Last year, Caltech announced plans to strike five names of prominent eugenics supporters from campus buildings, one of which, Robert A. Millikan, was Caltech’s founding president and first Nobel laureate. The planned renaming is in keeping with the latest trend of demonstrations by prestigious universities across the nation publicly disavowing their eugenic supporting presidents of the past — it seems they all have embarrassing reputation stains; eugenic skeletons in their closets that they’d like to sink in the cellar once and for all. But are the short-term benefits as advertised, which relate to promoting equity on campus, even real? Maybe, but a popularity contest to keep campuses the most attractive—or at least as attractive—to people of color is also plausible. Half recognized for our genius, half spurred by socio-economic carrots and sticks, black and brown people are once again a perverse form of currency. Would more energetic pushes to admit and promote the success of students from “races” traditionally locked out from the opportunity to even strive by eugenics ideology be even more impactful?
But aside from debating the true motivations of Caltech et al., it’s important to ask are the short-term benefits—as plausible as they may be—obscuring the long-term risk of developing a case of nation-wide historical amnesia? It’s not entirely clear, but detachment from our history is to forget how we as a nation have arrived at our current juncture and how far we still have to go to embody the principles at our nations foundation (See the U.S. Constitution). Attempts to erase or conceal any historical event, figure, idea, etc. without a proper benchmark should be disavowed as fervently as the event itself.
A line in the sand: Join or die.
A line was drawn in the sand by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — do you disavow institutional racism or don’t you; are you a racist, or aren’t you? The wise, but not necessarily “correct” answer is obvious. Good people are not racist, and racist people are those bad white people in the south gathering at lynchings. The so-called “good-bad binary” may explain why being racist-by-association is a kind of blow; a character assassination, and may even explain why the reflex is to defend or deflect allegations rather than explore them. Apparently, the debate over Caltech’s eugenic past resulted in the resignation of Sarah Sam, a doctoral neurobiology student, president of the Black Scientists and Engineers of Caltech, and was the only black person on the 15-person renaming task force. Sam revealed that although the official statements of altruistic disavowal of institutional racism at the core of the eugenic ideology made the headlines, behind closed doors “several committee members are eugenics apologists.” And that “Many of our meetings have centered on to what extent is eugenics wrong/ racist?” It may also explain the tide of public demonstrations of goodness in light of recently discovered of ties to eugenic ideologies. The numbers at Caltech make it hard to believe that the motives were truly about promoting the success of students historically marginalized by such ideologies.
The legacy lives on.
Eugenic ideology served to rank humans according to worth with black people—whose genetically determined worthlessness (not the state of penury) earned them their place at the bottom of a proverbial totem pole—denied access in general, but especially to prestigious universities. In fact, Millikan himself, who was quoted as saying that granting black people the right to vote is an “unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are” supported eugenic ideologies and shared the fears. However, according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the number of awards granted to Black students in 2019 (prior to influences from COVID shutdown) was just under 1%—very reminiscent of Millikan’s presidency in eugenic America.
If the graduating class of 2019 at Caltech was 100 students. There were 229 degrees awarded at Caltech in 2018. This figure illustrates the relative proportion of black (pompeian red) white (steel blue) and students with other (light grey) racial demographics. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data.
The bottom line is that whether or not the performances are actually well intended, removing the barriers to blacks seeking higher education is a more meaningful change. And doing things to make campuses feel more welcoming to all students is commendable, but something should be done to retain a firm grip on where we stand today, how far where we come, and where we are headed together as one nation.