Poor ol’ rock

University of Wisconsin student government calls for the removal of Lincoln statue and a big rock

The University of Wisconsin-Madison student government recently voted to approve a resolution that supports the removal of the school’s famous Abraham Lincoln statue, arguing it serves as a remnant “of this school’s history of white supremacy.”

The Associated Students of Madison’s resolution, approved Sept. 29, calls for campus fixtures billed as racist by activists to be “reevaluated and then removed and/or replaced based on inputs from BIPOC students.”

Among those items is the university’s historic 111-year-old Lincoln statue that sits atop the common passing area Bascom Hill. Another is Chamberlin Rock, a large glacial boulder that has been a campus fixture for 95 years.

The Lincoln statue has to go, of course, because everyone knows that he was a slave-owning racist, but what did the poor rock do? Turns out, it allowed itself to be called ‘Niggerhead” “by some people” in 1925, and 95 years after it was renamed “Chamberlin”, current students still feel the pain.

Glenn Reynolds thinks student governments should be abolished, I’ll go him one better: defund all public “institutions of higher learning” as punishment for false advertising.