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By Vicky Hart
Note: Since this story was written, the Board of Trustees met on Nov. 12 and voted unanimously to remove Pierce from the Library’s name. Read the news story here: eou.edu/news-press/board-approves-budget-de-names-library.
Before spring term ended last June, over 100 EOU students joined several hundred community members in making their voices heard in a public forum. The Black Lives Matter protest in La Grande drew attention on a Tuesday afternoon, but student leaders had already been at work on a poignant racial equity issue for years.
EOU students tapped into a legacy of campus activism in 2018 when student body leaders passed a resolution that questioned the appropriateness of an EOU building named for former Oregon governor Walter Pierce. This resolution, combined with a 2017 Faculty Senate recommendation, led President Tom Insko to form a committee of students, faculty and staff to review the naming issue.
This fall, after two years of academic research and community involvement, the EOU Board of Trustees will vote on whether to alter the library’s name.
Now a senior studying public health and psychology, Andrea Camacho has been a strong voice in these conversations since the ASEOU resolution. Camacho was joined on the committee by fellow student Joel Chin, library faculty member Katie Townsend, ’06, and history professor Rebecca Hartman. The committee was chaired by Vice President for University Advancement Tim Seydel.
Together, they were tasked with investigating Walter and Cornelia Pierce’s public stances on inclusion and recommending a course of action.
The processes of public institutions are often at odds with the passion of student leaders, but Camacho remained persistent. For over a year, committee members met to discuss recent findings, review Pierce documents and materials, delve into previous research and collect input from peers. When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, the committee’s long-anticipated visit to the state archives had to be cancelled.
“I had to learn the process,” Camacho said. “This conversation has been happening since 1999—I was born in 1999.”
Over 20 years ago, a committee of EOU faculty investigated Pierce’s history and found no convincing evidence that he was affiliated with Ku Klux Klan. They concluded that, while he cultivated the Klan vote, he was not a member, and that there was not sufficient reason to rename the library. The research also identified Cornelia Pierce’s role as Oregon’s state librarian. The university moved to rename the building “Pierce Library.”
The 1999 committee did not include student input, but for the last two years Camacho has solicited feedback from her classmates, continuing to elevate student voices.
“I had conversations with Black Student Union, Speel-Ya and Navigators Club,” she said. “These students were dumbfounded that EOU just hadn’t changed the name yet.”
Community members, employees, students and alumni also shared their input through an online form.
Townsend, who has overheard students’ discomfort with the library’s name throughout her 12 years as an employee, said she hoped to collect evidence that could serve as a reference point for questions that surface regularly.
“I really appreciated having students on the committee, to hear from them and see them continue to push for this, and go through the process, which takes so much longer than any of us want it to usually,” Townsend said. “It doesn’t move as fast as students expect or want, and they figured out how to persevere and stay passionate about it.”
Hartman agreed that student participation strengthens EOU’s liberal arts approach to graduating well-rounded, engaged citizens. Hartman said she saw students become educators for faculty, staff and administrators, and they continued to agitate from outside the committee, posting an online petition in June that garnered 3,000 signatures.
“Students did have to tussle with that lesson of how to bend the system to your will, how to work the process and the system,” she said. “It’s easy for institutions not to listen to voices that want change, not because of ill-will but because it’s easier to not change. I was impressed not just by their passion, but their tenacity.”
Pierce governed Oregon from 1922 to 1926. He also spent 10 years in the U.S. Congress and two terms in the state senate.
Townsend said historical records list him as an honorary member of the KKK and show that he cultivated the group’s support in his gubernatorial campaign. No conclusive evidence of his KKK membership was found, but Townsend said this particular facet of the controversy can distract from other important questions.
“Some past discussions seemed to only consider his Klan membership, but there’s so much that is concerning,” Townsend said. “His speeches and actions show racist views toward so many groups that continued for his whole career. The Klan membership question is part of his history that should be examined, but the conversation needs to be expanded.”
The committee’s report recounts a thorough investigation of Pierce’s legacy saying, “We conclude that regardless of the question of his Klan membership, Pierce’s support of the [anti-Catholic] Compulsory School bill, his and Cornelia’s successful campaign for forced sterilization [of people with mental illnesses], his vote against a federal anti-lynching law, and his sustained assault upon the civil liberties of Japanese-Americans are clear evidence of the Pierces’ discriminatory actions and values.”
They found that while Pierce supported agriculture and infrastructure, he did so exclusively for the benefit of white Oregonians.
The committee report reads, “For Pierce, civil liberties, due process, and democratic processes were not universal rights and principles but rather, entitlements of white Protestant Americans. However one might attempt to historically ‘contextualize’ these values, even in the early 20th Century, and certainly by the mid-century, the Pierces’ commitment to exclusionary racial policies reflected a strain of racist ideology that was increasingly rejected by Americans. We see no way to reconcile such a legacy with the values and goals of our university.”
In his 2020 Convocation address to staff and faculty, EOU President Tom Insko shared insights from a friend of the university who responded to concerns about erasing history.
“His words were: ‘This is not an exercise in rewriting history. History cannot be re-written, only our perceptions of what our collective histories mean to us can be revised. This decision is about whose lives and philosophies we in the 21st Century choose to celebrate and honor.
“It is one thing to accept that people lived in their times and must be judged in that context. It is quite another thing to continue to honor a century later people who we know in our hearts were wrong, and whose actions generated a divided society we are struggling to this day to correct.’”
“I believe it’s time for us to drop the name Pierce from the library, but we need to approach this in such a way that it allows for inclusion and many points of view because there are many out there that disagree with that perspective,” Insko said.
The committee’s report has been submitted to Insko and he’ll make a recommendation to the Board of Trustees at its Nov. 12 meeting. As a public meeting, community members, students and employees are invited to provide testimony on the issue.
At the close of a long process and following 66 years of contentious debate, committee members see an opportunity for EOU to fully embrace its mission, values and principles.
“We used the EOU mission statement to frame our analysis of the Pierces’ legacy and we concluded that their legacy fundamentally conflicts with the university’s mission,” Hartman said. “Part of what we do as an institution of higher learning is examine, reflect and think about ways our history can be an opportunity to learn about ourselves, and make choices about what we want to stand for. Denaming the library empowers us to move past our history and work toward a more equitable and inclusive future.”
The professors who co-authored the 1999 report now favor de-naming the building, which Hartman attributes to increased awareness of how systemic racism is entrenched through cultural symbols like building names. Hartman added that student activism has aided a general seachange in public opinion regarding racial equity, oppression and how to remember historical figures.
“It’s a testament that EOU is doing what it’s supposed to do: creating critical thinkers engaged in the world around them,” Hartman said. “The fact that students have spearheaded this should encourage us and give us hope. We are, in fact, doing our jobs because students are equipped to change the world.”
Camacho, who anticipates earning her degree in spring, embodies that success. She acquired letters of support, not just from peers, but from the Oregon Advocacy Commission. Her efforts to educate the community resulted in wider awareness that spurred public action.
“I don’t have a Ph.D., I’m not a historian, but I do know what’s right and what’s wrong,” Camacho said. “For the past two years, this is all I’ve wanted from EOU. We need something to show that EOU is moving in the right direction.”
In her final year on campus, she said this particular decision could stand as a pillar for change as higher education follows its students into the future.
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