REMOVE THEIR NAMES: Kr*v*s, R*b*rts & the Monuments to their Barbarism at Claremont McKenna College

"Without exception, cultural treasures...have an origin [we] cannot contemplate without horror....There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

                                            -- Walter Benjamin, "Thesis VII," On the Concept of History.

In recent months and years, names that should never have been affixed to public buildings have been coming down, especially on our college campuses.

In 2017, Yale University, for instance, removed the name of white supremacist John Calhoun (Yale 1804), from one of its residential colleges, renaming the college after Grace Murray Hopper (who earned a PhD in maths from Yale in 1934).  It's good to have removed Calhoun's name, but let's agree that it should not have taken a century-plus to know that white supremacism and slavery are wrong and that Calhoun deserves no honors: it should not have taken a century-plus to remove a name that should never have been honored with a building. 

Which brings us to the question: what buildings have names of contemporary and still-living figures that should be removed now, not in the next century, not in retrospect.  Ethics, after all, doesn't require or benefit from waiting until a distant future.      

For the Claremont Colleges, where I teach, I will start by proposing two: Kravis Center and the Roberts Pavilion, both of Claremont McKenna College (CMC).

Henry Kravis (henceforth "K") and George R. Roberts (henceforth "R") are alums of CMC, class of '67 and '66 respectively; and both are now trustees of College--not so coincidentally, they're also cousins.  They first gained broad public attention in the 1980s, when they pioneered what are known as "leveraged buyouts" of LBOs and led one of the most famous and infamous LBOs, the takeover of RJR Nabisco (a story told in the book, Barbarians at the Gate).  

As is characteristic of the high-risk, high reward financial maneuvers of the neoliberal era of financial de-regulation, LBOs have proven highly lucrative for finance capitalists (like K & R), at the expense of diminished compensation for workers (to invoke Thomas Pikkety's analysis of the broad increase in wealth inequality in recent decades; see also the 2010 film, "Inside Job," for the contribution of LBOs to the instability of financial markets and the resulting harms from that instability).

Rapacious finance capitalism is not entrepreneurial, in the sense of really building anything--and it is nothing to honor persons for by placing their names on monumental buildings on a college campus.

But we do not need to look back on the 1980s to see that K&R are hardly persons of ethics and hardly persons deserving of honor.   

At this very moment, right now in 2021, the investment firm KKR, which K & R jointly lead, is financing the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline (CGL), which is set to pass through un-ceded Wet'suwet'en Territory, despite tribal opposition, for the purpose of transporting fracked natural gas.

Let's say this clearly.  As fully as slavery was evil in its day, and not just a century-plus later, trampling the rights and lives of Indigenous people is evil right now--the wrongness of this is not a fruit that ripens only later. And the same is true in 2021 of any further extraction of fossil fuels, with fracking deserving special attention as particularly awful contributor to our unfolding climate catastrophe and a wide range of environmental harms.

Put simply, we know now that K & R are unethical profiteers, and there is no good reason to wait a century-plus to REMOVE THEIR NAMES.

The Claremont Colleges campaign to REMOVE THEIR NAMES is in solidarity with the larger struggle to Shut Down KKR.  The local campaign can be followed on twitter @KKRKills.