According to student news reports, the statue was anticipated to be reinstated
The University of Southern California’s monument of its foundation leader, Judge Robert Maclay Widney, has been missing for 14 months due to maintenance.
The Widney alumni home is the only thing left, and the school’s media affairs department declined to comment on its movements or potential. All that is left is an empty plinth next to it.
James Moore, an engineering professor at USC who took the picture of the podium for The Fix, claimed he had stopped by the government’s business to inquire about its reputation.
” A pleasant watch declined to let me enter the building, which is a custom associated with our current president,” but the office staff agreed to answer my question. He did, and told me that the President’s Chief of Staff reports the monument is still in preservation, and the plan for its return is unidentified”, Moore said via email.
The 10-year-old Widney memorial and its accompanying data memorial were removed in November 2023, and while it hasn’t already reappeared, a Widney family member has stated that the memorial may be reinstalled alongside three new statues of more owners.
” Before its eradication, the 8-foot-tall bronze monument stood in front of the Widney Alumni House. According to the Daily Trojan, Widney was viewed as a controversial figure because of his leadership of the Law and Order group, a vigilante organization linked to the murder of a guy in the late 1800s.
The monument, unveiled in 2014 before 30 Widney home successors, began facing significant scrutiny in 2020, no long after the Black Lives Matter protests launched.
According to The Daily Trojan, Widney’s younger brother, Joseph, who founded the USC medical college and served as its first headmaster for 11 years before becoming the university’s next president, even coauthored the text” Race Life of the Aryan Peoples” in which he argued that white and black people” cannot sit up as equal.”
The removal of the statue and its presumed cancellation, according to Moore, were the result of the renaming of the highly visible campus Von KleinSmid Center to the Joseph Medicine Crow Center, the latter of whom is a Native American.
KleinSmid had a history of the eugenics movement.
As president from 1921 to 1947, the scholar was credited with expanding the university’s academic programs and international relations curriculum. He argued that people with “defects” should be sterilized because they had no moral right to parenthood. His” Human Betterment Foundation” played a significant role in the passage of California’s 1909 law that authorized the forced sterilization of those found to be “unfit” — essentially anyone who is not white, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Moore cited the USC Task Force on University Nomenclature as being responsible for that renaming in response to student complaints and during the height of the protest against cancelling. He contends that the task force most likely targeted Widney as the target.
According to Moore, Widney “is probably the person most in charge of making USC the research powerhouse it has become.”
” This was less important to the revisionists than were Von KleinSmid’s cultural missteps, some of which were considerable, though understandable in the context of their time. So complete was Von KleinSmid’s removal that USC press announcements of the renaming often do not include Von KleinSmid’s name”, Moore said.
Moore is a member of the Heterodox Academy for Free Inquiry. It is “entirely possible that the statue and plaque are, in fact, merely undergoing cleaning,” according to a Substack post from two months after the statue’s disappearance.
” Perhaps he will reappear one day, as magically as he disappeared. However, past experience shows that when controversial statues disappear, they frequently disappear forever”.
When asked whether Widney’s reported pending return is a cancel culture victory, Moore said no. The statue’s disappearance was an “intrusion” into university matters but someone “beat it back into its pit”, he said.
The current school president’s contract will end July 31, and with her on her way out the faculty isn’t looking to “accommodate her progressive whims”, he said.
Between the college’s budget deficit, search for a new president, and 3/4s of the school’s full-time faculty voting to unionize, it seems that the University of Southern California has little time to waste on political correctness, he added.
The Daily Trojan reported that the other three statues set to be installed alongside Widney all had a hand in founding the University of Southern California: Ozro W. Childs, Isaias W. Hellman, and John G. Downey.
Distant family members of Widney say they look forward to once again honoring the founders and their influence on the university, telling , the Trojan:” They may not like what he did, but if it wasn’t for them, it wasn’t for the Widneys and the other folks, there would not be a USC”.
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IMAGES: For The College Fix
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