(CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — As the third president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker helped usher the school into national prominence in the late 1800s.
But another part of his legacy has received renewed attention amid the nation’s reckoning with racial justice: his role in shaping the nation’s hardline policies toward Native Americans as a former head of the U.S. office of Indian Affairs and author of “The Indian Question,” a treatise that justified forcibly removing tribes from their lands and confining them to remote reservations.
MIT is now grappling with calls from Native American students and others to strip Walker’s name from a campus building that is central to student life — part of a broader push for the nation’s higher education institutions to atone for the role they played in the decimation of Native American tribes.
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“Walker might be the face of Indian genocide and it is troubling that his name is memorialized at MIT,” says David Lowry, the school’s newly-appointed distinguished fellow in Native American studies and a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a recent column in MIT Technology Review that addressing Walker’s legacy is an “essential step” in the school’s commitment to its Native American community. Native students account for 155 of the school’s nearly 3,700 students this year.
“The question we are working through now is what to do with these facts, as well as other aspects of the history of MIT and Native communities,” wrote Reif, who stopped short of weighing in on the name change debate in his column and declined to be interviewed.
Built in 1816, Walker Memorial houses student group offices, the college radio station and a campus pub. Its focal point is a great hall decorated with soaring murals meant to depict scientific learning and experimentation.
Alvin Harvey, a doctoral student and president of the MIT Native American…
Source : time
