Caltech to Remove the Names of Robert A. Millikan and Other Eugenics Proponents
caltech.edu
caltech.edu
It seems like such a waste of time to do all this renaming stuff for a bunch of hyper-sensitive freshmen (freshpeople?) but some of the sterilizations were for things like 'insanity' 'feeblemindedness' 'mentally diseased' 'mentally defective' and applied to you if you were below 70% of the average intelligence of your age group.
I certainly wouldn't like to live under those laws yet some part of me still values eugenics. Vasectomy for thee but not for me I guess.
I remember something about nazi schools teaching children the sterilised were victims of their ancestors, not nazi society. From what I recall they even had laws against treating the sterilised with contempt. Very progressive.
Here's some newspaper clippings by the HBF.
It quotes, "More than half of the population in this state is made up of negroes — a very serious situation. For it means that under universal suffrage they could control the state now — an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are."
In particular, the phrasing above of "reached a majority of the population" is exactly backwards, as Mississippi had been majority African American from the 1840s to the 1930s, and likely already wasn't at the time of Millikan's visit in 1951 (contrary to his assertion). African Americans historically have moved away from Mississippi and other southern states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
Eugenics used to be a very respectable field of study. Highly intelligent people believed that unless the “feeble minded” were stopped from reproducing it would lead to the decline of the human race.
Institutes were established, Nobel prize winners wrote in its favor. It was seen as doing humanity a favor somewhat like how climate change is discussed today.
Take any random figure of western history who is widely admired. I’m not taking any names but odds are they believed that the rest of the world needed the guiding hand of western civilization to attain modernity.
Colonialism, Slavery and imperialism were seen as justified expressions of the natural order. Skulls were assembled from around the world and brain volumes meticulously noted down to “prove” this.
From this was born the ideology of the Nazis that humanity is a collection biological races constantly struggling for evolutionary dominance. And the duty of the superior race was to help this along by vanquishing the weaker races and sterilizing the feeble minded.
The under currents of this movement exist to this day. It has been rebranded as “Human bio diversity” to escape its Nazi past. Some writers hailed as truth telling heroes by people here have been recently revealed to have sympathies for these ideas.
These days it’s couched in extremely vague sounding dog whistles that are very hard to decipher. “Welfare bums” etc
By cutting our links with it we are not necessarily erasing the past but sending a message to those lurking beneath polite society that these ideas that have led to some of the most horrific massacres in history are unwelcome.
And to expound a little more - most rational, intellligent people from those eras believed in these things as well. After all, they told themselves, most reasonable, compassionate people do.
As such, it's interesting to ask yourself what we do today that will be held as barbaric by some future generation. Chances are, it'll be something that most of us believe to be normal and right.
And if you're someone who doesn't have any opinion that your peers would find scandalous, or at least unorthodox, chances are you are participating in some act that a future generation will find appalling but that is entirely acceptable today.
Abortion?
Meat eating?
Or some other practice that most of us take for granted.
For the same reason, we shouldn't judge past generations by today's moral standards. It makes no sense.
Why should I have a problem with the idea future generations might take my name off a building?
The concept of some sort of future is why some people do more.
You mightn't care, perhaps having kids is your thing, perhaps is extincting a species or designing a better ice cube, everyone's different, for some people it's buildings.
I think a lot of people are realising giving money to universities instead of building a bigger boat is a bad idea. They are probably right.
The road between “these people are ‘feeble minded’ and we should sterilize them for the good of the species” and “these aren’t even people we should kill them” is very short and paved in literal millions of dead bodies. The processes that allow one to forcibly sterilize a fellow human being against their will requires some degree of dehumanization, which is why it goes to even worse places than where it started.
This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù). There are other important things to attend to.
Learn to live with your warts. You don’t have to look like a pristine model. Nor does society.
How is choosing to no longer use their name for a building or award erasing their memories?
A bunch of goodie-two-shoes.
The great majority thought they were doing good. We know different today. We know now the new Soviet man is bullshit. Back then they believed in this.
My secondary school house was named after a slave trader, they recently changed it - good riddance.
Of all the bad things modern reappraisal culture is leading to, this isn't one of them.
It’s like condemning shamen and medicine men and women. Sure it was bullshit, but they thought it was real and effective.
We’re going to Mars. Maybe Elon will be first. Most everyone would be excited.
Maybe some day in the future it’ll be the worst thing we ever did as a species. Do we vomit on them because now we know better?
Not honoring someone isn't vomiting on them.
Maybe the answer is a somber monument, "Horrible People in Our History" somewhere on campus.
I don't mind that.
And Millikan's name will probably last for a millennia because of his work in physics.
