This street either has a controversial namesake or it doesn’t. Let me explain. Herbert Bismarck Foster (1885-1968), who helped lay out the UCLA campus in 1925, named the streets around it after his old UC (Berkeley) professors. Among those was Joseph Nisbet LeConte (1870-1950), a professor of mechanical engineering. But his father Joseph LeConte Sr. (1823-1901) was also at Cal – he was a professor of geology – and he has become persona non grata in recent years. Despite cofounding the Sierra Club and being an early champion of evolution, LeConte was also an old Southerner who had enslaved people before the Civil War and promoted white supremacist ideologies afterward. For these reasons there have been calls to rename this street, even though LeConte was dead before Herbert Foster attended Cal – and Foster made it clear in a 1960 interview that he named the street after “Little Joe LeConte”, the noncontroversial son. None of this explains why LeConte turned into “Le Conte” for this street.
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