1.) The public health building, which is currently nameless, used to be called Parran hall, after Thomas Parran, the first dean of public health at the graduate school. Thomas Parran also had a hand in the Tuskegee experiments, that infected hundreds of unknowing black men with syphilis, not treating them as they watched them die over the two decades of the experiment. The university likes to tout themselves as a beacon of diversity, and being open to any student regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other minority group they might belong to, but it also took them 50 years since the naming of the building to decide to remove the placard.
2.) The Cathedral of Learning holds the campus’s first computer lab, although the technology has been updated over the years. In 1969, this is where a group of black students took hostage until the university obliged to their list of demands, thereby founding Black Action Society. A few years prior, the university began letting black people into the institution, but had only let in 5. Five black students out of the around 20,000 students attending. They thought, at the time, that they were being innovative and accepting, but creating a black population that was less than a thousandth of a percent is disgraceful. Even today, the university peddles around their acceptance, while behind the scenes, they blame the Black Action Society for anything on campus that any black student had done, regardless of whether or not they’re affiliated with the organization.
3.) In the Cathedral, there are several nationality rooms, each dedicated to a country that donated money in order to have one constructed. However, there is one single room that hosts an entire continent, the largest continent: Africa. The African Heritage room is an incredibly poor attempt at showcasing all that Africa has to offer, as they pick and choose tiny things about mainly West Africa, and threw them all together in a room, undoubtedly insinuating that African countries are more or less, all the same. The room peddles the stereotype that all African people live in huts, as the top of the room, near the ceiling has straw material. Once again, the university that touts diversity from now until the end of time, lumped a continent with over 300 different ethnic groups into one room, and chooses to ignore this fact whenever it is brought up to them