Stop Naming Buildings After People

In late January, the School Names Advisory Committee of San Francisco’s Board of Education voted six to one to rename 44 of the district’s 121 schools, with the goal of ridding the public sphere of any names that might call to mind racism or sexism. Among the names targeted for replacement: George Washington (owned slaves), Abraham Lincoln (encouraged settlement of the West; authorized mass execution of Sioux warriors), Robert Louis Stevenson (once used the word Japanee instead of Japanese in a poem), and U.S. Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein (it’s complicated).

The committee’s process was short on historical research or consultation — one committee member dismissed the very notion, saying, “We don’t need to belabor history” — or logic. The decision to deep-six Lincoln took five seconds. A school named for Malcolm X was spared despite its namesake’s early career as a pimp.

This show of civic self-righteousness made headlines both local and national. In The Atlantic, Gary Kamiya — who has studied and written extensively about San Francisco history — was unsparing: The renaming decision was inconsistent, uninformed, a “holier-than-thou crusade,” “a joke.” Not to mention shockingly expensive. (All that signage, for starters.)

The San Francisco denaming is only the latest in a string of such decisions. In January 2020, UC Berkeley changed the name of its law school from Boalt Hall to UC Berkeley School of Law, citing the newly discovered racist writings of namesake attorney John Henry Boalt. In June 2020, Princeton University voted to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school because of the former president’s “racist thinking and policies.” We can expect more of the same elsewhere, as boards and legislatures attempt to redress historical wrongs (one perspective) or impose a political-correctness agenda (a counter-perspective).

I have a modest proposal for all of these public bodies: Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.

Take Mark Zuckerberg’s name off this public hospital.

I am aware that tradition is not on my side here. The custom of naming things after people goes back a long way in the United States. Harvard University (founded in 1636) was named for John Harvard, a clergyman who left money for its…