The Great Redesign
Architecture and Design schools are being confronted with their role in racist structures. Students and alumni so far have sent open letters in Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard.
The petitioners at Princeton write that “architecture lags behind other disciplines in the critical examination of its own methods and the subject positions of its practitioners.” According to the petitioners at Harvard, their department chair Mark Lee is an excellent example of this. He wrote that he saw “the [Graduate School of Design] as the most Eurocentric school in America, and that is really our strength. This is something that needs to be preserved and expanded, but at the same time, we should consider the other bridges that we need to build in different cultures, especially into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.” Lee has since apologized for these remarks.
Deans across these schools have started to respond to these demands, as part of conversations that started since early June. To what extent these responses will escape meetings and committees has yet to be seen.
Renaming the League
If students return to campus, they may have to learn some new names. In the past couple of weeks, Princeton has removed the name of Woodrow Wilson from their International Affairs School, while Teachers College at Columbia pledged to rename Thorndike Hall.
The change at Princeton has brought rhetorical turmoil across the Princetonian and the Tory. A sophomore released an email to the community, republished in the Tory, arguing that Princeton’s decision was reckless and impulsive, giving in to “the futility and hypocrisy of revisionism.” A classmate and summer columnist for the Princetonian asked why the author felt “so entitled to preach to the student body his opinion on removing the legacy of a man who dehumanized and degraded Black lives?” In making that argument, her use of a Hitler quote has drawn controversy.
What name will fall next? The Coalition for a Diverse Harvard wish to change the name of the Board of Overseers, given the history of “overseer” in American slavery. The namesake of Mather House, Increase Mather, is also under scrutiny as he owned a slave as a powerful Puritan clergyman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Only Some Schools Thrive During Pandemic
While the Ivy League is in a good position to weather the pandemic, NYU Business professor Scott Galloway predicts in Business Insider that Brown and Columbia have the most risk factors going into the fall.
Criticizing the higher education industry for “putting the lives of faculty, staff, students, and our broader populace at risk,” he released a working document that compared the value vs. the vulnerability of colleges and universities. He called for higher education to “announce fall classes will be all online” and “cut costs and prices.”
In Galloway’s analysis, while most Ivy League schools are listed as thriving during the pandemic, Brown and Columbia are more vulnerable. Reflecting this, Columbia, Barnard, and Brown are marked as surviving the pandemic instead of thriving. Based on the working document, this seems to be based on a number of factors including admit rates, endowment per student, percentage of international students, among others.
The data-driven approach may exclude current administrative decisions, like the fact that amongst the Ivy League, only Cornell is re-opening their campus to all students.