. The discussions and debates over how to reconcile these two different worlds paralleled the broader national debates over the legacies of race, racism, and whiteness in society, and brought the University into a sometimes difficult but illuminating dialogue with the surrounding community.