In San Francisco, they are considering renaming 40 schools that reference historical figures which have been declared controversial. Some, like Junipero Serra and Thomas Jefferson were maybe predictable, others like Abe Lincoln and John Muir less so (said to have had non-modern views of Native Americans), while others like James Garfield have become relatively obscure characters today.

It got me thinking about all the buildings named for people at Davis and how likely most passersby know nothing about the namesakes. Some have a plaque with a couple sentences, others have nothing. As best I can tell, most buildings start with fairly boring names like "Chemistry" or "Agriculture" and historically were named for founding department heads, notable professors, or administrators - sometimes this was right after construction, other times, as in Rock Hall (Chem 194), this was decades later. Most of these were decided at some point after the namesake's death or at least retirement. This seemed to change around the time of Mondavi Center, with naming shifting to honor donors who in some cases were still alive (Giedts and Schalls). Perhaps for lack of donors, suitable namesakes, or just to avoid controversy, the newest dorm buildings at Tercero are all just named for species of trees.

It got me thinking about some of the old buildings on campus that I didn't know much about. I looked up Wickson and Hunt - they lived from mid-1800s to 1920s, and were the leading authorities on plant science at the time. They were founders of the school of agriculture and helped select the site of the university farm. Important characters that probably few waiting at the MU bus terminal would know much about, though I bet the San Francisco school board would find something offensive about them. To my knowledge, the only named place that has had real controversy around it is Putah Creek, "putah" being a Native American word for river, but coincidentally sounding a lot like an insulting word in Spanish, and some debate about whether the Spanish map makers named the creek because that's what the Native Americans called it, whether they were getting a chuckle insulting the Native Americans, or a little of both.

Anybody have any interesting stories about building namesakes? There may be a few here who had classes with Roessler or maybe even Kleiber.