This semester marks two years since the creation of the Building Name Evaluation Committee in 2020 by Interim LSU President Tom Galligan.
The university-initiated committee has still yet to produce a public-facing report of any kind despite the public pressure leading to its creation.
The committee has a broad mandate to investigate the university’s past and an opportunity to make a mark on how it’s remembered in the future.
The panel seemingly exists only in mythology, having met most recently in March 2021 with little being known of that meeting and the few preceding it.
The committee, from its inception, has been exceptionally tight-lipped on the meetings and the research that it’s tasked with conducting.
One of the leading members of the committee and former university chief diversity officer – former Vice Provost Dereck Rovaris–is no longer at the university after quietly retiring in November 2021.
The month of Rovaris’ retirement, LSU President William Tate told the Reveille that he wouldn’t have made the renaming panel in the first place
“I actually would have never started that committee,” the president said. “But since it’s here, I have to be respectful of the democratic process. So in order to be respectful, I’m gonna have to let them deliberate and give me some set of recommendations.”
The public report was originally expected in September 2021, but there has been little to no whisper of progress.
The committee hasn’t held a formal meeting during Tate’s tenure, stopping shortly after one of its members, athletic administrator Verge Ausberry, was engulfed in the campus-wide sexual assault scandal.
If Tate is waiting on this report, he has a long wait ahead of him. And he knows that.
After the president’s comments on the committee, students shouldn’t expect broad axes to every questionable name on campus, but perhaps a few especially egregious ones could make the cut.
It’s a reasonable approach. It’s also one that the committee will never reach while it’s either unable or unwilling to meet for months at a time.
It’s not publicly clear exactly what needs to happen to resume the meetings of the Building Name Evaluation Committee, but whatever it is needs to happen.
Students deserve to know a complete history of the people honored on the campus buildings they interact with daily.
Not only should the panel begin meeting again, but the meetings should be open to the broader university community, not the closed-door, unannounced meetings of before.
The president is right that there are other ways of addressing issues of systemic racism than renaming buildings. We should absolutely do those things—while also taking into account the mental toll of learning in a building named after someone who would have never wanted you there.
Charlie Stephens is a 21-year-old political communication senior from Baton Rouge.
A tree grows next to the LSU Library on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022, in the LSU Quad in Baton Rouge, La.
