TIMELINE OF OUR ACTIONS

October 6, 2017:  A small group of students who would become the People for PMA called a town hall in Robert Lee Moore Hall to announce a campaign to rename the building. More than 80 students, faculty, and staff attended. The organizers explained who Moore was and why they wanted his name removed from the building. With weeks of the town hall, a petition to rename the building had more than 500 signatures.

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October 24, 2017: Three of the graduate students who organized the town hall met with Dr. Leonard Moore, a professor of American History and UT’s Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement; and Carlos Martinez, the chief of staff to UT’s President Greg Fenves. In this meeting, Moore and Martinez expressed doubt about the evidence for RLM’s racism, as well as concern that renaming one building on campus would open the door for other renaming campaigns. Moreover, Martinez emphasized the financial strain that UT had experienced earlier that year when the Littlefield family sued President Fenves for removing Confederate statues on the Main Mall.

Despite the negative feedback from Moore and Martinez, the People for PMA tried to get on the agenda of the Board of Regents meeting that November but were unsuccessful.

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January 19, 2018: Beginning to doubt their ability to work with the administration, the People for PMA held a rally to launch a grassroots renaming effort. They urged people to call the building by its original name, the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building (PMA) and posted a PMA sign in front of the building, which was removed by the university the following week.

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January 23, 2018: Then president of the Graduate Student Assembly and supporter of the people for PMA, Samantha Fuchs, received the following in an email from Martinez, regarding our efforts to speak at the next meeting of the Board of Regents:

“As discussed when we met in October, the university is not exploring the renaming of any buildings or facilities or the relocation of any additional monuments. As such, we will not be making recommendations to the Board of Regents about any facilities.

We recognize that the history conveyed by the names of some buildings and facilities do not always reflect our current values. However, after last year’s relocation of the Confederate statuary into our historic archives (where they are being preserved for scholarship), the university is not currently engaged in efforts to change or remove other historic names or monuments from the main campus, either building-by-building or collectively.”

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February 11, 2018: Two members of People for PMA published an op-ed about the grassroots renaming in The Daily Texan: http://www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/02/11/robert-lee-moore-hall-needs-renaming

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Summer, 2018: The Diversity & Inclusion Committee for the College of Natural Sciences began using PMA in its official communications.