> Elihu Yale was a slave trader.

That's an understatement! He was a president of the East India Company and an absolutely brutal slavemaster:

> The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in [Chennai], a trade in which Yale participated. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will. At a time when profits from the slavetrade were dwindling and pressure from the Mughal government to stop the enslavement was mounting, the administration of Fort St George eventually stepped in and introduced laws to curb enslavement

Brown as well. You really can't talk about the slave trade in colonial RI w/o mentioning John & Nick Brown.

Of course, the brand names of these colleges are too valuable to dump.

Nicholas Brown Jr., for whom the university was named, was an abolitionist.

...who got his money from his parents and uncles. Moe Brown was also a quaker && robustly antislavery, but that did not stop him from bailing out his brothers during the war. Trying to extricate the triangle-trade money from the Brown family is like trying to wring the pink from a sunrise.

and then we also must consider what kind of society are we if we look for and act on every opportunity to white wash our history?

If they really want to distance themselves from slavery, I'd recommend "Douglass University". It's much more mellifluous than "Yale", anyway.