In my experience, organizations tend to downplay the misdeeds of those whose name and likeness are prominently displayed in or around their buildings. It's just not terribly easy for an organization to talk frankly about such things without it getting really awkward, so they tend to just ... not talk about it.
I also supremely doubt that many people learned about Millikan's life from the building, ditto for his more troubled aspects. I also doubt that many people here have, or ever will, visit that building. The move to rename this building probably taught more people about his troubled aspects than the building itself ever did.
Instead I think it's more fair to say that naming a building after anyone is a tribute and an attempt to hold someone up as a model to be followed by those who go there. I think there's an interesting and nuanced discussion to be had about whether Millikan's negative aspects justify his removal, but I think arguing that we need his name on a building in order to remember him and his eugenicist past are a bit silly, frankly.
Agreed. The idea that someone might have done horrible things while having good intentions is an apt lesson for us all. Caltech should absolutely keep him up on their website and official history, and discuss both his contributions and his shortcomings.
> From that PoV I would not try to erase their memories.
That's where we diverge. In no way are they actually erasing his memory. Naming buildings after people and building statues of people isn't just history, it's an endorsement. It is a group of people coming together saying "this person should be celebrated and held up as someone to be emulated".
There is no obligation for Caltech to continue to hold up Millikan as someone to be proud of, or as a name that deserves honor and emulation going forward. Nor does renaming a building mean that we're magically going to forget him. Keep him in the history books, but name the building after someone that students should look to emulate.
Ironically, renaming this building probably taught more people about Millikan than the building itself ever did. I think the number of people who actually learned about Millikan because of that building is approximately 0. Most either have no clue who he was (I'm in this category), or knew about him beforehand from his work in physics.
> This reminds me of the cultural revolution and the four olds (sì jiù).
Flip side of this; if China eventually became a democracy, would you demand that the worst perpetrators the cultural revolution get to keep their places of honor in schools and statues? Or would you understand why these hypothetical future citizens of this democracy might not be super happy about having their kids attend a school named after someone they consider to be an awful person?
I think fundamentally, everyone has a line where they say "that person is too awful to name a school building after", and I think it's a bit silly to pretend that saying that is to erase history or start a cultural revolution. You would probably be rightfully shocked and appalled if someone tried to make an Adolf Hitler memorial art school, and I doubt you would argue that renaming such a school back to something reasonable would be to "erase" Hitler's memory. The difference is that you don't seem to think that Millikan's behavior is bad enough to warrant renaming over, while I disagree. I think that's a perfectly reasonable disagreement to have too! Unlike Hitler, Millikan made great contributions to science, and doesn't have a directly attributed body count. But let's actually have that conversation rather than pretending that we'd forget about him if it weren't for that single building in Caltech that neither of us have probably been to or even heard of before this.
> There are other important things to attend to.
In times and places, I think that this can be an issue. But if Caltech has a single committee over the summer and decides to rename a building, are they really wasting any resources that could've been spent elsewhere? A few hours to discuss and create a single press release doesn't really seem like it's distracting too much from anything important, and is probably pretty minor in the grand scheme of low value university meetings. The cynical part of my soul wonders if the committee members ever do anything useful, and if having them off renaming buildings and similar instead kept them off the backs of the people who actually do real work around there.
I also think universities do all kinds of things that waste administrator's time, or cause them to have too many administrators in general, distract students from education, or otherwise waste resources. But of course concern over such things only get brought out in extremely selective cases, which makes me think that there's little appetite in general for making universities focus more on education, and more interest in using that as a post-hoc argument against something they already dislike for other reasons. I've certainly never seen anyone go at college sports with anywhere near the intensity as we see in these cases, and in terms of distracting colleges from important things to attend to, that should be your top priority.
And for the record, I would cancel college sports or at least strip them of all their money, they're a massive waste of university time, attention, and resources, and a blisteringly stupid way to hand out scholarship money. No, I'm not from the south; I'd probably be run out of town on a rail if I said that there. That change alone could fund thousands of silly committees and still shifted more resources to education and scholarship.
> Learn to live with your warts. You don’t have to look like a pristine model. Nor does society.
Again, living with warts and having buildings named after said warts are different things. "Living with your warts" and honoring someone with a building are completely orthogonal things; one can do the former without doing the latter. And one can also do the latter and not the former, as Caltech has probably been doing until now.
One typically finds that organizations tend to downplay the warts of people whose name and likeness are plastered in prominent locations. Perhaps taking his name off a building is the first step in an honest and balanced discussion of both his contributions and his shortcomings.
Woodrow Wilson was probably the nadir of that ideological dead end: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-12-08/woodro...
The Cornerstone Speech is another example of science invoked in support of a terrible thing, in that case slavery, in juxtaposition to the religious zeal of the abolitionists: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
Except the standards of the day.
