He was a champion of public health — but played a role in the horrors of Tuskegee. Should a college expunge his name?

He was surgeon general under President Franklin Roosevelt. He’s been lauded for turning sexually transmitted diseases from a moral failing into a medical concern. During the height of segregation, he acknowledged the need to stem health disparities between black and white America.

But Dr. Thomas Parran Jr., whose name graces the main building of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, has also been called an architect of the syphilis experiments on black men and women in Tuskegee, Ala. While he was surgeon general, he was also aware that U.S. public health researchers were intentionally infecting with syphilis Guatemalan people who were mentally ill or in prison, in the name of research.

Now, under pressure from students who say Parran’s role in these experiments shows his disregard for human lives, the university is