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UMich loses $3M gift for new multicultural center because it would drop black man’s name

University of Michigan students and professors would rather have its multicultural center stay named after an African American than get $3 million for a new multicultural center.

The Detroit Free Press reports that the gift from UMich’s chairman and his wife, to help fund a new $10 million building on campus, has been rescinded following protests that it would be named after them.

The current multicultural center is named after William Monroe Trotter, an early 20th-century civil rights activist. It’s the only building on campus named after an African American.

The new building would have kept Trotter’s name on the center housed in it, just not the building itself.

Mark Bernstein and his wife say they didn’t want the new building named after them – it’s the default UMich policy for donors – but the only way to keep Trotter’s name on it is to take back their $3 million gift.

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The announcement was made at Thursday’s board meeting, the Free Press says, quoting Bernstein:

Since the gift announcement, “we spent time with faculty, students, staff and alumni who shared with us their sense of loss and who expressed their fear that the only African-American name on a building at U-M would be diminished or erased.

“There are hundreds of buildings on this campus, and only one, Trotter, honors the name of an African American. This is wrong. … We did not want to silence Trotter — this one, lonely African-American voice on our campus. This was, of course, not our intention, but it could have been the result.”

The school is building the new center in the middle of campus specifically in response to Black Student Union demands from 2014, which said the current center is “old, run-down and located away from the core campus,” according to the paper.

Bernstein told the Free Press in a followup conversation Friday that the naming was the administration’s idea – he and his wife’s public gift was simply a “very public gesture of a white family’s support of multiculturalism.”

UMich hasn’t said how it will make up the funding, just that the project will continue.

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Read the story and followup.

h/t Inside Higher Ed

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