The California State University board of trustees approved removing Henry Madden’s name from Fresno State’s University Library on Wednesday, following the discovery of the late university librarian’s Nazi sympathies last fall.
The trustees’ approval was required to rename the library, as the board approved the move to name it after Madden in 1980, shortly after he retired from three decades working as the university’s librarian.
“A library naming task force will be formed to review the CSU naming policy to determine the course for recognition of the library,” Fresno State said in a news release following Wednesday’s vote. “The CSU Board of Trustees will ultimately approve any name change, which may not occur for another year or more.”
Until then, the library will be called the Fresno State Library, while efforts are made to remove Madden’s name from university signage and websites, the release said.
Fresno State’s academic senate and President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval had already voiced their support for removing Madden’s name, responding to the findings of a task force that reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents related to Madden.
Madden’s troubling past came to light in November 2021, when Fresno State professor Bradley Hart spoke about his 2018 book “Hitler’s American Friends” in fellow professor Lori Clune’s class.
Hart’s book, although not focused on Madden, cited Madden’s own letters to friends during his lifetime, expressing a “violent and almost uncontrollable phobia” for Jews and admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Madden donated a collection of these and other writings to Fresno State’s library shortly before his death in 1982. These documents remained sealed until 2007 as a condition of the gift.
When Jiménez-Sandoval received word of these discoveries about Madden’s views, the Fresno State president created a task force to review Madden’s writings and status as the library’s namesake.
The task force, which consisted of students, faculty, staff, and community leaders, found that Madden expressed antisemitic and pro-Nazi views both before and after World War II. There was no remorse for those views in any of his writings, a report from the task force indicated.
The CSU board of trustees’ vote comes on the heels of Central Unified School District’s move late last month to rename James K. Polk Elementary, following a yearlong debate sparked by a Central student Malachi Suarez’s activism.
Suarez cited the late president’s racist legacy of supporting Manifest Destiny in a presentation challenging the elementary school’s namesake.
