COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – Most students at the University of Missouri-Columbia know Brady Commons as the hub of student life, a place to grab lunch, buy textbooks or play video games.

Erin Kennedy, a senior sociology major from Blue Springs, has a different perspective on the student union: Its name must go because Thomas A. Brady, a former history professor, vice president and dean, worked to purge the campus of gay students and professors more than a half-century ago.

After learning of Brady’s involvement in a campus disciplinary committee that targeted gays and lesbians, Kennedy and fellow students Megan Lee and Patrick Buckalew spent the summer poring over Brady’s personal papers in the university archives.

The documents portray not only a distinguished campus leader who promoted access to higher education for returning World War II veterans but also someone who regularly corresponded with university president Frederick Middlebush over ways “to establish machinery for identification and apprehension” of gays.

“We are not suggesting that Brady’s ideals were out of the mainstream at the time,” the students wrote in a recent edition of The Maneater, the university’s student newspaper. “We are simply wondering why [the university] would continue to leave a building … named after a man who represented where the university has been, rather than where it is going.”

The student union is in the early stages of a $58.7 million expansion that would nearly double its size.

While the project has been temporarily dubbed the MU Student Center in hopes of attracting a donor interested in naming rights, campus officials have told the protesters that a section of the new complex – a collection of eateries modeled after a British commons – will retain the Brady moniker.

The union was built and named after Brady in 1966, two years after his death.

In a July 28 e-mail to Buckalew, student life director Mark Lucas said, “It seems clear that the President [Elson Floyd] and Chancellor [Brady Deaton] will not consider changing the name of ANY building on this campus. Regretfully, this seems to be the final stance on this issue.”

Lucas applauded the students’ efforts but said a name change is not practical.

“I’m sympathetic and empathetic to the students’ issue,” he said. “But we’re not sure that opening up an entire campus with 80 buildings to public scrutiny of people’s past is the right way to do this.”

Any final decision about a name change rests with university curators, Lucas added.

The students – who have posted the Brady documents on the Web log http://realmizzouhistory.blogspot.com – also cited his efforts to track the names of students, faculty and community members working to hold an integrated student meeting on campus in 1947.

Brady also argued for administrative access to students’ confidential medical and mental health records over the strenuous objections of university doctors, records show.

“Brady’s actions went above and beyond simple ideology,” the students wrote in the student newspaper, which has also editorialized in favor of the renaming.

Kennedy said the university should consider a name that honors an important historical figure who was black – an honor that black students on campus have sought for years.

While Kennedy said support for the change is widespread among students, the Web log contains several comments that suggest Brady is being held to a higher standard than his historical contemporaries.

That’s also the view of his son, likewise named Thomas A. Brady, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We are all people of our times,” he said. “You would have to rename the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial and probably Washington, D.C.”