The University of Cincinnati announced this week that they will be removing Charles McMicken’s name from the college of arts and sciences. McMicken, one of the original founders of the University of Cincinnati, owned slaves during his lifetime in the first half of the 1800s.
According to a local news report, the University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees has approved a recommendation to remove Charles McMicken’s name from the institution’s college of arts and sciences.
The decision came in the aftermath of an extensive study by a group of professors that felt that it was inappropriate to continue to use McMicken as the namesake for one of the university’s several colleges.
Earlier this year, the University of Cincinnati announced that a group of professors had been tasked with evaluating whether or not McMicken’s name should remain associated with the university. In a report published by the group in November, the group argued that the use of McMicken’s name was incompatible with the university’s “core values.”
To commemorate Charles McMicken in this particular context and way – as the titular brand of the College of Arts and Sciences, as the single name that connotes the college – is highly incongruous and raises significant conflict with the observance of core values. Using McMicken’s surname without acknowledging his legacy of racially discriminatory exploitation and exclusion presents a sanitized account of him and his relationship to UC that betrays academic values. Elaboration is required to set the record straight, but elaboration is wholly impractical in this context. To serve effectively as the name of the college, the McMicken surname must be capable of being used whenever the college is mentioned or represents itself, without burdensome qualification and explanation.
The group went on to argue that the use of McMicken’s name is a symbol of the university’s “inability” to become a truly progressive institution.
Continuing to use McMicken’s surname unqualifiedly in these circumstances bows to the impracticality of qualification and explanation, but thereby compounds the conflict with mission and core values. It signals that UC prefers continuity in an honorific or commemorative recognition (a value not specified in the mission) more than forthright commitment to diversity and inclusion (values explicitly stated in the mission), and that UC will compromise academic values to do so. It is to act with relative indifference to diversity and inclusion, reinforcing McMicken as a symbol of the university’s inability to break from its past and truly progress.
The former McMicken College of Arts and Sciences will now simply be known as the College of Arts and Sciences. McMicken’s name will, however, remain on the college’s building and in other locations around campus.
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