Cesar Chavez dorm at Stony Brook University to be renamed following sexual abuse allegations
Chavez Hall at Stony Brook University will be renamed, university president Andrea Goldsmith announced in a recent letter to the community. Credit: Thomas Hengge
A residence hall at Stony Brook University will no longer bear the name of civil rights and labor leader Cesar Chavez, whose legacy was tarnished by claims he sexual abused young girls.
The university has decided to remove the controversial leader’s name from the dorm and will begin soliciting nominations for a new name in September, when most students return from summer break, according to a letter to the university community.
The action comes after a New York Times report in March revealed allegations from two women who were minors when they say they were abused by Chavez, long considered a champion for farmworkers’ rights. His longtime ally, Dolores Huerta, has also alleged that he raped her.
The public response was swift, with annual celebrations canceled, memorials taken down and streets and schools renamed, according to media reports.
At Stony Brook University, a committee of faculty, staff and students voted in support of renaming the dorm, according to a letter from university President Andrea Goldsmith to the college community on May 19. The campus community will be invited to submit recommendations for names in September and will then vote on the suggestions. Names with the highest votes will be further reviewed by Goldsmith and her team, according to the letter.
After a name is selected, it will be submitted to the Stony Brook Council for approval followed by a final decision by The State University of New York Board of Trustees, Goldsmith said.
"I extend my sincere appreciation to the committee members for their discernment in navigating this complex situation, and I encourage our entire community to remain engaged as this process continues in the fall,” Goldsmith said in the letter, calling it a "significant" process.
While deciding on whether to retain or scrap the name at the hall, the committee was tasked with reviewing several factors, including the "centrality of the person’s offensive behavior to his or her life as a whole," “relation to the university history,” and “harmful impact of the honoree’s behavior "as well as “possibilities for mitigation."
According to the university, the decision to name a building or space after a person is a “profound honor” made after careful consideration. In a prior statement, a university spokesperson said, "We are aware of the allegations reported about Cesar Chavez and are deeply sympathetic to the women who have come forward and to all victims of abuse and exploitation.”
Chavez, a Mexican-American who once worked in the fields, organized campaigns to draw attention to unsafe conditions and low wages for farmworkers, many of whom were Spanish speakers in the country illegally.
In 1974, his work took him across the country to Huntington Station, where he protested the abuses of grape and lettuce growers who were refusing to hire workers from his union, according to a previous Newsday article.
In 2014 President Barack Obama signed a proclamation commemorating March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day but some states no longer recognize the day as such.
Some Stony Brook students told Newsday in April they wanted to see his name erased from the campus dorm.
The Times investigation found that Chavez, who died in 1993 at age 66, sexually abused girls as young as 13 and raped Huerta, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which became the United Farm Workers of America union. Now 96, she previously told the Times in a statement that prior to the report, she kept the abuse to herself, including the two “sexual encounters” with Chavez that left her pregnant with two children. She maintained close ties with her children but had to give them up to other families to raise.
“I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way,” she told the New York Times in a statement.
With AP
Lorena Mongelli has been reporting for Newsday since 2021. Prior to that, she covered breaking news at the New York Post.
