The Names We Choose or Ignore
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NYC
The New York Times
July 6, 2007
As we know, Bernard B. Kerik’s name came down from a jail in Lower Manhattan and Sonny Carson’s name did not go up on a street in Brooklyn, and hands were wrung in both situations.
That’s good, Jay P. Greene said. He meant the hand-wringing; he was not so much concerned with what happened to Mr. Kerik and Mr. Carson. Professor Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, believes that fights over these matters are healthy because the names slapped on public spaces reflect, and sometimes shape, our communal aspirations.
“We have to decide what our civic values are,” Professor Greene said by phone from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he is chairman of the Department of Education Reform. “To decide what they are, we have to talk about them, and it’s inevitable that people will disagree about what those values are or should be.”
“If we try to avoid that conflict, we are avoiding deliberating about what values we wish to convey,” he said. As a result, “we may fail to teach any desirable values at all.”
Well, if those are good battles to have, New York must be in fine shape.
In particular, the clamor over Mr. Carson, a black activist and avowed racist who died in 2002, has led to ugly threats and racial name-calling. (The reaction was far more muted when the name of Mr. Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner, was removed from the detention center known as the Tombs, though some suggested that jail and “Kerik” were a splendid fit.)
By chance, as fallout from the Carson dispute turned into a federal court case this week, a pertinent study by Professor Greene came to the fore. It didn’t deal with streets or jails. Instead, it looked at public schools and the names they bear. Its main points had broad application, though.
After examining records in seven states — New Jersey being the closest to New York — the professor found that schools are increasingly being named not for people but rather for animals, lakes, hills and other features of nature. The trend in those states is so pronounced that Professor Greene is confident it is a nationwide phenomenon.
Historical figures have taken it on the chin, especially American presidents.
In New Jersey, for example, 16 percent of public schools built before 1948 were named for presidents. The figure for schools built over the last two decades is 6 percent. In Arizona, the study said, a school opened in the last 20 years “was almost 50 times more likely to be named after such things as a mesa or a cactus than after a leader of the free world.”
Of course, one could say that some presidents richly earn the low regard in which they are held. But Professor Greene’s larger point is that cities express communal values by naming schools, bridges or roads after people. When they settle on a name like Owl Creek, which was what Jefferson Elementary School in Fayetteville morphed into last year, they are essentially saying nothing.
Local officials often find it safer to stick with mesas and cactuses. That way, they avert potentially messy conflicts, said Professor Greene, who wrote his study with two researchers at the University of Arkansas, Brian Kisida and Jonathan Butcher.
TAKE Thomas Jefferson. He articulated America’s founding principles. He was also a slaveholder. Which of these two identities should be deemed more important? “Owl Creek,” the professor says, is a way out of a sticky situation.
But it is a cop-out, he suggests.
“Even naming schools after seriously flawed people can be instructional because we at least learn about those failings,” he said. Thank goodness, then, for the Tweed Courthouse, eh? In a sense, yes, Professor Greene said: “It’s important to learn about Boss Tweed if you’re in New York City, or anywhere.”
“In general, we prefer to honor people who are worthy of emulation,” he said. “But even if we learn of unsavory aspects of people’s lives, we can also learn from their mistakes.”
For New York, Messrs. Kerik and Carson proved, on balance, to have too many unsavory aspects to be honored. But weighing their merits and demerits was of itself useful, Professor Greene said. In a democracy, he said, “even the fight is instructional.”
Fair enough. Still, one can understand why some cities find comfort in a natural object like a mesa. Unlike many politicians and other public figures, mesas are mostly on the level.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
NYC
The New York Times
July 6, 2007
As we know, Bernard B. Kerik’s name came down from a jail in Lower Manhattan and Sonny Carson’s name did not go up on a street in Brooklyn, and hands were wrung in both situations.
That’s good, Jay P. Greene said. He meant the hand-wringing; he was not so much concerned with what happened to Mr. Kerik and Mr. Carson. Professor Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, believes that fights over these matters are healthy because the names slapped on public spaces reflect, and sometimes shape, our communal aspirations.
“We have to decide what our civic values are,” Professor Greene said by phone from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he is chairman of the Department of Education Reform. “To decide what they are, we have to talk about them, and it’s inevitable that people will disagree about what those values are or should be.”
“If we try to avoid that conflict, we are avoiding deliberating about what values we wish to convey,” he said. As a result, “we may fail to teach any desirable values at all.”
Well, if those are good battles to have, New York must be in fine shape.
In particular, the clamor over Mr. Carson, a black activist and avowed racist who died in 2002, has led to ugly threats and racial name-calling. (The reaction was far more muted when the name of Mr. Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner, was removed from the detention center known as the Tombs, though some suggested that jail and “Kerik” were a splendid fit.)
By chance, as fallout from the Carson dispute turned into a federal court case this week, a pertinent study by Professor Greene came to the fore. It didn’t deal with streets or jails. Instead, it looked at public schools and the names they bear. Its main points had broad application, though.
After examining records in seven states — New Jersey being the closest to New York — the professor found that schools are increasingly being named not for people but rather for animals, lakes, hills and other features of nature. The trend in those states is so pronounced that Professor Greene is confident it is a nationwide phenomenon.
Historical figures have taken it on the chin, especially American presidents.
In New Jersey, for example, 16 percent of public schools built before 1948 were named for presidents. The figure for schools built over the last two decades is 6 percent. In Arizona, the study said, a school opened in the last 20 years “was almost 50 times more likely to be named after such things as a mesa or a cactus than after a leader of the free world.”
Of course, one could say that some presidents richly earn the low regard in which they are held. But Professor Greene’s larger point is that cities express communal values by naming schools, bridges or roads after people. When they settle on a name like Owl Creek, which was what Jefferson Elementary School in Fayetteville morphed into last year, they are essentially saying nothing.
Local officials often find it safer to stick with mesas and cactuses. That way, they avert potentially messy conflicts, said Professor Greene, who wrote his study with two researchers at the University of Arkansas, Brian Kisida and Jonathan Butcher.
TAKE Thomas Jefferson. He articulated America’s founding principles. He was also a slaveholder. Which of these two identities should be deemed more important? “Owl Creek,” the professor says, is a way out of a sticky situation.
But it is a cop-out, he suggests.
“Even naming schools after seriously flawed people can be instructional because we at least learn about those failings,” he said. Thank goodness, then, for the Tweed Courthouse, eh? In a sense, yes, Professor Greene said: “It’s important to learn about Boss Tweed if you’re in New York City, or anywhere.”
“In general, we prefer to honor people who are worthy of emulation,” he said. “But even if we learn of unsavory aspects of people’s lives, we can also learn from their mistakes.”
For New York, Messrs. Kerik and Carson proved, on balance, to have too many unsavory aspects to be honored. But weighing their merits and demerits was of itself useful, Professor Greene said. In a democracy, he said, “even the fight is instructional.”
Fair enough. Still, one can understand why some cities find comfort in a natural object like a mesa. Unlike many politicians and other public figures, mesas are mostly on the level.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
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