By putting a Jewish name on Colgate’s new interdisciplinary center, a benefactor honored his family’s heritage — and, unexpectedly, my own.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks set off a wave of campus incidents and activism, several major Jewish donors have halted or withdrawn gifts to colleges they saw as not being responsive enough to antisemitic behavior on campus. But at an unusual renaming ceremony last spring at Colgate University, alumnus and trustee Dan Benton ’80, H’10, P’10 put a twist on that narrative.
When Benton first pledged the principal $25 million gift for a flashy new Center for Arts, Creativity, and Innovation, in 2021, that building was announced as the Benton Center. When the center opened last fall, however, it instead bore the name Bernstein Hall.
Why the change? At the most basic level, Benton wanted to honor his family’s heritage. Bernstein was his family’s surname until his grandfather changed it in the 1940s, in response to the antisemitism of the time.
But Benton’s intent was also to make a statement. While other Jewish donors were using their financial clout to show displeasure with their alma maters, Benton told me he “wanted to stand in contrast to that.”
For him it was “an opportunity for Colgate to look different and act different,” he said: to add an explicit, visible symbol of Jewish philanthropy and Jewish representation to a respected 205-year-old liberal arts college.
When Benton toured other campuses with his daughter last year, he often noticed major buildings named for benefactors who were identifiably Jewish. Until now, Colgate’s only building with an overtly Jewish name was the Saperstein Jewish Center, at the edge of the campus. Bernstein Hall sits at the base of Colgate’s hilltop campus in rural Hamilton, N.Y., one of the first buildings students and visitors see when they pull in. “They can’t miss it,” he said.
In a year when the heartbreaking war between Israel and Gaza brought tensions on many American campuses to a roiling boil, the story of one donor changing the name of a building at one small liberal arts college might seem like a minor footnote. But for many people on and around those campuses, including many American Jews, seeing how colleges have responded to the war and the ensuing protests has touched off deeper contemplation about their own identities and experiences — and how they fit within the places that have molded them.
At the renaming ceremony last spring, Benton described the decision to rename the building Bernstein Hall as a “personal journey.” The more I learned about that journey, and the legacy of his Bernstein forebears, the more personal it became to me as well.
That’s not only because several steps along his journey connect directly with themes that the Chronicle of Higher Education and I cover regularly: the controversies about campus antisemitism, yes, but also the significance of buildings’ names and the importance of student belonging. It’s also because Benton’s journey intersects with my own — with my family’s Jewish heritage, and with my own experiences as a first-generation student and active alumna.
I thought a lot about those intersections while back on campus for my 45th Reunion. I’ve made dozens of trips to Colgate since graduating. It’s a beautiful place; my visits are always nostalgic and fun filled.
This time, however, I also came away with something deeper and longer lasting. The Waspy, fraternity-dominated, tradition-rich college that first seemed so alien to me when I visited with my mother in 1975 now features a major academic building that bears an engraved name that reflects my Jewish heritage.
Seeing that, I felt a connection I didn’t expect. It’s one thing to write about first-generation college students and the power of student belonging. Experiencing it for myself, even decades after graduating, affected me at a decidedly different level. Sometimes, symbolic gestures do matter.
Benton and I overlapped for three years during college, and we now know a couple of fellow alumni in common. But we come to this story from very different places. He’s a business guy who made billions as a tech investor and has now given $75 million to our alma mater. His prior donations helped build Benton Hall, the spiffy six-year-old career center, endowed a professorship, and supported the Benton Scholars honors program. Suffice it to say, my Chronicle salary doesn’t put me anywhere near that philanthropic level. Until I interviewed him about this gift, we’d never spoken to each other.
Our experiences as Jewish students at Colgate also differed. When Benton, who calls himself an ethnic but mostly secular Jew, arrived from Ridgefield, Conn., the college felt more Jewish to him than the community he was raised in. I was brought up in a home marked by regular Jewish rituals and initially felt like an outsider.
That alien feeling began for me even before my first class. The summer before my classes started, I attended a weekend orientation program for students and parents. I guess there were other Jewish parents there, but I doubt there were any who, like mine, had come to America after surviving years in Nazi concentration camps. My dad was proud of me but also a little worried, awed by the campus and the collegiate traditions he was hearing about, but unsure about its Baptist history and preppy airs. And so when he found a Colgate professor whom he had identified as Jewish, my dad pulled him aside and asked: Will my daughter be OK here?
Later that weekend, the professor — Jerry Balmuth, who taught philosophy and religion — told me about that encounter. He had promised my dad, he said, that he’d keep an eye out for me. (Yeah, a small-college thing.) Balmuth and I remained friendly throughout my four years. And he was right. I flourished there.
I sat frozen at my computer, overtaken by chills, as I realized Bernstein Hall won’t just be a building with a Jewish name, but a building named for people who helped other Jews escape the Nazis or regain their lives after surviving their horrors. People like my father and mother.
