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Notes & CommentsMay 2009 Goodbye, Columbus The death of a holiday at Brown. How are things elsewhere in the academy? Well, last month the faculty at Brown University voted to rename Columbus Day “Fall Weekend.” What do you make of that? Rather lacking in poetry, “Fall Weekend.” But from the perspective of the tenured elite, that anodyne moniker has the advantage of ideological neutrality. “Fall Weekend” does not commemorate a European explorer. It therefore does not honor the memory of the settlement and cultivation of the American continent and, by implication, withholds approbation of the ultimate fruit of that settling and cultivation: the founding of the United States. As Fox News reported, the Brown faculty acted in response to the clamoring of students, hundreds of whom had petitioned the university “to stop observing Columbus Day, saying Christopher Columbus’s violent treatment of Native Americans he encountered was inconsistent with Brown’s values.” This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 May 2009, on page 2 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Goodbye--Columbus-4072
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