One can only sympathize with the current predicament of University of Texas at Austin President Robert Berdahl, who is, by all accounts, a good president and a fine person. In what is an entirely symbolic battle, he is caught between a rock and a hard place -- several rocks and several hard places, in fact. The fight over naming a building after Jim Bob Moffett could potentially place Berdahl between two warring factions on campus, as well as between Trustees and some of the faculty, and, perhaps, between his head and his heart. A major cause of this dilemma is that Chancellor William Cunningham sits on the Board of Freeport-McMoRan. (The issues I won't address here are why the board suspended its rules regarding the size of the donation and the naming of a building, and if Cunningham's dual roles indicate a total conflict of interest.) But, so far, an all-out on-campus fight hasn't materialized. The faculty, even those who have spoken out, have still been remarkably courteous toward Berdahl, largely out of respect for his position.
The power of money is brutal. A building is being named after Jim Bob Moffett not because of any intellectual or social achievement, but because he gave a certain amount of money to the University. But the object of the University is to educate students, not name buildings. If we were going to pretend that every named building on campus honored a worthy person, then we would all be picketing the Jesse Jones Communications Building on a daily basis. You might think that, if there were a morality content to the naming of buildings on campus, such a building should honor the highest moral and ethical vision of journalism. Naming the building after Jones, a prominent right-wing power during the McCarthy era, would indicate exactly the opposite. In order to function, the University needs money. The University's purpose is to educate students. I'm not being glib here, we're not talking about a pastoral college of a few hundred where every family's bloodline is well known, we are talking about the University of Texas.
Their insensitivity towards the planet (which seems to be a hallmark of how Freeport-McMoRan does business) turns my stomach and offends some of my deepest ideological beliefs, especially about the responsibilities of businesses in the free enterprise system. If the University were naming a building after a progressive liberal and the right wing attacked because they didn't like her pro-abortion stance, how would we feel about the integrity of the building-naming process? Should we name buildings after people who offend no one? Should we name buildings after people who simply don't offend us?
Don't get me wrong, I think morality and ethics should guide all decision-making. But whose morality and whose ethics? I think it is simply tragic that the UT campus will have a building named after Jim Bob Moffett, but I wouldn't spend a minute of my day trying to stop it. That would imply that these named buildings indeed honor a person rather than simply record financial contributions. In that vein, it would be assumed that UT and this Austin community were in some way honoring Jones (and who knows who else has buildings named after them on campus; I'm certainly not about to undertake this research), and that we as a community had decided, by a lack of ongoing protest, to acknowledge that honor.
Now, if I were a UT student or professor, having to live and work on the campus, my visceral reaction to this naming would certainly be more militant. Having to walk by a building every day that was simply a monument to one person's ability to donate to the University would, perhaps, question the core value of the idea of the university. We should respect and honor the students who have taken a stand because they still insist that the University is not simply an institution of learning but a moral universe. Their sensibility improves the campus. But let's not lend dignity to a process completely without it.
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