Neither Benton nor I were deeply familiar with Colgate’s history of antisemitism. But we both recently learned more about it from the same source: Repression, Re-Invention, and Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate, a book written by six undergraduate students in 2017 as part of a Jewish-studies course. (One of them happens to be Balmuth’s great-niece.) Drawing on archival research and interviews, the book describes six periods of Colgate’s Jewish history, including the eras during which college leaders used quotas to restrict enrollment of Jewish and Black students. In ways, it reminded me of the scholarly projects some colleges have recently undertaken to understand their connections to slavery, but Alice Nakhimovsky, the professor who taught the course, told me it “wasn’t meant as reconciliation” or a comprehensive history. “It’s episodic,” she said: The students collaborated in reviewing and analyzing documents, and then later chose their own stories to tell. (Nakhimovsky started teaching full time at Colgate the year I got there. The day I spoke to her was one of her last in Hamilton before retiring.)
Wearing my Chronicle hat, I found the book fascinating: What a rich, engaging academic experience for those students. Reading it as an alum left me a little rueful, especially the chapters that described a period of vibrant Jewish life on campus in the decades immediately after I graduated. Benton, who read the book in the spring of 2023, told me it made him “really angry,” particularly when he encountered descriptions of the bigotry espoused by George Barton Cutten, Colgate’s president for two decades beginning in 1922. In 2017 Colgate removed the Cutten name from a residential complex, more than 15 years after students and others first noted his record as a proponent of quotas and eugenics. Until reading the book, Benton told me, he hadn’t known “just how awful he was.”
The book was very much on Benton’s mind as he watched responses across the country to campus protests over Israel and Gaza. Often he was disappointed in university leaders — some of whom, he felt, were dismissing concerns of Jewish students who felt harassed. At the same time, he was dismayed that some Jewish donors were quick to threaten or pull institutional support, uneasy that their actions were feeding into antisemitic tropes about monied Jews controlling important institutions. And he was supportive of Colgate leaders’ efforts to accommodate students and faculty members who demonstrated sorrow over Hamas’ attacks and hostage taking, as well as those standing up for Palestinian rights and the safety of people in Gaza in the wake of Israel’s military response. He’d already been considering whether to name the new center after his Bernstein family. The combination of all those events tipped the scale.
On May 3, 2024, Colgate held the small “renaming” ceremony for the center that had not yet opened. I watched a video of the ceremony a couple of weeks later in which Benton explained that the building will honor family including his great-grandfather, James Bernstein, and great-uncle, John L. Bernstein, two early leaders of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now known as HIAS. Before and during the Holocaust, HIAS rescued more than 250,000 Jews from Nazi persecution; after World War II, the organization helped to resettle an additional 150,000 Jewish refugees in the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, and Israel. (John was a founder of HIAS in 1901; James was a European director.) Today, HIAS helps resettle refugees from diverse faiths and ethnicities in more than 20 countries.
I sat frozen at my computer, overtaken by chills, as I realized Bernstein Hall won’t just be a building with a Jewish name, but a building named for people who helped other Jews escape the Nazis or regain their lives after surviving their horrors. People like my father and mother.
Growing up, I heard a lot of Yiddish in my house. Now my mind went immediately to the word yichus. It translates literally as “lineage.” More commonly it’s used to describe someone with family or community connections to admirable people. A scholar from a family of scholars has “good yichus.” I couldn’t help but laugh as I contemplated the notion that Colgate’s newest building is named for a family with good yichus.
During the reunion, I was granted a hard-hat tour of the not-yet-finished building. Bernstein Hall sits just a one-minute walk from the residential complex formerly named for Cutten, and directly adjacent to a building named for an earlier benefactor and trustee during Cutten’s tenure, James B. Colgate. It’s also within view of the library, named for another president, Everett Needham Case, who fought to keep admission quotas at Colgate until they were outlawed by state law in 1948.
The building is as cool as you might imagine for a space designed to house computer science, visual and performing arts, film and media studies, and entrepreneurship. The three-story structure includes digitally equipped spaces for experimental performances, a fabulation lab with tools like digital looms and laser cutters, several flexible studio spaces, and a “media archaeological” space that will house devices like jukeboxes, VCRs, and overhead projectors for students to explore. (I felt old just hearing about that one.) The design was developed with considerable input from faculty members, but it also seems well suited to Benton’s hope that the center fosters collaborations across disciplines, or as he put it, “collisions and serendipity.”
I spent about 45 minutes checking it out. After the tour, I took a few moments to myself and walked over to Taylor Lake. I realized that it was the same spot where Professor Balmuth, now deceased, had told me about that conversation with my dad. I wanted so much to tell my dad about Bernstein Hall, even though he had died 25 years ago. I did anyway, not even bothering to hold back my tears.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mBNtgNFmv9k?feature=oembedA timelapse video of Bernstein Hall.
— Reprinted with permission from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Blumenstyk recently retired from the Chronicle, where she was a senior writer, after 36 years. A nationally known expert on the business of higher education, she has won multiple awards from the Education Writers Association; reported for the Chronicle from China, Europe, Israel, and Peru; and also contributed to the New York Times and USA Today. A frequent speaker at conferences and guest on public-radio shows and C-SPAN, she is the author of the Washington Post bestselling book American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2015).