Yes, we should rename Rupp Arena. But we have more important things to do first.
Lately, I’ve gotten a couple of emails asking when the name of Rupp Arena will be changed, so it no longer honors Adolph Rupp, the father of University of Kentucky basketball, who may or may not have been an outright racist, but certainly coached all-white teams longer than he had to.
It’s an interesting topic in this extraordinary time we live, when we might finally be willing to recognize that Black Lives Matter in this deeply unequal and unfair society we’ve created. Seemingly overnight, we’re getting rid of formerly intractable symbols like murals and Confederate statues.
I do believe the city, the Lexington Center Board and UK should rename Rupp, named not for a statesman or hero, but a basketball coach who casts a long shadow over UK and the perceptions over how welcoming it has been to Black students.
Then I talked to Chester Grundy, a UK alum and long-time civil rights activist in Lexington.
“We’re in this amazing moment, but there’s going to be a deadline,” he said. “I would really hate to see is that all that happens is symbolic things — they’re low-hanging fruit. Some of it is really important, but when I look at things that would have some lasting impact, it comes back to policies. For UK, I’d really like to focus on how do you create a campus where you have serious substantive input from Black people at the policy level. The thing with the mural didn’t change one thing in central administration in terms of who sits around the president and shapes the policy.”
He makes an excellent point. A decade of debate over whether the 1930s era mural in Memorial Hall is racist has done nothing to improve the situation of Black students. Kentuckians, in general, are much happier arguing about basketball than civil rights. We could use up all the oxygen in Kentucky arguing about Rupp, and probably would, and we’d never get to the important things that need to get done at UK or in Lexington.
We could debate renaming Rupp Arena and forget about the fact there’s only one Black administrator in President Eli Capilouto’s direct reports (and she is leaving to become provost at the University of Michigan-Flint), and only two on the 20-member UK Board of Trustees.
Black employees make up about 8 percent of UK’s 14,000 employees, but a scant 118 — or .8 percent —are in administration or faculty. Black students made up just 7.8 percent of enrollment last fall. That number has actually fallen from a record 2,110 in 2016-2017 to 1,978. Nor is UK doing a great job with those students; the six-year graduation rate is 51 percent and the four-year graduation rate is an abysmal 30 percent.
Rev. C.B. Akins, a former Board of Trustee member, made sure that President Eli Capilouto’s 2014 evaluation stressed the need for him to diversify his direct reports. To no avail.
“His video does not agree with his audio,” Akins said of Capilouto. “He’s not going to make better decisions until he gets better input. They (white administrators and trustees) can have the best hearts, but on their best day they can’t think like an African-American.”
UK officials declined to talk about the Rupp issue directly. But at the most recent UK Board of Trustees meeting, Capilouto announced a series of changes to close opportunity gaps for Black students on campus, including making Juneteenth a campus holiday and more diversity and inclusion training for faculty, staff and students.
Akins agrees that the issue of Rupp Arena can wait until more important things get done.
“I think you have to look at the history and decide for yourself what that name means,” he said. “We have a pretty good idea of where that conversation would lead.”
While UK does ever more training, let’s don’t forget about its partner, the city of Lexington.
A huge debate over Rupp would also take attention away from the massive issues with which the city is grappling, such as police reform, gentrification and the fact that more than half of the city contracts designated for minorities go to white women instead. A new 70-member committee headed up by UK professor Gerald Smith and educator Roz Akins (married to C.B. Akins) will study the issues and hand out recommendations. And then we’ll start all over again.
There is a difference, Akins said. “This time, these issues are not going away.”
Changing a name, in the end, is easy. This more important stuff, changing economies and attitudes and racism that’s baked into the scaffolding of our lives, is hard. (We haven’t even talked about our K-12 education system, or about unpaid Black athletes who bring so much money and attention to UK.) Maybe by the time we properly address these issues, the debate over whether Rupp Arena represents white supremacy won’t be much of a debate at all.
