The Nicholas Murray Butler Library, the library that all Columbia students know and love/hate, has been an icon of the Columbia campus for years. This icon, however, is named after a man whose ideas and beliefs are clearly transgressive to Columbia's ideals as a progressive, socially conscious educational institution. In light of many changes in the names of buildings on college campuses (Calhoun College at Yale, Wilson College at Princeton, Aycock Hall at Duke, etc.), it is time that we give a brief, critical look into the past of the man whose name is plastered on one of our most frequented and notable buildings.

One of the most telling features of Nicholas Murray Butler's ideology was his explicit sympathy for fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After failing to secure the 1920 Republican party nomination, Butler "continued to preach vigilance and the excellence of the American capitalist system, and by the mid-1920s he had eagerly embraced a new ally in the struggle against Bolshevism: Benito Mussolini." (Rosenthal 381). In contrast to the experiment of communism of his time, which Butler perceived to be on the verge of collapse, fascism was, for him,“the amazing movement which under the leadership of Premier Mussolini has brought new life and vigor and power and ambition to the great people of the Italian peninsula." After multiple friendly diplomatic visits to Rome to speak with Mussolini, Butler commented that “Mussolini has endowed Italy with a new sense of youth. They are young in spirit, young in feeling, young in ambition and young in enthusiasm. They wish to sit again in the seats of the mighty and to be hailed and looked upon as one of the great intellectual and political forces of the modern world." (Rosenthal 383). Butler eventually came to organize and sponsor an institute for "Italian cultural learning" that, while purportedly "non-political," had explicit support from Mussolini, and mostly every student attending the institute were fascist sympathizers.

With the rise of Nazi Germany, Butler began to see it difficult to reconcile his ideas in the face of public opposition. Rosenthal explains: "feeling constrained in his public role as international statesman not to sever his connections to Germany, however, Butler also was reluctant privately to reject the nation whose spiritual and intellectual ideals he once passionately admired. The tension between his commitment to the German past and the dreadful reality of the Nazi present produced an ugly scene at Columbia in the spring of 1936. While Butler was in Europe during February, Columbia, along with other universities throughout the world, received an invitation from the University of Heidelberg to send a representative to participate in festivities for its 550th anniversary in late June. In Butler’s absence, the assistant secretary of the university, Philip Hayden, announced Columbia’s acceptance" (392). Despite student opposition (and protests from prominent figures of his time), Butler "determined that this artfully contrived event at which propaganda minister Goebbels, among other Nazi officials, would speak, was safely nonpolitical. Columbia, in short, would attend."

His sympathy for fascism extended to his very sinister anti-semitism. "His most creative involvement with the undergraduate college seems to have come in searching for ways to keeps its Jewish enrollment down. He considered having applicants take physicals that would 'find grounds to eliminate socially unappealing Jews smart enough to have passed the entrance examination,' and throughout the 1930's he funneled Jewish students into an affiliated two-year college in Brooklyn. Its courses were "'taught largely by junior faculty members from Morningside Heights,' and the dropout rate was enormous. When it closed after 10 years, Butler at last gave up on the 'Hebrew problem.'" (Mallon 2). He explained his "analysis of Jews—as being distressingly persistent, seeking special privileges by law, and supplying 'leaders for anarchistic, socialistic and other movements of unrest'—was as “true as gospel.'" (Rosenthal 333). When considering Joseph Jastrow, a distinguished psychologist, for an appointment to Teachers College, Butler had said Joseph “is, I’m sorry to say, a Hebrew.”

We must now ask ourselves, do we, as the Columbia community committed to inclusion, equal rights, and opportunities for all, stand for Nicholas Murray Butler's name to be representative of us and our library? I for one, will not stand for this, and propose a simple solution: rename the library (in the loosest sense of "rename") to Judith Butler Library.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. he is most famous for her notion of gender performativity, but her work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war. She has received countless awards for her teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale's Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. Indeed, she is described in alt.culture as "one of the superstars of '90s academia, with a devoted following of grad students nationwide."

Judith Butler, of course, has an excellent record in contemporary philosophy and the advancement of progressive, socially conscious values. Her Berkeley Comparative Literature department professor page describes her as such: "Butler is active in gender and sexual politics and human rights, anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and their committee on Academic Freedom. She was most recently the chair of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibilities for the MLA. She is affiliated with the Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She was the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13). She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and the Research Lecturer honor at UC Berkeley in 2005. She is as well the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the College des Hautes Etudes in Paris. She has received honorary degrees from Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University, University of St. Andrews, Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the Université de Liége in Belgium. In 2014, she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry. In 2015 she was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy."

Judith Butler is an outstanding representation of the modern, progressive university. I would go as far as to argue that she represents the student body much more then Nicholas Murray Butler can and ever has. She is a contemporary hero that anyone can find inspiration from, and her ideas are much more worth sharing than the parochial, out-dated ideologies of Nicholas Murray Butler. While this is of course a bold and lofty proposal, I believe that this change could mark a significant departure from the narrow, old-fashioned atmosphere that characterizes many college campuses across the United States. In any case, the name change does not necessitate much physical changes, and the colloquial name of "Butler Library" still can ring true throughout the campus.

Bibliography: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22mallon.html?pagewanted=all Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler http://complit.berkeley.edu/?page_id=168