Why is yale named yale

When he left India though, his wealth had increased manifold. Reviewing 'Elihu Yale' by Diana Scarisbrick and Benjamin Zucker, Charles Dameron wrote for The Wall Street Journal , "The precise size of his fortune by the time he left India is unclear, but his assets were numerous enough that their disposal at his death required seven separate auctions.

He however was able to take a sizable fortune with him to England and soon he entered the diamond trade in London, along with turning philanthropist. George on the Madras coast, a devastating famine led to an uptick in the local slave trade. As more and more bodies became available on the open market, Yale and other company officials took advantage of the labor surplus, buying hundreds of slaves and shipping them to the English colony on Saint Helena," it said.

In just one month in , Fort St. George exported at least individuals. As governor and president of the Madras settlement, Yale enforced the ten-slaves-per-vessel rule. On two separate occasions, he sentenced 'black Criminalls' accused of burglary to suffer whipping, branding, and foreign enslavement. Although he probably did not own any of these people— the majority were held as the property of the East India Company— he certainly profited both directly and indirectly from their sale," it stated.

The Yale University was earlier known as Collegiate School at Saybrook, and in , Elihu had made his first donation to the institution in the form of 32 books. The Saybrook school moved to New Haven in and in , Cotton Mather, an American Congregational minister and author , wrote to Elihu asking him to make a donation to the school. Cotton hinted that if Elihu did provide them with a grant, they would rename the school after him.

This money was put in the construction of the Yale college. My position is not particularly exalted. Instead, I am stuck listening to the chorus of trolls and imps who are driving this debate online, and occasionally fooling normal people into taking positions on their terms.

We have a moral duty to avoid confected controversies such as these. No one was venerating him; no one was trying to live up to his ideals. The name Yale does not belong to Elihu, but to the university, with its faults and virtues, not his. Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson. The same cannot be said for Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, or John C. Calhoun, whose name was removed from a Yale dormitory in Wilson was not a casual bigot. He should be judged harshly as a politician.

Lee is known for being a traitor—an even easier case. Calhoun, I think, was more complicated. He was a Yale graduate and a United States senator, a secretary of war and of state, and a vice president, and he is one of very few American political theorists of the 19th century whose work repays reading today.

Crucial to the renaming decision in was the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, chaired by Witt. In an email to the News, Witt wrote that roughly, the three considerations articulated by his committee in the event of a possible renaming are: principal legacy, standards of the time and reasons for the naming.

Witt also noted the origins of the recent call to rename Yale, and emphasized that other social concerns are more worthy of attention.

According to Steven Pincus, a former Yale professor of history and current professor at the University of Chicago, Yale was never a slave trader and never owned slaves — in fact, Yale opposed the slave trade during his time as a prominent member of the East India Company and governor of Madras, Pincus argued. This later involvement, Pincus said, was the likely inspiration of a controversial portrait of Elihu Yale that used to hang in the Yale Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall until its removal in The picture was later removed from the Corporation room, with administrators citing controversy surrounding the racist overtones of the artwork.