A COLLEGE in the US state of Minnesota has stripped the name of its Scottish founder from one of its landmark buildings, after students revealed he was a racist and a sexist. 

The trustees of Macalester College in St Paul, which has historic ties to a number of Scottish Americans, last month agreed to remove the name Edward Duffield Neill from its humanities building, as well as Neill Room in the college’s Weyerhaeuser building.

Neill, whose family was of Scottish and Northern Irish descent, founded Macalester in 1874 as a Presbyterian-affiliated but non-sectarian college. In 2013, it decided to rename the iconic humanities building after its founder and first president.

The college says the name has now reverted to Humanities Building, until a new name that better reflects the diversity and current liberal outlook of the college is chosen.

Neill was a minor but influential figure in 19th century American history. 
He founded two Presbyterian churches in Minnesota, was said to be a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and churned out more than a dozen books on colonial and Minnesota history. 

An ordained Presbyterian minister, he opened the college after securing funding from Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Charles Macalester, also a devout Presbyterian and fellow member of the Scottish diaspora. Macalester’s mother had emigrated from Perth and his father was a shipping merchant from Campbeltown. 

READ MORE: Scotland is not this anti-racist utopia that we pretend it is 

Ever since, Macalester has celebrated its Scottish roots – including the offer of free bagpipe lessons to students. Its sports teams are known as the Scots and the student campus centre is called the Loch. Bagpipes still inaugurate nearly every major event at Macalester and its LGBT alumni society calls itself Scots Pride. Until 1999, the college hosted its own Scottish Fair, complete with pipe bands, highland dancing and sheep-herding competitions. 

However, according to an exposé last month by student journalists at the Macalester college newspaper, The Mac Weekly, Neill had a darker side.

An in-depth investigation into the primary sources of Neill’s historical writings – conducted largely by Macalester student group Proud Indigenous People for Education – revealed that Neill had desecrated the graves of Native Americans, described them as “savages” and advocated forced religious and cultural assimilation of an “inferior race”. He also adamantly refused to teach classes with women in them.

In a letter that accompanied the November issue, Mac Weekly editors called for college administrators and the board of trustees to remove Neill’s name.

Macalester president Brian Rosenberg agreed with the students’ assessment of the founder.

“The language and attitudes expressed toward indigenous people in those writings are racist and dehumanising in the extreme, even by the admittedly different standards of the time,” Rosenberg said in a statement. 

He recommended the board of trustees remove Neill’s name from the humanities building as well as Neill Room. Within days, the trustees approved the recommendation.

The Minnesota college is the newest example of a renaming phenomenon that has seen education establishments around the world – from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley and dozens of other universities in the US to the University of Pretoria in South Africa – attempt to atone for the sins of their founders.

In 2015, Glasgow University said it would begin naming and renaming buildings on campus to reflect the diversity of the student body and faculty. No buildings have yet been renamed, but a university spokesman said five new buildings have been named with the aim of “achieving greater diversity”. 

These include the new £90.6 million James McCune Smith building on University Avenue, named for the first African-American to graduate with a degree in medicine after receiving his MD from Glasgow in 1837.

READ MORE: How slavery made the modern Scotland 

Liam McMahon, co-editor-in-chief of The Mac Weekly, said: “We don’t expect any additional name changes. When speaking with us, both President Rosenberg and the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Jerry Crawford, said they viewed the Humanities Building differently… because the decision to name the building after Edward Neill was honorific, while other names have money attached to them.”

He added: “Naming spaces or buildings on campus after people who’ve gone and made the world better strikes me as a great way for the college to move forward. If we were to move in that direction, it would be really important to highlight women and people of colour who have done that work. 

“There are an awful lot of places on campus named after white men, and having names that are more representative of students, staff and faculty at Macalester would be great.”