Jul 5, 2018 4 min read

No one is perfect, as we are reminded periodically from childhood onward, and that more than applies to the people we venerate with statues, monuments and shrines.

Take Thomas Jefferson, to cite one example. He penned the Declaration of Independence, was our president at a moment when our nation was still young and wobbly, and founded the University of Virginia, still one of the country’s premier institutions of higher learning. He also was a slaveholder who almost certainly sired several children with one of his slaves – a relationship, no one can doubt, where there was a distinct power imbalance.

Still, his name remains worthy of being affixed to Washington & Jefferson College, and no one is calling for the Jefferson Memorial to be dismantled. James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers University, once noted that we need “the humility of retrospect” when approaching figures from the past.

That being said, there are some figures whose misdeeds, once they have been uncovered, render them unworthy of the honors they had previously been accorded. A raft of institutions have stripped Bill Cosby of the prizes they sent his way, and for good reason – he is now a convicted sex offender awaiting a jail term that will probably keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. And he apparently committed dozens of other offenses that would have resulted in criminal charges being brought had the statute of limitations not run out.

And then there’s the case of Thomas Parran Jr. Gone now for 50 years, he was the sixth surgeon general of the United States, serving from 1936 to 1948, was instrumental in creating Social Security and, closer to home, was the founder and first dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s public health school. His name is on the building on the Pitt campus that houses the school.

The doctor’s record of accomplishment, though, is besmirched by the fact that, when he was surgeon general, U.S. researchers infected Guatemalan prisoners, prostitutes, mental patients and others with syphilis without their consent. During Parran’s tenure, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments also occurred. In a long-running clinical study, African-American men in Alabama were told they were being treated for syphilis when, in fact, they were not, and researchers were watching the disease progress as it went untreated. Even after penicillin was shown to be effective in treating syphilis, the unwitting subjects did not receive any.

For that reason, University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Patrick Gallagher has recommended that Parran’s name be removed from Parran Hall. It’s the right decision.

If the full details of the Guatemala and Tuskegee experiments had been known when the building was named for Parran, the honor would not likely have been extended, Gallagher said. A committee looking at the issue said in its report, “The power of symbols is not what they are intended to convey, but in the messages that are received. For many in our community and beyond, the received message is that the University of Pittsburgh is celebrating a name associated with some of modern history’s most grievous racialized abuses in the research on human subjects.”

The committee also stated that Parran’s name on the building could serve to repel students and researchers the university would like to attract.

Opponents will perhaps argue that this is political correctness run amok. It’s not. Instead, it’s a statement about what the University of Pittsburgh is – and, to a larger extent, who we are – in the 21st century.

As Benjamin Franklin once remarked, “It takes many good deeds to build a reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”