As a child I was told this country was a melting pot of all the world’s cultures brought together to live without persecution; yet if I want to find a statue of a non-white person, I have to resort to Google and pull out a map.

Meanwhile one can’t walk due south for an hour without tripping over seven Robert E. Lees and a dozen Stonewall Jackson memorials.

Louisville is home to arguably one of the more famous and beloved athletes of all time, Muhammad Ali. The man made modern boxing what it is and preached peace and love, but the closest thing you’ll get to a statue in his hometown is a half-assed stainless steel mess that vaguely resembles boxing gloves.

Oh, but don’t worry, you can head over to the Kentucky capitol building in Frankfurt and see a 12-foot, incredibly accurate stone carving of the biggest loser of a President this country has ever seen: Jefferson Davis.

Y’know, the man whose splinter country was so successful that, according to inflationdata.com, its own version of the dollar suffered well over a 5500% inflation rate by the time the Confederates surrendered in 1865.

While every armchair historian and pop political pundit on Facebook is bitching about which Confederate statues to tear down, I propose a proactive solution: dilute the market.

Stop building new statues of safe, dead white dudes, and more importantly stop copping out by only installing non-representational art.

Yeah, it’s funny that the piece out by the Orr Center vaguely looks like a set of vulva at just the right angle.

Yeah, we all had a good laugh at whatever the heck was put in front of the library last year.

This campus, this area and this country will be a better place once we start broadening the scope and installing more statues truly representative of those who make a difference in the world, not dead generals who are buried many states away and didn’t do much of importance where said statue was erected.

One of the longest running traditions of any bigger college is dropping a bronzed version of people important to the college around campus.

All I’m saying is we have a not-male president (something not too common in education) retiring with a clean track record and high approval rating.

A spiffy, smiling statue of her welcoming future students to USI would look a far sight better and inspire far more people than slapping her name on a street sign for future AMIGOs to explain to a freshman bored enough to ask the meaning of the road names.