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Caltech to Remove the Names of Robert A. Millikan and Other Eugenics Proponents
- mbg721 6y agoAs a kid who grew up in the Midwest in the 1990s, my education did include Millikan's name, and the idea that California's work led to a ton of nasty German things.
- Judgmentality 6y agoHas a founder of a university ever been condemned by that university before?
- nkurz 6y agoIt's not quite what you are asking for, but I thought this was a well done article by the current Black president of George Mason University on how he views the slave-owning namesake of his university: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/george-mason-university-named-slave-owning-founding-father-let-s-ncna1236054 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/george-mason-universit...
- underseacables 6y agoGeorge Mason University has been desperately trying to appear more diverse lately, unfortunately the selection of the new president only shows more of that desperation. The immediate past president, Angel Cabrera, was a complete disaster. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear this new president is going to change that.
- throwawayboise 6y agoNot sure about a founder but past Presidents and Trustees have had their names removed from buildings and other landmarks after this sort of thing came to the surface.
- Dracophoenix 6y agoShortly after removing Calhoun's name from the now-named Grace Hopper Residential College, members of the Yale community set their sites on statues and paintings of the university's eponymous slave-trading founder, Elihu Yale. There was/is talk of even changing the university's name.
- selimthegrim 6y agoSlaves and opium, now, let's set the record straight.
- brucelidl 6y agoThe original name of Columbia University was King's College.
- retox 6y ago>In making its recommendations regarding Millikan, the committee also considered his stances on gender, race, and ethnicity, finding them sexist, racist, xenophobic, and inexcusable by any standard. Except the standards of the day.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fuzxi 6y ago>"It is fraught to judge individuals outside of their time, but it is clear from the documentation presented that Millikan lent his name and his prestige to a morally reprehensible eugenics movement that already had been discredited scientifically during his time," Rosenbaum said. Source: the next sentence of the article.
- mortdeus 6y agodont just downvote, present a counter argument that is based in science why I am wrong and use your own brains, don't just "defer to the experts". Just because I used an extreme analogy to prove a bad point, that doesn't mean you shouldn't contemplate every bad idea along with the good. I'm not saying we should practice eugenics on the human race, I am saying whether or not it is theoretically possible and whether or not scientists who brought up these ideas did so because they were nazis, or because they were pioneers traveling into dangerous lands for the very first time.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoThe sibling was flagged and killed while I wrote the following reply; I’m unwilling to let it vanish into the aether: > 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.
- nelsonmandela 6y agoDamn, 130 million americans were once under forced sterilization laws pushed by the human betterment foundation (HBF) which was chaired by those guys. 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. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.0020380g/?st=gallery https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.0020380g/?st=gallery
- selimthegrim 6y ago(I'm a Caltech and Ruddock House alum). Millikan is also on record writing in a letter to his wife in the 50s that if blacks in MS reached a majority of the population democracy there as we understand it would cease to exist. I say it's time for him to go.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 5chan 6y agoWhat if he was right? What are the well functioning majority black democracies?
- selimthegrim 6y agoBotswana and Namibia, ever hear of them?
- jcranmer 6y agoI don't know what the comment you're replying to said, but guessing at its contents, I'd also throw in Ghana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, and Seychelles to round out the usual list of well-governed Sub-Saharan African countries.
- cambalache 6y agoLet's do something easier. Let's erase from history the names and contributions of any white male born before the year 2000.
- it 6y agoLife will be so much better after we erase our history so we can repeat it.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWe can keep the history. But to be clear, naming a building after someone is a form of endorsement and honor. That’s not the same as history. 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.
- harry8 6y agoI go the other way on this. We used to erase Millian's awfulness and celebrate the rest. We now decline to do so. 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.
- ardy42 6y ago> Life will be so much better after we erase our history so we can repeat it. 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?
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoThere's already another holocaust ongoing (see what the CCP is doing to the Muslim Uighur population). No one seems to care. It's all about the money at the end, all the holocaust museums didn't seem to prevent a repeat.
- alexashka 6y agoThis is the perfect comment.
- mhh__ 6y agoI disagree. There is no history being lost here. We aren't sending gag orders to Wikipedia, for example. It's just a name on a building.
- mannerheim 6y agoPerhaps we can spare future generations of physics undergrads from the monotony of examining falling oil drops through a microscope.
- mhh__ 6y agoDo undergrads even cover it? The fraud/bias aspects of the experiment are interesting
- mannerheim 6y agoWe reproduced the experiment in one of my laboratory courses. I don't remember if the controversial aspects of Millikan's data collection were discussed; whether it could even be called fraudulent seems somewhat debatable. But interestingly, Feynman had a quote about Millikan's successors[0]: > 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 https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm 1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollst...
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- rtrdea 6y agoWhy name anything after anyone?
- selimthegrim 6y agoI always thought MIT had a good idea with building numbers.
- calylex 6y agoIs Margaret Sanger from Planned Parenthood next? [0] [0] https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...
- greenburger 6y agoIndeed: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/22/us/margaret-sanger-planned-parenthood-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/22/us/margaret-sanger-planned-pa...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wahern 6y agoThe case for painting Sanger as a eugenicist, or even a sympathizer, is pretty weak. Anti-abortion activists have been trying to make that argument for decades, but it just doesn't fit. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simonblack 6y agoWe have to learn to separate people's personalities from their achievements. 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.
- umvi 6y ago> If we remove Millikan, do we also remove Napoleon? Do we also remove George Washington? Do we also remove Edison? 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.