> I agree that eugenics is problematic for many reasons. However, when people were thinking these things out, many or most thought they were doing it to improve humanity (I guess we’d breed out the undesirable traits).
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.