From the Chicago Maroon:
The statue of Carl von Linné, located on the Midway, has been spray painted with several phrases, including “death 2 amerikkka” and “death 2 academy.” The Midway is part of the Chicago Park District and the statue is not on University property.
– Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon, News Reporter
Now we can’t be sure that the protestors encamped here defaced this statue, but I haven’t seen it defaced in the 38 years I’ve been here. And the correlation with The Encampment, as well as the message, is striking. Defacing it makes no statement except “I am ignorant and hateful.”
If you don’t know who Linnaeus was (also called Carl von Linné after he became a nobleman), you can read about him here. He was a Swedish botanist and formulated the system of Latin binomials to identify organisms. (I visited his house, which still stands, when I lectured at Uppsala, but don’t have time to post the pictures.) He was amazingly productive, widely admired, and is known as “the Father of Modern Taxonomy.” Why some chowderhead would deface his statue defies me.
Here’s the lovely statue from the front, which I always admire when I walk by it on the Midway. It was created by Frithiof Kjellberg in 1891, installed the same year, and then relocated in 1976. And what a great thought to memorialize a famous biologist whom almost nobody has heard of!
Photographed by Joe Lothan, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.