Name Change Sought For College Building Named For Gay Foe

[davidinalameda]

http://www.365gay.com/Newscon06/10/100406college.htm

Students at the University of Missouri-Columbia have launched a campaign to rename the student union building because it is christened in honor of a former dean who worked to purge the campus of gay students and professors more than a half-century ago.

Erin Kennedy and two other students spent the summer poring over Thomas A. Brady's personal papers in the university archives and said the documents show that Brady regularly corresponded with the university president over ways "to establish machinery for identification and apprehension" of homosexuals.

The student union was built and named Brady Commons in 1966, two years after Brady's death. Brady was also a history professor and a university vice president.

"We are not suggesting that Brady's ideals were out of the mainstream at the time," the students wrote in a recent issue of The Maneater, the student newspaper. "We are simply wondering why (the university) would continue to leave a building ... named after a man who represented where the university has been, rather than where it is going."

The student union is in the early stages of a $58.7 million expansion that would nearly double its size. While the project has been temporarily dubbed the MU Student Center in hopes of attracting a donor interested in naming rights, campus officials have told the protesters that a section of the new complex will retain the Brady name.

[Mabus]

1. Columbia is one of the bright spots in Missouri

Like my town of Lawrence. College towns are great.

I do hope they manage to get a better name for a student union because it shouldn't be named for an anti-gay bigot.