Dead White Males

The debate over diversity and gender is going to be going on for a long time, I suspect. As a followup to my comment on Clara Schumann vs Beethoven in the concert review, I want to draw your attention to this initiative: Columbia's library building features the names of only male authors. After 3 decades of trying, these students have fixed that. Yes, indeed they have, but in an interesting and not offensive manner. They could have chipped away or covered up the objectionable male authors, but instead, simply placed an alternative banner above. See the photo at the link.

Homer. Herodotus. Sophocles. Plato. Aristotle. Demosthenes. Cicero. Vergil.

Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male. Male.

These are the author's names chiseled into the stone facade of Columbia University's Butler Library. In case it hasn't become clear yet, every single one of them is a man.

Yes, and not only male, but also Greek and Roman and all of them core thinkers in the Ancient world. Which you might think is even more important.

The new 140-foot banner emblazons the last names of Toni Morrison, Diana Chang, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria E Anzaldúa and A. Revathi across the face of Butler Library and directly above the original names.

To which I say "who?" Well, ok, I have heard of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, but the rest are a mystery. The names were selected by a small committee of students.

The original 1989 banner included the last names of Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Brontë (meant to represent all three Brontë sisters), Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.

I have heard of nearly all of those names, at least, though the list had to comb through a couple of millennia of literary history to find enough names. There was another list in 1994:

For the 1994 interpretation, the names of Sappho, Murasaki Shikibu, Mirabai, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sandra Cisneros graced the northern face of the library.

You can see the tendrils of politics slowly exerting their influence, can't you?

Basically, what is going on here is a category error: the current banner is a demonstration that the students have not only no comprehension of history, they are also pretty weak in aesthetics as well. The new list is of those names that are fashionable among impressionable students in the humanities in the second decade of the 21st century. I would bet that those names will disappear in a decade or two to be replaced with other, equally ephemeral ones. But Homer, Herodotus and the rest of those vile males will continue to be just as important as they have been for the last two and a half millennia.