We are given to understand that the great majority of those at Iowa State support having Catt Hall stand as our symbol of diversity. Since becoming “the premier land grant university” is supposedly our institutional goal, we might pause to consider how the trajectory of the Catt debate supports that goal.

The September 29th Movement has put forth one quotation after another from Catt with clear racist, xenophobic and class-biased attitudes they assert are inconsistent with a commitment to diversity and academic excellence.

Each quotation comes with a challenge: refute this. After two years of such defenses as “everybody was racist back then,” (which is false). Another defense is that her alleged racism was a strategy, and a winning one at that, to gain the white supremacist vote. This is true, but is expediency in pursuit of a noble goal honorable?

The September 29th Movement’s tactics are inappropriate, claim others. This is false, but wait a minute. Catt used deplorable tactics, but we want to honor her? Since the Movement uses deplorable tactics, let’s condemn them? Isn’t something wrong with this argument?

Others defend Catt as racist in her youth (“a regular jingoist” in her own words), but she grew out of it. OK, prove it. If convinced, I’ll modify my view in public.

The closest anyone on this campus has come to putting forward an academically respectable defense of Catt’s character was the letter by Haselhoff, et al. asserting her jingoism was taken out of context. Whether you agree with that conclusion, you have to respect the ability to present, finally, an argument worthy of the name.

That said, let’s look at the argument itself, and what it says about Catt. Remember that the passage was a published chapter rather than a speech.

Readers of books (people at universities, for example) are presumed to be intelligent, honorable and inclusive. That isn’t always true, anymore than it is true that “all Southerners are racist.” However, the stereotype of intellectuals is that they ought to recognize the difference between a valid argument and jingoism, and that they will not tolerate the latter any more than we ought to tolerate racism today.

So, we must look at that wonderful passage where Catt lays out the competing constituencies who fear one another, and in which she concludes that until we recognize that we are, in fact, all EQUALS, real progress won’t be possible. In this, is there a lesson to be drawn?

I think there are at least three possible interpretations. One, she had come to realize her “winning” strategy was itself morally corrupt, and she intended in this passage to reject it in favor of the greater good for all people.

Two, as always, she would do anything, say anything to gain women’s suffrage, and so she calculated what her audience — in this case, intellectuals — would be receptive to hearing and gave them what they wanted.

And three, she knew well enough what she was doing when she sold out Southern blacks to white supremacists and did it anyway.

If such passages as the one brought forward by Haselhoff, et al. are, indeed, common in Catt’s words, one would think after two years of exploring the woman’s work more examples than this could have been brought forward.

Surely, out of all those supporters of Catt, a couple more folks could demonstrate how all of Catt’s alleged racism was just words taken out of context.

For those who argue that a little bit of racism doesn’t make that much difference in the scheme of things, Catt Hall is rightly embraced as ISU’s symbol of diversity, but please forgive those of us who take exception.

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Virginia Allen

Associate professor

English