On Monday, Macalester College in St. Paul announced that its board of trustees voted to remove the name of its founder from two buildings, Neill Hall and Neill Room, after students confronted school officials, claiming that Neill’s historical writings and attitudes toward Native Americans were racist. As of today, his name has already been removed.
Macalester College claims that if they knew of these findings before renaming the building a few years ago, they would not have gone through with it. A statement from the college reports, “Now that those writings have been discovered…they cannot be ignored or dismissed,” it continues, “All on the Board are keenly aware of the complexity surrounding the question of renaming buildings and of judging figures in the past by the standards of the present. We are aware that even people who do good things can also do bad things, and that history is complicated. But we believe, too, that abhorrent beliefs and writings that stand out even within an historical context should not be overlooked, and that continuing to honor Neill as if these beliefs and writings were not unearthed would be wrong.”
Neill was not only the founder of Macalaster College in 1874 but he was also a historian, author of several books, first chancellor of the University of Minnesota, and founded two churches in the state. The college aims to acknowledge these contributions in a way other than having a building bear his name.
In light of change, the final plan for a billion-dollar development of the old Ford plant in St. Paul was announced last week. Since the plant’s closing more than 11 years ago, they have been planning what should take its place. This plan is essentially a whole new neighborhood for St. Paul.
The site will include 3,800 housing units, 265,000 square feet of office space, 150,000 feet of retail space and a $92 million investment in new green space and parks. 20% of housing units will be set aside for affordable housing. St Paul Mayor Melvin Carter states that,“Fully built, the site will generate $1 billion in added property tax value to the city’s current $23 billion tax base”. Overall, the project will create 14,500 construction jobs, and once finished over 1,000 permanent workers will hold jobs on the site.The build out is scheduled to take roughly 20 years, but Ryan Companies, the developer, states that the first resident could move in as early as three years.
On Wednesday, Israel said it struck dozens of Iranian targets in Syria in a “wide-scale” operation in response to rocket fire on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights the day before.
A Britain-based war monitoring group said the strikes killed at least 23 people, including 15 non-Syrians, some of them Iranians. Syrian state media only reported that two civilians were killed.The Israeli militarysaid the attack “threatens Israeli security, regional stability and the Syrian regime,” and vowed to “continue operating firmly and resolutely” against Iran in Syria. Tuesday’s rocket fire on the Golan was the sixth attempt by Iran to attack Israeli targets since February 2018.
Sophia Primozich can be reached at sophia.primozich@stthomas.edu.