Wildermuth was a secret racist

Ignoring the laughable homonym in the lead sentence of your above-the-fold cover article on March 4th (“Officials request time to decide building name”), I am dismayed that the report got the motivation for the issue surrounding the Wildermuth name completely wrong. Wildermuth was not “a known segregationist” but a secret racist. If he was a known segregationist, he would not have had any career as an IU trustee and would not be in a position to have a building named after him. The problem is that he hid his racist views and only disclosed them in private correspondence. And that is why the issue is so difficult. Are we going to hold historical figures (Wildermuth died in 1964) to present standards of comportment, extending to views that were not expressed publicly? I fear that we are going down a slippery slope, trying to excise from our collective memorials any taint of behavior and attitudes that do not meet current mores. We are also focusing on a few letters, however distasteful, and ignoring the rest of the record. Wildermuth was elected by IU alumni as trustee in 1929, and served on the board for 22 years, retiring in 1951. He, more that any other individual, was responsible for the selection of Herman B Wells as IU’s 11th president in 1938. President Wells and Wildermuth, as board of trustees’ president, worked hand-in-hand for well over a decade to make IU what it is today. Let us decry the racist impulse that Wildermuth succumbed to, but not at the expense of rewriting history to suit ourselves.