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Student newspaper reports statue expected to be reinstalled

After a 14-month absence for maintenance, the University of Southern California still has not returned the statue of its founding president Judge Robert Maclay Widney.

All that remains is an empty pedestal next to the Widney alumni house, and the university’s media affairs division declined to comment to The College Fix on its whereabouts or future.

James Moore, USC emeritus professor of engineering who took the picture of the pedestal for The Fix, said he stopped by the president’s office to inquire about its status.

“A polite guard prevented me from entering the building (a practice singularly associated with our current president), but agreed to convey my question to the office staff. He did, and told me that the President’s Chief of Staff reports the statue is still in maintenance, and the schedule for its return is unknown,” Moore said via email.

The 10-year-old statue of Widney and its accompanying information plaque was removed in November 2023, and while it has yet to reappear, the student newspaper recently reported that a Widney family member has said the statue will be reinstalled alongside three new statues of additional founders.

“Before its removal, the 8-foot-tall bronze statue stood in front of the Widney Alumni House. Widney was seen as a controversial figure due to his work as the leader of the Law and Order party, a vigilante group that is tied to the lynching of a man in the late 1800s,” the Daily Trojan reported.

The statue, unveiled in 2014 before 30 Widney family descendants, began facing major scrutiny in 2020, not long after the Black Lives Matter protests launched.

The Daily Trojan reported that Widney’s younger brother Joseph, who founded the USC med school and served as its first dean for 11 years before becoming USC’s second president, also published a book in 1907 titled “Race Life of the Aryan Peoples” in which he argued white and black people “cannot live together as equals.”

Moore told The College Fix the statue’s removal and presumed cancellation were preceded by the renaming of the highly visible campus Von KleinSmid Center to the Joseph Medicine Crow Center, the latter of whom is a Native American.

KleinSmid had been involved in the eugenics movement.

“The scholar, who is credited with expanding the university’s academic programs and international relations curriculum as president from 1921 to 1947, believed that people with ‘defects’ had no ethical right to parenthood and should be sterilized. His ‘Human Betterment Foundation’ was instrumental in supporting the 1909 California legislation that authorized the forced sterilization of those deemed “unfit” — essentially anyone non-white,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Moore cited the USC Task Force on University Nomenclature as being behind that renaming after student complaints and amid the height of the cancel culture movement. He argues the task force had likely targeted Widney next.

According to Moore, Von KleinSmid “is probably the individual most responsible for positioning USC to become the research powerhouse that it has become.”

“This was less important to the revisionists than were Von KleinSmid’s cultural missteps, some of which were considerable, though understandable in the context of their time. So complete was Von KleinSmid’s removal that USC press announcements of the renaming often do not include Von KleinSmid’s name,” Moore said.

Moore is a member of the free inquiry Heterodox Academy. A Substack post of theirs from two months after the statue’s disappearance stated that it is “entirely possible that the statue and plaque are, in fact, merely undergoing cleaning.”

“Perhaps he will reappear one day, as magically as he disappeared. However, past experience shows that when controversial statues disappear, they frequently disappear forever.”

When asked whether Widney’s reported pending return is a cancel culture victory, Moore said no: “The statue’s disappearance was a ‘cancel culture intrusion’ into university matters, but someone, probably on the USC board of trustees, beat it back into its pit.”

The current school president’s contract will end July 31, and with her on her way out the Board of Trustees isn’t looking to “accommodate her progressive whims,” he said.

Between the college’s budget deficit, search for a new president, and 3/4s of the school’s full-time faculty voting to unionize, it seems that the University of Southern California has little time to waste on political correctness, he added.

The Daily Trojan reported that the other three statues set to be installed alongside Widney all had a hand in founding the University of Southern California: Ozro W. Childs, Isaias W. Hellman, and John G. Downey.

Distant family members of Widney say they look forward to once again honoring the founders and their influence on the university, telling the Trojan: “They may not like what he did, but if it wasn’t for them, it wasn’t for the Widneys and the other folks, there would not be a USC.”

Editor’s note: This article has been amended to clarify quotes from Professor Moore.

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