The Reveille’s article “LSU’s building renaming committee quietly disbanded in December 2021” was a somber, albeit unsurprising, revelation, which showed that the Building Name Evaluation Committee and President William Tate IV shirked their duty to serve the student body and bring issues to the Board of Supervisors.
It’s frankly irritating and disheartening to see that an opportunity to acknowledge repeated student pleas died with a whimper.
While I was an undergraduate student senator, I authored a resolution with another student senator and the help of concerned students that supported the renaming of 13 buildings bearing the names of people who subverted the country, violated individual rights, participated in mass violence or espoused racist beliefs.
To put it bluntly, these were traitors, slave owners, white supremacists and everything in between. How else would you describe the eight men who took up arms against the Union? Or the governors who unapologetically participated in the nation’s largest mass lynching and disenfranchised nearly every Black Louisianian?
We were neither the first students to encourage such changes, nor were we making an unheard-of request. In 2017, students attempted to convince the university to rename the same 13 buildings, and the University renamed Raphael Semmes Road to Veterans Drive. In 2020, students circulated a petition, Interim LSU President Thomas Galligan created the now-defunct committee, and the Board of Supervisors renamed the LSU Library.
At best, the committee’s excuse that it wanted to give President Tate and the new administration time to “develop its vision” was mediocre. The month before it disbanded, it was clear that President Tate’s vision was unconcerned with, if not tacitly opposed to, the group, which “he never would have started.”
At worst, the committee’s decision was reckless.
It should have been obvious that they ought to continue because President Tate said, in the same November interview, that he would let them deliberate and offer recommendations. In June 2021, The Reveille even reported that the committee might be able to submit its report by September.
Was the committee just an attempt to placate students and kick the can down the road, or is there an unfinished report sitting abandoned in someone’s laptop folder?
It’s a shame that I have to ask these questions. It’s even worse that it took 10 months to ask them.
Drake Brignac is an LSU law student and former Student Government senator who co-authored the 2020 SG resolution supporting renaming buildings on campus.