More on renaming the hall...

I just read an article that appeared in the New York Times last week (two days after I introduced Nuruddin Farah in that room) about the process of renaming the many Egyptian institutions that bear the Mubarak name, and it included this account from the university:

Gigi Ibrahim was about to inaugurate a free speech program at the American University in Cairo when the name etched in gold across a heavy beige marble plaque hanging outside the hall stopped her in her tracks: H. E. Suzanne Mubarak Conference Hall.

So Ms. Ibrahim, 24, having cut her teeth as a political activist at Tahrir Square, immediately applied the lessons learned about direct action, found a screwdriver and took it down with a friend’s help. “When we saw it we thought, ‘Well this just needs to come down,’ ” she said, although officially the name holds.