Eavan Boland, who wrote about women's lives, is a better fit for ...
Trinity College Dublin’s largest library has been denamed and now renamed. The new dedication will celebrate Irish poet and 1966 TCD graduate Eavan Boland and replaces that of fellow Trinity graduate, philosopher and much less good poet George Berkeley.
In 2015, I spent four lovely months in northern California. My PhD dissertation topic was Berkeley and mathematical infinitesimals, and I managed to get funding to spend the autumn (“fall”, as I would learn) working under the supervision of a very brilliant philosopher of mathematics over there.
My first week was the first of the college calendar. Societies and clubs (and two good barbershop groups) filled the promenade that led up Sproul Plaza, under the Sather Gate, from which my new commute eventually departed to get me to the philosophy department in Moses Hall. I took a picture of the “Berkeley College Republicans” stand (featuring a lone woman on a chair looking down into her phone), which was the only table with nobody near it. I’m no photographer, but the backdrop of Sather Gate – visual accompaniment to famous imagery of the Free Speech Movement that established 1960s American campus protests –seemed fitting. Tickled, I sent it to my godfather, a retired American cultural historian. Looking at that photo now, I’m struck by the potency of Berkeley symbology.
Not everyone realises Berkeley, California, was named after George Berkeley, Ireland’s most famous philosopher (no disrespect intended to the John Scotus Eriugena community). Reportedly, American politician Frederick H Billings read Berkeley’s poem Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America on a visit to the site that would become the University of California at Berkeley. The poem, reflecting Berkeley’s panicked belief that European Christianity was collapsing and that transatlantic imperialism represented the great hope for Anglicanism, opens as follows: “Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”
Apparently, Billings liked the verse and his entourage agreed that the new university should honour its author. The rest is history. Now, when you mention Berkeley (at least, in the American pronunciation that runs closer to “turkey” than the scholarly usage rhyming with “car key”) the immediate associations skirt very wide of a philosopher bishop or immaterialist metaphysics. The legacy that rose out of that site, named in 1866, is significant and illustrative of the complexity of institutional enshrinements and the philosophy behind names. The (California) Berkeley brand now symbolises political activism and significant moments in liberal and left-wing American thinking. Berkeley, California, has clearly outgrown the circumstances of the act of naming that gave it a social meaning of sorts.
Names and their meanings are philosophically complex. The California case shows it would be unwise to rename everything named after a figure whose troubling personal legacy comes to light. The TCD library was different. It was named fairly recently, in 1978, and, given the tight connection between George Berkeley and Trinity, the appropriateness of the name in the current context warrants deeper scrutiny. Though the library is one of TCD’s multiple brilliant libraries, it would be an exaggeration to say that it has developed a legacy all of its own. It was just an important piece of institutional infrastructure named to celebrate one of the most famous thinkers who worked there.
The reasons given for denaming the library were that the working group came to believe maintaining it was “inconsistent with the university’s core values of human dignity, freedom, inclusivity and equality”. Human dignity is debatable, but I can assure you freedom, inclusivity and equality are not core to Berkeleyan ideals.
Arguments against renaming mostly came from those who thought holding Berkeley to today’s moral standards was anachronistic. I think this is wrong-headed. It’s important to ensure that norms of the day are part of our ethical evaluations of historical actions, but it’s mistaken to think they are decisive considerations. Otherwise, we run dangerously close to suggesting that the ethical status of an act is equivalent to its contemporary popularity.
Knowing Berkeley’s thinking as intimately as I do, I find it frankly patronising to endorse the idea that a mind like his couldn’t have imagined selling, dehumanising, separating and torturing people might be wrong.
In this context and indeed paper, it was asked “do we think less of Cicero because he, like most prominent Romans, was a slave-owner in a slave-owning society?” For me, this is an obvious “yes”. I can separate the excellence of the work and that of the person. And importantly, thinking less of him doesn’t mean thinking nothing of him, he is obviously an important thinker – as is Berkeley – but that less might be exactly the difference that meant I didn’t name a public institution after him in this day and age. If we wouldn’t rename something for these guys now, why should habit and tradition block us from a serious investigation of the merits of the name continuing when significant communities of stakeholders in the university lodge complaints about it. These issues are complex, but rigorous case-by-case analysis is the only way here.
Boland is a much better fit for Trinity’s current values. When I had my most recent baby, Caitriona Lally told me about Boland’s poem Night Feed, written while she was writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital. The poem celebrates the power and fragility of early parenthood, as a new mother feeds her baby in the hospital nursery. Its ending moved me greatly: “Worms turn. Stars go in. Even the moon is losing face. Poplars stilt for dawn/And we begin/The long fall from grace. I tuck you in.”
[ Eavan Boland obituary: Outstanding Irish poet and academicOpens in new window ]
The very fact of a celebrated poem emanating from the halls of Holles Street feels like a thing that could not have been possible long ago. Much less a woman poet enshrined in Trinity architecture. Values change and we should accept that our institutional symbols should change with them from time to time. There will only ever be so many buildings for the many people we might want to celebrate, and a culture of changeover reflecting our shifting – and, one hopes, improving – ideals is no bad thing.
Dr Clare Moriarty is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin
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