By Caltech’s own admission, their Committee on Naming and Recognition (CNR), which recommended that Millikan’s name be scrubbed from the central building on campus, was formed not because new information had come to light, but for the same reason that the rest of the country had been set ablaze:
On May 25, 2020, police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. The tragedy triggered international outrage and protests. In the weeks that followed, Institute leadership received calls for action to improve diversity and inclusion within the Caltech community. Two significant petitions, each with more than 1,000 signatures, demanded the removal from all campus assets and honors of the names of past Institute leaders who had been associated with eugenics and the [Human Betterment Foundation].
Having served on a few collegiate committees myself, I don’t find it at all surprising that the CNR ultimately sided with the petitioners. Committees usually work to find practical solutions, not some abstract truth, and the attitudes of the students who led the protests (“I don’t want to have that constant reminder that the people who built this institution didn’t want me to be there, and didn’t even want me to exist”) are of a sort that would be hard to dismiss without redress.
The CNR’s long report, which is available in full online, covers an emotional response with a fig leaf of rationality. The report’s central claim against Millikan is that he “joined the [Human Betterment Foundation] as a trustee in 1937, at a time when eugenics and its claims for the hereditary nature of human behavior and character had fallen into disrepute within various quarters of the scientific and broader academic community.” Quotes from biological luminaries are cited to support the claim that eugenics, by 1937, was a fringe scientific belief.
Thomas Hales, a mathematician at the University of Pittsburgh, compared claims from the CNR report against the historical record, in an article he posted last September. Hales discovered that some of the biologists cited by the report as opponents of eugenics were in fact supporters of forced sterilization—sometimes in the very same quotes used as evidence against Millikan. Furthermore, Millikan never attended any Foundation meetings, and saw his membership as just another of the charitable causes to which he lent his support.