UMass Library has a Bad Name

Time for a change.

Oh no! It's snowing again!

As always, the snow did nothing to stop these students from trudging past the W.E.B. Dubois Library on their way to class this morning.

Library namesake W.E.B. Dubois has been written about lately by syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell, and not in a flattering way. Says Sowell:

W.E.B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers.

Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was "absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order."

As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that "there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past."

Yikes, the UMass library named after a Nazi sympathizer? Of course Hitler isn't the worst mass murder of the 20th century, that would be Chairman Mao of socialist China (estimated death toll 60 million) whom Dubois also admired. 

For years a picture of Dubois proudly posing with Mao hung in the library lobby, where it attracted numerous complaints from Chinese exchange students who were shocked and offended that a picture of the most brutal dictator of modern times was so honored. When the lobby was recently remodeled, someone apparently "forgot" to re-hang the offending portrait.

In his youth DuBois was one of the founders of the NAACP, for which he should be praised. However the rest of his career was a terrible embarrassment, in which he displayed spectacularly bad judgement in supporting virtually every blood-thirsty dictator he ever heard of provided they (as both Hitler and Mao did) claimed to be socialists.

When I was at UMass back in the 70's, the library had no name. Everyone referred to it simply as "The UMass Library." Then in the 1980's, the peak years when campus leftists ran wild on campus, the move was made to name the library after DuBois, primarily to honor his radical leftist views. Since then the Cold War has ended, socialism is totally discredited and former socialist heroes like Mao are now regarded as the evil tyrants they really were.

Therefore, the naming of the library after the foolhardy DuBois has become an embarrassment to the university, sort of like the honorary degree UMass gave to African despot Robert Mugabe around the same time (again at the urging of campus leftists).

The time is now long overdue to quietly erase the DuBois name from the building and go back to simply calling it "The Library."

Perhaps the UMass Republican Club will lead the renaming effort. 

Meanwhile, as the snow comes floating down upon us, we can at least follow the advice of this sign outside a Northampton shop.

 



What do UMass students do when they're not rallying for or against something or studying in a library named after a Nazi sympathizer? They bounce off the walls.

They're good at it too.