If you’ve been through The Program or talked to people who have, you know that reading the book is half of the process and discussing it is the other. Forming an opinion and explaining it, listening to other people’s positions, and discussing them, this adds depth and dimension to your understanding of a book. We hope that you will find a way to do the same with the reports that we’ve provided, and give us well-thought-out, reasoned recommendations, based on the material we provide, and any additional outside historical reading you choose to do. People’s lives are complicated, full of grey areas and ambiguity; a serious examination of someone’s life requires thoughtful consideration, just like a Program reading.

But history is a bit different than philosophy, and there won’t be a tutor at your seminar, so we’ve developed this guide to help you in your work. We based it on processes used at other colleges and universities in their examinations of their histories and tweaked it to make it appropriate for St. John’s. In a sense, it can be thought of as a funnel, asking you to start with as much information as possible, and then narrow it down to what is really relevant to the question at hand. We tried using it in a discussion of a biography and found that it helped us organize our thoughts, we hope it does so for you as well.

1. What are the person’s legacies? Yale University’s Witt Committee notes that the Oxford English Dictionary defines a legacy as “a long-lasting effect.” Over the course a life, a person acts in multiple settings (e.g. family life, professional life, public life, spiritual life), and often acts in one setting in a way that contradicts contemporary actions in others. Some of those actions affect only that person, some affect others; some are important, others are not; some are considered and repeated, some are done once or on the spur of the moment. One way to understand a person’s life it to attempt to list the person’s actions, describe the intent and the energy that the person devoted to each of them, evaluate what effect they had on the world, and determine which of them are the most important, or prime, legacies. The first step in such a process is identifying everything that could be considered to be a legacy.
2. How strong is the historical evidence about each of the legacies? The level of scrutiny under which a person lives often leads to varying levels of detail being known about the multiple settings of his or her life. More weight should be given to those where the evidence is clear and unambiguous, and less when the evidence is scant or ambiguous.
3. How unusual was the person’s behavior at the time? A person’s activities can be seen as more worthy of praise or blame where the behavior in question was out-of-the-ordinary in its character or extent. Behavior that was conventional at the time is less remarkable.

4. What are the person’s prime legacies? Taking the complete list of a person’s legacies and identifying and defining the “prime legacies” recognizes the complexity and plurality of multiple narratives comprising an individual’s life and works, considers all of them when evaluating the person’s life, and attempts to determine which are the most important and had the most effect.

   Yale offers the following example:

   “[Walt] Whitman, as it happens, contained virtues and vices himself. He excoriated the Lincoln administration for insisting on equal treatment for black soldiers held as prisoners of war in the South. But his principal legacies are as a path-breaking poet and writer. Frederick Douglass contrasted African Americans with Indians, who he said were easily ‘contented’ with small things such as blankets, and who would ‘die out’ in any event. But his principal legacies are as an abolitionist and an advocate for civil rights.”[1]

5. Are the person’s prime legacies fundamentally at odds with the mission of the College? As stated in the Preamble to the Charter and Polity of the College, The Mission of the College is as follows:

   Education is the making of men and women out of children by bringing them into the world of inherited customs, intellectual traditions, and spiritual ties. Institutions of learning are set up for this purpose. Beyond this they should also seek to develop the moral and intellectual powers of their students to enable them to fulfill best their freely chosen tasks and thus to take their own responsible part in shaping the future. St. John&’s College is a community of learning committed to holding these ends constantly in sight and to seeking the best means of attaining them.

   St. John’s College strives to illuminate the common heritage of humanity in a persisting study of the great documents in which that heritage can be found. It is concerned with the unity of knowledge, an understanding of the great issues, and the moral foundations on which men and women may conduct their lives. To provide proper conditions for the pursuit of these ends, we, the Board of Visitors and Governors, after consultation with the Faculty, do ordain and establish this Polity for St. John’s College.

6. Why did the college choose to name the building after the individual? Did the college make its decision in order to honor or praise the individual’s prime legacies? Did those prime legacies exemplify the mission and values of the college at the time of naming or did they violate them? What about now?

   Yale offers the following example:

   “An illustrative example of this principle is the change in the name of Saunders Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Historians at UNC were unsure whether or not the namesake William Saunders had been a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The university trustees nonetheless changed the name of the building when they discovered that university leaders had believed Saunders was a Klan leader and viewed this belief as reason to name the building in his honor. Another useful illustration arises out of the residential college here at Yale named for Samuel Morse. If University leaders had named the college after Morse not in honor of his invention of the telegraph, but to honor his nativist and anti-Catholic views and his support for slavery, that would be a consideration pointing in favor of renaming the college.”[2]

7. What was the person’s relationship with the college? Should the discussion lead toward renaming of a building, the case for renaming is weaker when the honoree has had an important beneficial role in the college’s history, and stronger when the honoree had no significant connection to the college.
8. How closely does the community identify with the feature? Along with the books of The Program, and the individuals with whom a student associates, the location and buildings of a campus form an important part of the experience of being a student and help create historical connections between Johnnies across generations. Historical names can also be a source of knowledge; changing them risks eliding “the moral complexity often associated with the lives of those who make outsized impressions on the world.”[3]
9. Did the honoree’s legacies have any harmful impact? Because the names of buildings form an important part of the St. John’s experience, a name that creates an environment that impairs the ability of students, faculty, or staff to participate fully and effectively in the mission of the College should be avoided.
10. Additional Points. Consider anything that you think has not been covered above.
11. Recommendation: how should the college acknowledge this aspect of its history? Other institutions have adopted a wide variety of ways to acknowledge their histories. These have included explanatory signs, sessions in Freshman Orientation, scholarships, ceremony revision, changing names, construction of monuments, statements of apology, prayer meetings, and campus discussion sessions, among others. Please tell us how you think St. John’s College should acknowledge this person’s history.

[1] “Letter of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming,” Yale University, November 21, 2016, 19. For Douglass see the “Native Americans” section.

[2] “Letter of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming,” 21.

[3] “Letter of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming,” 18.