Berkeley wants to drop name of its law school

Namesake was a 19th century attorney who was for the Chinese Exclusion Act

For more than 100 years the University of California, Berkeley School of Law has been known colloquially as Boalt Hall. Now its dean wants the name dropped because it honors a man known to have been an anti-Chinese racist.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky announced his decision on Tuesday in a written statement after considering a law school committee's recommendation to drop the Boalt name, and evaluating more than 600 messages about it, with 60 percent for removing the name and 40 percent against.

John Henry Boalt was a 19th-century San Francisco attorney and never a student at the school. He described Chinese laborers coming into California as unassimilable murderers and thieves and successfully pressed for an 1882 federal ban on Chinese immigration, which became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Boalt also spoke derisively about Native Americans and people of African descent.

His past became widely known last year after Charles Reichmann, a Berkeley law lecturer, published an op-ed article and then a law review article.

In 1906, Boalt's widow, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, paid for a granite building in the center of campus that was once the law school, and then she donated $200,000 for a law school endowment. A wing of the new law school built in 1951 became Boalt Hall.

The campus building committee will launch its own review, which will include a public hearing, with a decision by UC Chancellor Carol Christ expected next spring. University President Janet Napolitano would have the final say.

Chemerinsky said some suggested that the hall be named for Boalt's widow, who is not known to have shared her husband's bigotry. But he said Boalt's widow donated the money to honor her husband, so the problem would remain.

He said the law school will stop using the name in most other cases and will encourage student and alumni organizations to do likewise. He said that the school will find ways to make sure that Boalt's racism is remembered.

Tar Rakhra, co-chair of Berkeley Law's Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and a second-year student at the law school, told the Los Angeles Times that he empathized with alumni who feel a close link with the Boalt name. "It's a tough, painful thing for them," he said, "but we have to do the right thing and the right thing is to acknowledge John Boalt's racist past."

Reichmann, who wrote the op-ed, said he is thrilled to have made a difference. "It's part of society's ongoing obligation to consider its history," told the newspaper.

In September, Stanford University announced plans to remove Father Junipero Serra's name from two buildings and a key mall on campus but will keep the name of the founder of the California mission system on other campus features.

The university said that while Serra was the "founder and clearly identified leader of the California mission system, which played a role in the founding of modern California," the legacy of the Roman Catholic priest includes the "harmful and violent impacts of the mission system on Native Americans, including through forced labor, forced living arrangements and corporal punishment."

Contact the writer at aiheping@chinadailyusa.com