Moving swiftly on - Frank McNally on the rebranding of the Berkeley balcony collapse site

In the Californian city of Berkeley recently, quite by chance, I found myself outside the apartment block where six Irish students died in the balcony collapse of 2015.

There is little there now to identify it as the site of the tragedy, least of all balconies. The building has since been refurbished without them. Formerly “Library Gardens”, it has also been renamed, as the “K Street Flats”, from its location on Kittridge Street.

Only the frailest of memorials, drawn in chalk on the footpath, commemorates the lives lost. It comprises seven coloured hearts bearing the first names of the victims – including that of Aoife Beary, who died only last January. There is also a small green Celtic cross and the date: June 16th, 2015.

The official, permanent plaque is elsewhere, in a nearby park alongside strawberry trees planted by President Michael D Higgins in the students’ memory. The plaque includes a line from James Joyce: “They lived and laughed and loved and left.”

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[ Berkeley balcony collapse: Timeline of a tragedy ]

Meanwhile, back in Kittridge Street, a banner now advertises apartments for rent. The block’s rebranding was completed last Autumn when, according to the newspaper Berkeleyside, it “quietly became part of an emerging and controversial affordable housing strategy”.

Bought then by the California Community Housing Agency, described by Berkeleyside as both a “public” body and “obscure”, it has been relaunched as accommodation for workers of moderate income.

Here and elsewhere in the San Francisco bay area, “moderate” incomes can be $100,000 and more, such is the tech-inflated cost of housing. Berkeleyside suggests disquiet at the prospect that the city itself may end up owning the notorious flat complex, the disaster at which “prompted state regulators to revoke the license of the contractor who built it”.

As the memorial plaque notes, both the college and city of Berkeley are “named after an Irish philosopher”, the 18th-century bishop George Berkeley. The supposed inspiration was his verse “westward the course of empire takes its way”, remembered in the 1860s by a politician who helped found the university.

Back in his native Ireland, or at least in Trinity College Dublin, Berkeley has become a contentious figure. Because he owned slaves, students are now campaigning to remove his name from a TCD library. But even though the Californian university has also of late been wrestling with questions of branding, that has nothing to do with the bishop.

A more pressing issue there, it seems, is the split personality arising from a tradition whereby the college is called University of California (or UC) Berkeley while its sports teams are known as “Cal”.

College sport is huge in the US, so much so that expensive investment in university teams can be justified as a loss leader to increase the overall institution’s prestige. But in one survey, 65 per cent of Americans didn’t know that “Berkeley” and “Cal” referred to the same college. So according to the campus newspaper, the Daily Californian, the college has just set up a $100,000 taskforce to see if the divided identities can be bridged.

As for Bishop Berkeley and his slave-owning, that has yet to trouble local consciences. A bigger ethical issue, here and in many other US colleges, is stolen Indian land. Hence, the UC Berkeley website now includes the increasingly standard “Land Acknowledgement”: a sort of confession of past sins and promise of future atonement.

“We recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of the Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone,” the statement begins. It ends: “By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.”

The statement may be academic in more ways than one. When the area was under Mexican rule in the early 19th century, most of the Chochenyo moved into Catholic “missions”. But according to one account, a “large majority” died of disease there. The tribe is little known today.

Still, in the country of the rebrand, Native American identity is a much-prized thing, often to the extent that it too may be misappropriated. As I write this, the Daily Californian’s lead story is about a college professor who has been forced to rescind claims of Native American ancestry.

Having previously introduced herself as of “mixed Mohawk, Mi’kmac, French, English, Irish, and German descent,” she now accepts that she cannot provide documentary proof of her Indian credentials, which she had based in good faith on family lore.

But some genuine Native Americans, including those who work to publicise the false claims of “pretendians” say she should have known better. One anthropologist in the field called it “fraud”. She accused the professor of willingly falling for “unverified stories that are germane to many American/Canadian settler fantasists.”