LSU’s Building Name Evaluation Committee expects to complete its research and send its findings up the chain of command early in the Fall 2021 semester, Vice Provost for Diversity Dereck Rovaris said Thursday. 
The 16-member committee is evaluating roughly 20 buildings on campus named after confederates, slaveholders, segregationists or racists and working on a list of names that it will recommend administration remove.
The full panel last met on March 11. The university’s presidential search and the members’ busy schedules delayed the process, Rovaris said. The committee decided not to make any final decisions until new President William Tate takes over on July 2.
“We’re close to the wrapping it up, I believe,” Rovaris said. “If if I had to guess, now that I think about it, I’d say by September we should have that recommendation to the provost. It could be a lot sooner than that though.”
Rovaris said the committee is placing recommendations into three categories: names that clearly should be removed, names that should stay and a more ambiguous middle ground. When its research is complete, the panel will send the suggestions to a different, permanent eight-member naming committee. That group will then forward their conclusions up the administrative ladder: to the provost, president and finally, to the board of supervisors. 
Rovaris declined to give example of names that fall in the “middle category.” He said members have combed through hundreds of documents to gain an understanding of each namesake’s full body of work and beliefs. If a person were a staunch segregationist or racist their entire lives, he said, then their names would go to the “clear removal” category. But if their beliefs on race evolved or changed over time, then the namesake would go to one of the other two categories.
“We did the hard work of combing through texts and biographies just to find out who these people were before we just said ‘well you know, they were a member of the confederacy, so they come off,'” Rovaris said. “We didn’t do that. That would have been an insufficient assessment. We wanted to do a complete, thorough assessment on these folks.”
By the time the committee’s work is complete, it will have been a year since it first convened in August 2020. A student-led advocacy group named Cooperation Rouge (formerly Democracy at Work LSU) researched the building names and wrote a list of 13 names they wanted changed. The group started a petition that received over 3,000 signatures. 
Some students expressed frustration that the process has lasted months. They questioned why the university could decide to remove Troy H. Middleton’s name from the library in weeks, but wait months to decide whether or not to remove the other 13. 
“There is no good reason why they should delay in voting to remove the remaining 13 names,” Cooperation Rouge wrote in a July 2020 statement. “The Board already has our research detailing the history behind the remaining 13 names. If they understood the importance of removing Middleton’s name, then they should doubly understand the importance of removing the other 13 names, all of whom oppressed people and/or committed genocide in the name of white supremacy.”
Rovaris said the long process is simply “due dilligence.” Some of the buildings have been named for decades, he said; Some biographies are 400 or 500 pages long. Removing names without “exhaustive” research would be inappropriate — the process is not “cavalier, quick or easy,” he said. 
“We have not been sitting on our thumbs,” Rovaris said. “We have done the work. It is intensive work. And [the students] would be very proud of their student committee members because they’ve had loud voices and and informed voices. The student reps on the committee have done a humongous job. We’re just really proud of the work that they’ve done.”