Michael Hiltzik: The Hitler beetle, the Trump moth and the raging debate over offensive species names
We are all familiar by now with the movement to eradicate the names of racists and other villains from the buildings, institutions and public spaces where they were once honored. Caltech excised the name of Robert A. Millikan, its longest-serving president and a known eugenicist, from its campus; Princeton removed Woodrow Wilson's name from its public policy school; UC removed from its San ...
We are all familiar by now with the movement to eradicate the names of racists and other villains from the buildings, institutions and public spaces where they were once honored.
Caltech excised the name of Robert A. Millikan, its longest-serving president and a known eugenicist, from its campus; Princeton removed Woodrow Wilson's name from its public policy school; UC removed from its San Francisco law school the name of Serranus Hastings, its original donor, because of his complicity in the California Indian genocides of the 1850s and 1860s.
Statues of Confederate soldiers and generals are being pulled down in a coast-to-coast reckoning with the Jim Crow era.
Although some of these changes were controversial — Millikan and Wilson were
