Western's environmental college moves on, but name debate lingers

In an era of deep examination of the ways institutional racism has shaped U.S. social structures, name-change controversies have become almost as common on university campuses as term papers. They follow a common pattern: inquiry, discovery, protest, argument and resolution, often resulting in a changed name, intense feelings and confusion about long-term implications.

That's exactly what happened this winter at Western Washington University, which found itself in a bitter tug-of-war between student demands and status-quo before removing the name of 19th century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley from the oldest environmental college in the country.

At Western, it's probably too soon to judge impacts on the program, which has produced 5,000 influential alumni in key jobs around the nation, or on the university more broadly. But it's clear that lessons learned are in the eyes of their beholders. And those eyes still produce starkly different views of the Huxley controversy.