Washington and Lee University (WLU) will keep its name amid calls for the school to remove its Confederate ties, The Washington Post reported.
WLU announced Friday that after a review, the Board of Trustees decided there is support for diversity and inclusion efforts but no consensus on a name change.
The university will rename and renovate Lee Chapel, which holds the family crypt for Lee and also plans to create an academic center for the study of Southern race relations, culture and politics.
The board announced $225 million towards scholarships, student support and curriculum development.
The board “acknowledged that the association with its namesakes can be painful to those who continue to experience racism,” according to university officials and “repudiated racial injustice in any form and expressed regret for the University’s past veneration of the Confederacy and the fact that the university itself owned human beings and benefited from their forced labor and sale.”
