Grace Hopper College

Based on Wikipedia: Grace Hopper College

In the summer of 2016, a Black dishwasher named Corey Menafee grabbed a broomstick in a Yale dining hall and smashed a stained glass window depicting enslaved people picking cotton. He'd been washing dishes beneath that image for years. "I no longer wanted to be subjected to seeing the racist, very degrading image at my place of work," he later explained. That single act of defiance crystallized decades of tension over one of Yale's most controversial buildings—a residential college that had been named for John C. Calhoun, one of America's most influential defenders of slavery.

Menafee was initially arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges. Yale chose not to press charges, and after first accepting his resignation, eventually rehired him to work at a different location on campus. But the window he shattered was just one piece of a much larger story about how institutions remember their past, who gets memorialized, and what happens when the weight of history becomes unbearable.

The Building and Its Original Namesake

Grace Hopper College stands at the corner of College and Elm Streets in New Haven, Connecticut. It opened in 1933 as one of eight undergraduate residential colleges funded by Edward Harkness, a Standard Oil heir who gave Yale millions to create a system modeled on Oxford and Cambridge. Each college would be a self-contained community where students lived, ate, and socialized together for all four years.

The architect was John Russell Pope, a classicist who later designed the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Pope gave the building a Neo-Gothic style that matched Yale's medieval aesthetic, complete with stone walls, arched windows, and a courtyard that would later famously feature a tire swing.

When the college opened, it was named for John C. Calhoun, class of 1804.

Calhoun arrived at Yale as a young man from South Carolina in November 1802. He was socially isolated there, writing to his cousin that he found "a considerable prejudice here against both the southern states and students." Despite this chilly reception, he excelled academically, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and was selected to deliver the commencement address—though illness prevented him from actually giving it.

After obtaining a law degree from Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, Calhoun returned south and entered politics. His rise was swift and impressive. Elected to Congress in 1810, he became one of the "War Hawks" who pushed for the War of 1812 against Britain. He served as Secretary of War under President James Monroe, then was elected Vice President—a position he held under two different presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He's one of only two people in American history to serve as Vice President under two different chief executives.

But Calhoun is remembered today less for these accomplishments than for what he advocated. He was the intellectual architect of pro-slavery ideology in the antebellum South. While earlier apologists had defended slavery as a "necessary evil"—something regrettable but economically essential—Calhoun went much further. He called slavery a "positive good," arguing that it benefited both white masters and the Black people they enslaved. He believed in white supremacy as a matter of principle, not just practice.

Calhoun also developed the doctrine of "nullification," arguing that states could invalidate federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. He resigned the vice presidency in 1832 to become a Senator from South Carolina, where he could more directly fight for slaveholder interests. His ideas laid the intellectual groundwork for secession and the Civil War that would come less than a decade after his death in 1850.

Why Yale Honored Him in the First Place

To understand why Yale named a residential college after Calhoun, you have to understand how he was perceived in the early twentieth century—and how institutions create their own selective memories.

When the residential colleges were being planned around 1930, Calhoun was considered one of Yale's most distinguished graduates. For the university's first two centuries, he was the only Yale alumnus elected to federal executive office—not until William Howard Taft won the presidency in 1909 did another Yalie reach that level. A 1914 biography by Yale Secretary Anson Phelps Stokes celebrated Calhoun as an "eminent Yale man" without once mentioning his slaveholdings or his defense of the institution.

This wasn't unusual. In the Jim Crow era, many white Americans—including those at elite Northern institutions—either minimized or romanticized the antebellum South. Calhoun could be remembered as a brilliant political theorist, a powerful orator, and a consequential statesman. His racism was treated as incidental to his greatness, or simply ignored altogether.

Yale had already begun commemorating Calhoun during the construction of the Memorial Quadrangle in 1917, when an eight-foot statue of him was placed on Harkness Tower alongside seven other "Yale worthies" from before the twentieth century. Of those eight, only Calhoun and the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards were chosen as namesakes for residential colleges.

