News
2006-10-06
Missouri students
seek to remove homophobe's name from school building
Students at the
University of Missouri, Columbia, have launched a
campaign to rename the student union building be
Students at the
University of Missouri, Columbia, have launched a
campaign to rename the student union building because it is
christened in honor of a former dean who worked to
purge the campus of gay students and professors more
than a half-century ago. Erin Kennedy and two other
students spent the summer poring over Thomas A. Brady's
personal papers in the university archives and said
the documents show that Brady regularly corresponded
with the university president over ways ''to establish
machinery for identification and apprehension'' of gay people.
The student union was built and named Brady
Commons in 1966, two years after Brady's death. Brady
was also a history professor and a university vice president.
''We are not suggesting that Brady's ideals were
out of the mainstream at the time,'' the students
wrote in a recent issue of TheManeater, the student newspaper. ''We are
simply wondering why [the university] would continue to
leave a building...named after a man who represented
where the university has been, rather than where it is going.''
The student union is in the early stages of a
$58.7 million expansion that would nearly double its
size. While the project has been temporarily dubbed
the MU Student Center in hopes of attracting a donor
interested in naming rights, campus officials have
told the protesters that a section of the new complex
will retain the Brady name.
''I'm sympathetic and empathetic to the
students' issue,'' Mark Lucas, student life director,
said Wednesday. ''But we're not sure that opening up
an entire campus with 80 buildings to public scrutiny of
people's past is the right way to do this.''
The students, who have posted the Brady
documents on the Web, also cited his efforts to track
the names of students, faculty, and community members
working to hold an integrated student meeting on campus in
1947. Brady also argued for access to students'
confidential medical and mental health records over
the strenuous objections of university doctors,
records show.
''Brady's actions went above and beyond simple
ideology,'' the students wrote in the student
newspaper, which has also editorialized in favor of
the renaming. Kennedy, a senior majoring in sociology, said
the university should instead consider honoring a
black historical figure—something that black
students on campus have sought for years.
Brady's son, also named Thomas A. Brady, an
emeritus professor of history at the University of
California, Berkeley, suggested his father is being
held to an unfair standard. ''We are all people of our
times,'' he said. ''You would have to rename the
Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and probably
Washington, D.C.'' (Alan Scher Zagier, AP)
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