The Student Government Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution “strongly condemning” LSU President William Tate IV for the Building Name Evaluation Committee’s disbandment. 
The resolution, authored by senators Adam Dohrenwend, Cooper Ferguson and Chloe Berry, urges the university to follow through on 2017 and 2020 resolutions to have buildings with problematic namesakes renamed.
The university’s building renaming committee came to a consensus to disband in December 2021, according to a letter sent to Tate on behalf of the committee. The letter said the committee disbanded to “give the new administration adequate time to develop its vision and set priorities.”
The committee’s dissolution came less than a month after Tate said that he would have never started the committee in the first place, had he been president at the time. He said then that he’d rather pursue other avenues to increase diversity and inclusion at LSU. 
The resolution says Tate was undermining the objectives of the committee before they were disbanded, concealed the committee’s disbandment for 10 months, did not set the renaming of these buildings as a priority and dismissed the concerns of the student body. 
Tate released the following statement to The Reveille regarding SG’s condemnation:
“In the months since the building renaming committee voted to disband itself, I have been working to outline priorities related to diversity and equity for our campus,” Tate said. “This included a reorganization of our diversity efforts into the Division of Inclusion, Civil Rights & Title IX and conducting a national search that resulted in the hire of Todd Manuel as vice president over the division.”
“The administration has also been considering a number of other ways to enhance our diversity efforts such as pathway programs to help provide more opportunities to students from elementary school to Ph.D. levels, diversity hiring initiatives and our A&M agenda with Southern University,” the statement continued. “Importantly, we are working to find ways to better acknowledge important pioneers who came before us, and we will be finalizing and rolling out new efforts in the coming months.”
International trade and finance junior Cooper Ferguson, a senator for the University Center for Advising and Counseling, said previous resolutions had been made in 2017 and 2020 to change these building names, with little progress being made.
“There’s been one large student movement that has been taking over,” Ferguson said. “It’s tearing down the names of segregationists, slave-owners, confederates and mass murderers. And you see the inaction from administration on this issue.”
The resolution says the building names sanitize people who enacted racial terror during Jim Crow and the Civil War and that certain building names are symbols of racial oppression and work to enforce a white power structure.
“White supremacy, symbolic or structural, must be rooted out of all facets of campus life and society at large,” the resolution says.
The resolution says that the building renaming committee was a result of years of students organizing around the issue.
“President Tate will not meet with the student-body on this issue. He feels like he’s not responsible to the student-body on this issue,” Ferguson said.