The Faculty Executive Committee delayed a vote Tuesday on whether to change the name of Columbus Day on the University calendar - a move that came as a disappointment to members of the group Native Americans at Brown, who have advocated such a move.
The committee agreed to take up the motion again on Feb. 20.
During the meeting, part of which was opened to about a dozen interested students, the committee's chair, Professor of Philosophy Jamie Dreier, said that while faculty members generally favor changing the holiday's name on the calendar, they lack the authority to endorse political statements like those found in the student proposal.
The current draft of the proposal contains a rationale for renaming Columbus Day that makes the issue "much more controversial than it needs to be," Dreier said.
"I think that you are inviting the law of controversy and dissent,"
he said.
Until they revise the proposal and remove a provision calling for the University to issue a formal statement regarding its position on the holiday, the proposal is not under faculty control, Dreier said. The committee has the power to change the calendar but not to endorse statements like some found in the student proposal, he said.
The committee issued recommendations to two of the students behind the proposal, Reiko Koyama '11 and Jerry Wolf Duff Sellers '09, on how to modify it. Koyama and Sellers, both members of Native Americans at Brown, led a "Speak-Out" campaign in October against the University's observance of Columbus Day. The Brown University Community Council passed a resolution later that month encouraging faculty and administrators to address the students' proposal.
The committee's suggestions included ways to make the motion stronger and less controversial by streamlining its stated rationale. The faculty members also said that while they believed a name-change was appropriate, the new name should honor Native American heritage rather than adopt a neutral name such as "fall weekend," the name suggested in the current draft.
Sellers told The Herald afterward that he was "entirely" optimistic about the upcoming vote once the name-change and rationale are further addressed.
"I think that the opportunity to change the name can be much more powerful," he said, adding that it could be a chance to celebrate not Columbus' misdeeds but his contributions. "Because Columbus created this relationship between two different hemispheres, I was able to have an Irish-Italian mom and a Native dad," he said.
A resolution to support modifying the name of Columbus Day will be introduced to the Undergraduate Council of Students at their general body meeting tonight, UCS Vice President Mike MacCombie '11 told The Herald. The council voted down a similar resolution last semester that would advocate changing both the name and date of the holiday, but this resolution will only support changing the name, MacCombie said.
MacCombie said he was confident the resolution would pass.
- With additional reporting by Ben Schreckinger
