Ten years ago, Princeton’s Board of Trustees established a special committee to consider the usage of Woodrow Wilson’s name at Princeton. That work resulted in the ultimate removal of Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs, and the creation of a “Committee on Naming” of the Council of the Princeton University Community to consider similar future issues.

One naming that especially deserves consideration has to be Princeton’s “Atatürk Professorship in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies,” which is named for Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey and anti-Armenian figure that inspired Nazi ideology. The Princeton professorship appears to be the only such named chair in the country that bears Atatürk’s name. While no professor has held the title since Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies emeritus Heath W. Lowry departed in 2013, the position remains open for new candidates. Just as Princeton exempted Wilson’s name from celebration due to his racist ideologies, it must do the same for the Atatürk Professorship: It must be retired.

Last year, historian Taner Akçam came to Princeton to discuss the Armenian Genocide. Relatives on both my father’s and mother’s sides were among the 1.5 million Armenians killed in this effort to establish an ethnically homogeneous state by the Turkish Empire in the early 1900s.

In a section on anti-Armenian racism, Akçam showed a slide with the following quote from the eponymous Kemal Atatürk: “The Armenians occupied our craft guilds (sanat ocaklari) and adopted an attitude of [being] the owners of this country. ... The Armenians have no rights whatsoever in this prosperous country. Your country belongs to you, to the Turks … The Armenians and others have no rights here whatsoever.”

Concerns surrounding Atatürk don’t stop with racism. He arguably inspired the fascists of World War II that came after him. In his book “Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination,” Stefan Ihrig cites Hitler, who said that “Atatürk was a teacher; Mussolini was his first and I his second student...”