Recently I’ve heard a lot of people make grandiose statements about how they’re not going to call Bass Library by its new name, and I will fight that grandiosity with the only weapon available to me: the Yale Daily News. In my eyes, calling the new library Bass is a simple question of kindness. It all comes down to Kant’s “universalizability test,” which is something I learned the name of in Directed Studies. If I donated all of my money to Yale, I would want the university to appellate accordingly the product of my generosity. Call the Gregor P. Nazarian Dining Hall Spoon by any other name, and you cheapen my love for Yale.

I don’t see why we as a student body can’t just respect Robert Bass enough to refer to the library he paid to renovate by his name, instead of by some meaningless acronym. We should show him the same amount of respect we show to the University’s other great donor families, like the El Dubbs.

The controversy over the name change of course recalls the change from DUH to UHS, which also, of course, never took. If you’ve ever had to wait for seven hours at DUH with blood spurting rhythmically from a sucking chest wound just to be told where to sign in, you know the danger that lies in not accepting the new name of a Yale institution. DUH clearly became disheartened, lost confidence, and was never able to achieve greatness after the day that no one accepted its new name, like an alternate-reality John Wayne who never quite convinced people to stop calling him Marion.

We also must not forget the element of student safety. The kind of man who can spend $13 million on a library while running a lucrative investment firm is clearly not the kind of man who has trouble having someone killed. I have estimated the value of my own life at $147, which frankly puts me at high risk from a multi-billionaire with solid connections in the worlds of Yale, corporate jets, and philanthropy. The only question is whether Robert Bass cares enough about his name being on that library to order the systematic, cold-blooded execution of every single Yale student who calls it CCL.

Also, I’ll bet you that Robert Bass is a much cooler guy than you might think based on the fact that he just used his vast wealth to bankroll a giant underground book depository. My slapdash research brought to my attention a certain Richard Bass, the first person in the world to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents. Need I remind you that among the seven continents one finds Antarctica? This Bass traveled to a vast polar waste of ice and sleet and then slogged 16,067 feet up, just because he was rich and bored. If I were rich and bored I would probably use a cheat code to beat that level. My point is, these Basses are probably related, and Robert Bass thus may very well be some kind of superman, if not a convincingly human automaton programmed to make money and destroy mountains. If I got on his bad side, he just might immobilize me with a Fujiwara Armbar, strap me to an internal-frame backpack, hike me up to the top of Mount Makalu and then perform Shooting Star Elbow Drops on me until my prone and frosty body succumbed to a combination of spinal trauma, hypothermia and internal bleeding. Or, again, hire someone else to do so.

Although I’m certain that I’m right, I will admit that one of the reasons I became so adamant about calling it Bass is that a kid in one of my classes castigated the professor for referring to the new library as Bass and then proceeded to explain that he would never do such a thing, “not if they paid [him],” before settling into a hearty, uncomfortable chuckle. Prejudice, I know thy name, and it is whatever the name of that kid in my class is. Besides, who would pay someone to call a library by any particular name? More importantly, what kind of unprincipled shill would write an article in staunch defense of that name? Certainly not Gregor P. Nazarian, PO Box 202619, New Haven, CT 06520.

Gregor Nazarian is the chairman of the Yale Record.