Excerpt: The Board of Trustees’ recent decision regarding the John Witherspoon statue merits both praise and criticism. Their refusal to remove or alter the statue is commendable. Dedicated by predecessor trustees in 2001 to honor Witherspoon, the statue should remain unchanged, regardless of artistic considerations. Recent scholarship has provided a more favorable historical understanding of Witherspoon’s relationship with slavery than was available in 2001, further justifying this decision.
Regrettably, the Trustees erred in delegating the fate of the Witherspoon statue to the Campus Art Steering Committee. Any alteration of the statue would constitute a damnatio memoriae of Witherspoon. An ominous portent in the Committee on Naming report is the troubling conflation of judgments about Witherspoon’s historical relation to slavery with those about the statue’s artistic merit.
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