Daily Herald opinion: Thoughtful, practical review: What’s in a name? Often, these days, it’s controversy

“What’s in a name?” William Shakespeare’s Juliet famously asks Romeo.

These days, the answer is “a lot.”

Consider, for example, the political divide over President Donald Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.

Does it reflect patriotic pride — or arrogance? Is it a celebration of one nation — or the rejection of another? And if you stick with the original name, is it a political statement — or a practical acceptance that the rest of the world will not follow suit?

Here in the suburbs, the naming question has come up in two high-profile ways this year.

In February, the DuPage County Board, controlled by Democrats, voted to remove the late Republican congressman Henry Hyde’s name from the Wheaton courthouse, turning the Henry J. Hyde Judicial Office Facility into the DuPage County Judicial Office Facility. The change arose over legislation that dates back almost 50 years: the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited federal funds from being used to pay for elective abortions through Medicaid.

We took issue this winter with stripping his name off the building, arguing that it reduced a great conservative thinker and DuPage County icon into a one-issue caricature. At the same time, we pointed out that sometimes names are removed because new information surfaces.

Now, a different naming controversy is bubbling up at Prospect High School, and Northwest Suburban High School District 214 is taking a wise and cautious approach to deciding whether its theater should continue to honor the Mount Prospect school’s first principal.

As Chris Placek chronicled this weekend, a student journalist at Prospect has raised troubling questions about former Principal Alvin Kulieke, whose name is memorialized above Prospect’s theater.

Sophomore Sage Gilliland’s investigation, published in the May 16 edition of The Prospector, dug into Kulieke’s ties to a religious group that embraced principles of eugenics.

Kulieke co-authored workbooks used to train teachers and students involved in the Urantia movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Included, Gilliland points out, are passages that call for “subnormal” men to be “kept under society’s control” and other justifications for slavery. Gilliland also found science exams Kulieke wrote for the Urantia Brotherhood School that posed questions about which races were “most intelligent (and) belligerent.”

We commend Gilliland for her hard work and for bringing new information to District 214 officials. Now, the matter is in their hands.

The district launched its own investigation into whether to rename the theater. Officials are taking their time, weighing the contributions of a past school leader against the message that honoring him might send.

At the same time, officials have kicked off a review of the district’s naming practices and given the board the power to approve or rescind honorary namings.

It’s a thoughtful and practical approach to a problem thornier than Juliet’s rose. After all, what was accepted by one generation can be abhorrent to the next. And vice versa.

Casting aside old honors for evolving mores can be a slippery slope, one to be navigated with care and caution. That’s exactly what District 214 is doing, setting an example for the students who will pass through their doors in the years to come.