The college didn't just carry his name. Its coat of arms incorporated the Calhoun family crest—a diagonal cross called a saltire, in black on white. The dining hall featured stained glass windows depicting scenes that, however they were intended at the time, looked to many later observers like celebrations of plantation life. One panel showed a Black man kneeling in shackles before Calhoun. Another showed enslaved people picking cotton in fields.

Living in Calhoun's Shadow

For its first few decades, Calhoun College was actually considered one of the less desirable residential assignments. The corner of College and Elm Streets was served by trolley cars that screeched around the turn, creating constant noise. This changed under Master Charles Schroeder, a popular figure who jokingly promised that if the trolley service were ever removed, he'd buy a trolley car, put it in the courtyard, and throw a celebration.

The trolleys stopped running in 1949. Schroeder couldn't get a whole car, but he did secure a fare-collecting machine from one of the trolleys and made good on his promise to celebrate. Thus was born "Trolley Night," an annual dance party that became one of the college's most beloved traditions.

The college developed other quirks over the years. It was the only residential college with its own sauna—removed during renovations in 2005. Its courtyard featured a tire swing that hung from a massive elm tree, an incongruously playful touch against the Gothic stone architecture. When a new master named Turan Onat tried to remove the swing in 1990 to "restore the courtyard to a grassier state," students reinstalled it overnight, and Onat quickly reversed his position.

That elm eventually had to come down anyway. By 2007, it was rotting from the ground up and leaning dangerously. The tree was taller than the five- and six-story building itself, and posed a real threat to the structure and to students below. Its removal marked the end of an era.

The Name Becomes a Problem

The debate over Calhoun's name waxed and waned for decades, intensifying as American society's understanding of racism and its history evolved.

In 1992, the graduating seniors commissioned a plaque acknowledging "the unfortunate reality of John C. Calhoun's legacy" while still supporting keeping the name for "historical purposes." Around the same time, the stained glass window showing a Black man kneeling before Calhoun was quietly altered to show Calhoun alone—the enslaved figure simply removed.

But removing one figure from one window didn't resolve the underlying tension. The dining hall still featured other images of slavery. The name still honored a man who had called human bondage a positive good. And as America grappled more openly with its racial history, the contradiction became harder to ignore.

The breaking point came in June 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—Calhoun's home state, where his legacy loomed especially large. The massacre ignited a nationwide conversation about Confederate monuments, the Confederate battle flag, and all the ways American public spaces still honored defenders of slavery.

Students and alumni petitioned Yale to rename the college. Radio commentators questioned whether keeping the name constituted an ongoing endorsement of white supremacy. The students' petition acknowledged that Calhoun had been respected in his time as an "extraordinary American statesman," but argued that he was also "one of the most prolific defenders of slavery and white supremacy" in American history.

Yale's president, Peter Salovey, addressed the issue in his speech to the freshman class of 2019. He described Calhoun's political achievements—vice president, secretary of war, secretary of state, congressman, senator—then acknowledged that Calhoun had also "believed that the highest forms of civilization depend on involuntary servitude" and that "the races he thought to be inferior, black people in particular, ought to be subjected to it for the sake of their own best interests."

And yet, Salovey announced in April 2016 that the name would stay.

The Decision to Keep the Name

Salovey's reasoning reflected a common argument made about Confederate monuments and similar memorials: that erasing them would mean erasing history. "Yale is part of that history," he said. "We cannot erase American history, but we can confront it, teach it and learn from it."

He argued that students living in Calhoun's "shadow" would be "better prepared to rise to the challenges of the present and the future." Removing the name, he suggested, would "obscure" Calhoun's "legacy of slavery rather than addressing it."

At the same time, Salovey announced that the title "master"—traditionally used for the faculty head of each residential college—would be changed to "head of college." The word carried too much weight from its use by American slaveholders.

The decision satisfied almost no one. Critics pointed out the contradiction: if "master" was too freighted with slavery's legacy to keep using, how could "Calhoun" be acceptable? Others argued that living under Calhoun's name wasn't educational—it was a daily indignity, especially for Black students and staff.

And then, two months later, Corey Menafee swung a broomstick at a stained glass window.