Source: the next sentence of the article.
> Eugenics, the only discredited science, that seems to work exceptionally well when applied to plants, livestock, microbiology, horses, household pets, but magically fails when the idea is applied to the human race?
The failure is a result of the lack of a definition for “good genes” aside from whatever any random person thinks is good. That is, the fitness of an organism always and necessarily refers to a specific environment, and the characteristics (genes) that make it fit for that environment are not the same as the ones that make it fit for another environment. This means that there is no objective measure upon which to determine which genes are good and which are not. Eugenics is subjective.
> The idea is morally reprehensible, but the idea that all you have to do to cull out say "sickle cell disease" from the human race as a whole is to stop say "black people" from breeding is actually scientifically sound.
In the first place, sickle cell anemia provides some protection against malaria. So whether it is adaptive or maladaptive depends on the environment. But secondly, sickle cell evolved naturally, and removing it from the breeding population doesn’t stop that from happening again.
> Like I said the idea is morally reprehensible and we should never do that. But the idea that you couldn't theoretically control a population and eliminate "undesirable" traits from the gene pool is just willfully ignoring the obvious soundness of the mathematics.
I don’t think people are denying what you’re claiming here. They are responding by noting that there is an incredible power differential between the eugenicist and the people who are prevented from reproducing (I’m sure this is obvious) and there is no objective basis on which to scientifically decide who is supposed to reproduce and who is not. Together these facts create the inescapable impression that eugenics is about having kids and preventing the competition from doing the same.
There seem always to be people of the day that are in direct opposition to what you call the standard. As an example, Quakers and other abolitionists of the antebellum South famously aided slaves to escape to freedom via the "Underground Railroad".
Was anti-slavery the standard of the day? Or were the abolitionists progressive? Enlightened? Or were the slave-owners (the Millikan's) regressive. Provincial?
I think it's hard to say what the "standard fo the day" was. Maybe a historian can answer.
Wikipedia article on Maroons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroons?wprov=sfla1
Read Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts for some amazing stories (what they don't teach in school)
And there were plenty of anti eugenicists even among the progressive crowds; it’s deeply annoying that eugenics is presented as some kind of de facto worldview in the early 20th century, when it was 100% a minority-held position - unfortunately the minority holding it were the ruling elite and primarily aimed at the most vulnerable and least politically connected members of our society.
Many a famous person has been an absolute arsehole. That doesn't mean he wasn't productive to the world as a whole.
If we remove Millikan, do we also remove Napoleon? Do we also remove George Washington? Do we also remove Edison?
Knee-jerk reactions require more thought before doing what is the first thought.
The answer used to be "no", but now I suppose it's becoming "yes". No historical figure is safe from being cancelled. Pick some random but important historical figure. Now google the name along with the word "racist" and you'll find some opinion piece about how that person was racist and needs to be cancelled. Henry Ford, Mark Twain, heck, you can even find articles about Abraham Lincoln holding "problematic" views.
> We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
> Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
A classic example of herding[1].
0: https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm
1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollst...
It’s a bit like statues. A statue in a museum is history. A statue in the town square is an honor or endorsement. They’re different things.
We're embracing all of the history in full, considering it and treating it the way we feel is right. We may revisit decades hence and treat it differently again, who knows? I don't see history being "erased" here.
So you're saying the way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust is to setup awards and honors in the name of Adolph Hitler?
It's just a name on a building.
No one is calling for this person to be erased from history. They are asking that he no longer be honoured as a consequence of what he said.
Indeed, teaching people what he did and said will be the best way to prevent history from repeating.
But he said a lot! E.g., Millikan contributed greatly to science and had some views that are unacceptable today. So do we celebrate his useful contributions or do we punish him after death by un-naming buildings, etc.? Could we not possibly do both?
What if we found a letter written by Albert Einstein that derogatorialy used the N-word? Would we never again speak of Einstein, of his opposition to nuclear warfare, of his personal trials as a Jew, etc? Would every reference to Einstein initiate a conversation that ended with the mention of his (here hypothetical) N-word letter?
The end-game of this woke attitude is the death of history (since no history will be acceptable and all will be subject to revision downward at any time) and, in the long run, the end of social knowledge.
[0] https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
The case is much stronger with W.E.B Du Bois. Neither applied Social Darwinian thinking in racial dimensions, though. And that seems to be what puts Millikan over the top. His racial animus seems to have been rather typical of whites back then. (And arguably up until the 1980s or later!) On the other hand, his aggressive advocacy for applied eugenics seems exceptional, and therefore arguably places more culpability for the harms upon his shoulders. But eugenics doesn't play well in public debates; racism is what revs people's engines, especially on the left. So not surprising how people keep hammering on his racism.