Cabot Philips, the media director of Campus Reform, America's leading watchdog to the higher education system, noted that it’s ironic for The University of Notre Dame to campaign against Christopher Columbus given his contribution to Catholicism as we know it today.
“It absolutely does not surprise me. It’s the wrong approach. I think most Americans can understand that history is full of people who were just that. They were people, they were flawed,” Phillips said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.”
On Monday, the university decided to cover up murals of Columbus on its campus and dedicate them to Martin Luther King Jr.
“They did oftentimes horrible things and in this case Christopher Columbus, of course did some reprehensible things but also had an immeasurable impact on mankind. And to ignore that because did he some bad things is counter intuitive,” Philips went on, while claiming that such an approach is not “what history is about.”
In addition, he dubbed it “ironic” that “this happened on MLK day, in the name of MLK day,” which is, in other words, “a day when we as Americans look back on the incredible life of a man that changed our country for the better.”
Philips then emphasised the fact that Columbus, despite modern-day criticism, had received an endorsement from the Pope and was deemed by the Catholic church to be a hero due to “things he did to spread the religion.” He hit at revisionist history efforts, claiming they won’t stop with Columbus, and suggested that they are paving the way for other important historical figures to become erased.
“We’ve covered at The Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform, how universities at Pepperdine, they removed a statue of Columbus. Countless other universities [are] changing Columbus day and now calling it Indigenous People’s Day. And this goes on to where people are going to start erasing other important figures in our history simply because they did some horrible things,” Philips concluded.