A Dishwasher's Breaking Point

Menafee had worked in the dining hall for years. Every day, he washed dishes beneath windows that depicted enslaved Black people laboring in fields. The images were part of the original design, installed in the 1930s when such depictions were considered acceptable, even decorative.

Yale had plans to replace some of the windows in 2016. But before that could happen, Menafee took matters into his own hands. He knocked out the panel showing slaves harvesting cotton.

"There's always better ways of doing things like that than just destroying things," he acknowledged later. But he'd reached his limit.

The university's response was telling. Yale initially accepted Menafee's resignation and supported criminal charges, but public backlash was swift and severe. The optics were terrible: a prestigious university prosecuting a Black worker for destroying a racist image that the university itself had acknowledged was problematic. Yale dropped the charges, and Menafee was rehired to work elsewhere on campus.

The incident made national news and intensified pressure to address not just the windows but the name itself.

The Reversal

Partly because of the controversy, Yale established a formal policy for considering whether to rename buildings and other campus institutions. One of the first cases the resulting task force took up was Calhoun College itself.

In February 2017—less than a year after Salovey had insisted the name would stay—the task force recommended changing it. The Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, accepted the recommendation and voted to rename the college after Grace Murray Hopper, effective July 1, 2017.

The reversal was remarkable. Universities, like most large institutions, tend to avoid admitting mistakes. Salovey had made his case for keeping the name in strong terms. But the combination of the Charleston massacre, the window incident, ongoing protests, and broader national conversations about race had shifted the ground beneath Yale's feet.

Who Was Grace Hopper?

The new namesake represents almost everything Calhoun did not.

Grace Murray Hopper earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934, just a year after the residential college bearing Calhoun's name had opened. Her dissertation, written under the direction of the Norwegian mathematician Øystein Ore, was titled "New Types of Irreducibility Criteria." It was highly technical work in abstract algebra—about as far from plantation politics as one could imagine.

During World War Two, Hopper joined the United States Navy Reserve and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There she worked on the Mark I computer, one of the earliest electromechanical computers ever built. It was the size of a room, made of more than 750,000 parts, and used mechanical switches rather than electronic circuits.

Hopper became one of the first programmers in history. She helped develop the Mark II and Mark III computers, and later worked on UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer produced in the United States. She invented the first compiler—a program that translates human-readable code into machine instructions—which made programming accessible to people who weren't electrical engineers. She was instrumental in developing COBOL, one of the first programming languages designed to resemble English, which remained in widespread use for decades.

The story goes that Hopper also popularized the term "debugging" after her team found an actual moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer, causing it to malfunction. Whether or not she coined the term, she certainly helped make it part of the programming lexicon.

Hopper rose to the rank of Rear Admiral in the Navy—one of the few women ever to achieve that rank—and remained on active duty until age 79, making her the oldest serving officer in the United States Armed Forces at the time of her retirement in 1986. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2016, the same year Yale was debating whether to keep Calhoun's name.

Where Calhoun argued for human bondage, Hopper worked to free human beings from tedious labor. Where Calhoun believed some races were inherently inferior, Hopper opened doors in a field that had been almost entirely closed to women. Where Calhoun left a legacy of division that helped spark a civil war, Hopper left tools that connected people across distances and transformed every aspect of modern life.

The New Symbols

With the new name came new heraldry. The college's coat of arms, designed in 2017, was meant to honor Hopper's legacy while acknowledging the building's history.

The new arms feature a heraldic dolphin—a stylized figure that in heraldry represents leadership and, appropriately for a Navy admiral, the sea. Rectangles and circles represent Hopper's contributions to mathematics and computer science, evoking both punch cards and the binary logic underlying all digital computation.

One element connects the new arms to the old: a scalloped bar called an "engrailed" pattern, suggesting waves. This same engrailed pattern appeared in the Calhoun family crest. The designers deliberately included it as an acknowledgment that the college's history didn't begin in 2017—that the building itself carries the weight of what it once represented, even as it takes on a new identity.

