Building Name Review Committee Principles

The legacy of a building’s namesake should be in alignment with the values and mission of the university. The values of UC Berkeley are expressed in our Principles of Community:

  • We place honesty and integrity in our teaching, learning, research, and administration at the highest level.
  • We recognize the intrinsic relationship between diversity and excellence in all our endeavors.
  • We affirm the dignity of all individuals and strive to uphold a just community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated.
  • We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.
  • We respect the differences as well as the commonalities that bring us together and call for civility and respect in our personal interactions.
  • We believe that active participation and leadership in addressing the most pressing issues facing our local and global communities are central to our educational mission.
  • We embrace open and equitable access to opportunities for learning and development as our obligation and goal.

In deciding whether to remove a building name, we believe that the committee should be guided by two principles:

1. As stated in the Regents of the University of California Policy 4400: University of California Diversity Statement:

[T]he University of California renews its commitment to the full realization of its historic promise to recognize and nurture merit, talent, and achievement by supporting diversity and equal opportunity in its education, services, and administration, as well as research and creative activity. The University particularly acknowledges the acute need to remove barriers to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of talented students, faculty, and staff from historically excluded populations who are currently underrepresented.

We view it our intellectual and ethical responsibility to promote an inclusive, global perspective of the peoples and cultures of the world, particularly in view of past and current scholarship in the United States that may omit, ignore, or silence the perspectives of many groups, such as ethnic minorities, people from non-European nations, women, lesbian, gay and transgender, and disabled people among others.

2. Whether or not a building’s name is removed, we believe it is historically and socially valuable to retain a public record, perhaps in the form of a plaque in the building, that notes the building’s history of naming and the reasons for removing the name.

Memorial Stadium