The college colors are no longer black, navy blue, and gold. That combination too closely echoed Calhoun. The new palette reflects the change.

What the Building Has Seen

The land where Grace Hopper College stands has been many things over the centuries.

In 1641, a man named John Brockston established a farm there. After the American Revolutionary War, an inn was built on the site—an inn that would later become the meeting place of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the United States, founded in 1776.

From 1863 to 1931, the Yale Divinity School occupied the land, housed in three buildings: West Divinity Hall, Marquand Chapel, and East Divinity Hall. When Yale President James Rowland Angell announced the residential college plan in 1930, these buildings were demolished, and the Divinity School moved to its current location atop Prospect Hill.

Then came the Neo-Gothic dormitory, named for a defender of slavery, where students dined beneath images of bondage for more than eighty years.

Now it bears the name of a mathematician and naval officer who helped invent the digital age.

The Broader Question

The renaming of Calhoun College was part of a larger national reckoning that accelerated after Charleston. Confederate monuments came down across the South. Schools and streets were renamed. Some changes happened through official processes; others, like the toppling of statues during the 2020 protests following George Floyd's murder, happened through direct action that echoed Corey Menafee's broomstick.

Yale's situation illustrated the complexity of these debates. A 2001 report had revealed that at least seven of the original residential college namesakes were slaveholders. In 2009, students protested by posting alternative names near the college entrances. Critics pointed out that Yale's own namesake, Elihu Yale, was a slave trader—raising the question of how the university could justify changing "Calhoun" while keeping "Yale."

The question has no easy answer. Where does the reckoning end? Should every building named for someone complicit in historical injustice be renamed? That would require renaming most of the oldest institutions in the country. Should none of them be renamed, on the grounds that erasing names erases history? That would mean continuing to honor people whose values we now reject.

Yale's approach was to treat each case individually rather than establish a blanket policy. Calhoun was different, the task force concluded, because his principal legacy was his defense of slavery and white supremacy. Unlike figures who owned slaves but are remembered primarily for other contributions, Calhoun is remembered specifically for his role in justifying human bondage. That made his case exceptional.

Notable Alumni of the College

Over its history, the residential college—under both names—has housed students who went on to remarkable careers. The actress Jodie Foster graduated in 1985. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the literary critic and Harvard professor who became a public intellectual through his television work on African American history, graduated in 1973. Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, graduated in 1974. William Nordhaus, another Nobel laureate in economics (2018), graduated in 1963.

The college produced politicians including Mark Dayton, who became governor of Minnesota, and John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor. It produced artists like Sandra Boynton, whose illustrated books and greeting cards have sold tens of millions of copies, and Jonathan Coulton, a singer-songwriter known for geeky anthems like "Code Monkey" and "Still Alive" from the video game Portal.

The actress Claire Danes attended but did not graduate. Angela Bassett, class of 1980, did. Steven Mnuchin, who became Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump, graduated in 1985—the same year as Jodie Foster.

These names reflect the college's history as a place where young people lived, studied, argued about ideas, and went on to shape American culture and politics. That history happened under Calhoun's name, but it will continue under Hopper's.

A Trolley Machine and a Tire Swing

In the end, what matters most about a residential college might not be its name at all. It might be the trolley fare machine that Master Schroeder rescued from the scrap heap, now a relic of a celebration that became a tradition. It might be the tire swing that students defended against a well-meaning administrator, a small act of collective rebellion that won. It might be the friends made over meals in the dining hall, even when those meals were served beneath troubling images.

Institutions are made of symbols, but they're also made of the people who inhabit them. Grace Hopper College is now named for someone whose legacy points toward the future—toward computation, toward problem-solving, toward the idea that human ingenuity can make difficult things easier. That's a better story than the one the building used to tell.

But the old story isn't erased. The engrailed pattern remains in the new coat of arms, a reminder that this building was once something else. The stained glass windows that weren't destroyed have been removed, but they existed. John C. Calhoun attended Yale, and for most of the university's history, that fact was celebrated rather than examined.

A dishwasher swinging a broomstick forced an institution to reckon with what it had tolerated. That's part of the story now too.