Eugenics at Stanford University

The history of Stanford University has been intertwined with the histories of eugenics and scientific racism in the United States and abroad since its founding in 1885. In combination with a year-long lecture series, Eugenics and Scientific Racism at Stanford and Beyond aims to explore this fraught history of the University. Supported by the Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics and the Program in the History of Science, this digital gallery documents historical Stanford administrators, faculty, and affiliates who used their positions to endorse eugenics and scientific racism, and traces their complex legacies and the landmarks that honor them. The intent of this project is not to simply judge the past but rather to elucidate complex lineages and legacies that still persist today.

As the project continues, the gallery will be updated further.

David Starr Jordan (1851 - 1931) was the first president of Stanford University, as well as a deeply influential eugenicist and supporter of eugenicist organizations. In 1906, Jordan chaired the first major eugenic organization in the United States, the eugenics committee of the American Breeders' Association.

David Starr Jordan published many popular texts on the topic of eugenics, such as The Heredity of Richard Roe (1913) among others. Heredity of Richard Roe, for instance, contained arguments promoting the forced sterilization of disabled people. These texts catered often to general readership and helped to popularize eugenic thought.

David Starr Jordan taught about eugenics in his classes on evolutionary theory. In a 1892 syllabus of lectures on evolution, he prepared a talked on "Human Degeneration" and the "destruction of the unfit," caused when "the best are destroyed" and when "degenerates are allowed to mate with degenerates."

In 1913, David Starr Jordan and his protégé Paul Popenoe worked alongside other influential eugenicists to plan an official Race Betterment Week exhibition, including this photo exhibition booth in San Francisco designed by Popenoe. Attendees learned about the basics of eugenics and the necessity for forced sterilizations of the unfit.

In 1909, David Starr Jordan and fellow eugenicist Charles Davenport requested that Stanford students fill out forms detailing their family lineage and heredity. This type of widespread knowledge collection was key to eugenic research.

In 1917, the Zoology Building was named Jordan Hall after David Starr Jordan. In 2020, it was announced that Jordan Hall, now the home of the psychology department, would be renamed due to Jordan's eugenicist beliefs and actions after student and faculty requests.

Featured on the facade of Jordan Hall was a statue of Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a biologist who mentored David Starr Jordan. As a polygenist, Agassiz purported that different human races were of different origins, with the white race being descended from Adam and Eve. This view was influenced by Agassiz's racism and belief in racial hierarchy. During the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the statue of Agassiz toppled headfirst into the cement in front of the hall. It was later returned to its perch.

In 2020, Stanford University removed both the Jordan Hall name and the statue of Agassiz after petitions by students and the Department of Psychology, housed in Jordan Hall. The building is currently known as Building 420.

Lewis Terman (1877 - 1956) was a professor of educational psychology at Stanford University. During his tenure, he researched marital happiness, homosexuality, and intelligence. As a eugenicist, theories of heritability and racial health shaped much of his research.

In 1917, Terman developed the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale and test which intended to quantifiably measure intelligence. For Terman, who believed that intellgence was heritable as a simple Mendelian trait, the test served a eugenic end: to locate people deemed unintelligent and prevent them from reproducing. Eugenicists often used intelligence tests scale to create hierarchies of human worth and ability, such as is portrayed in the right. With the aid of Terman and other psychometric researchers, state institutions utilized these intelligence tests and scales to determine who should be sterilized in the name of eugenics.

David Starr Jordan and Lewis Terman, alongside other Stanford professors Vernon Kellogg and William F. Snow and Stanford's second president Ray Lyman Wilbur, served on the advisory committee for the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America, a precursor to the later American Eugenics Society. They served alongside notable eugenicists and racists Madison Grant, Charles B. Davenport, and Lothrop Stoddard. With the aid of Jordan, eugenicists formed wide networks of research and propaganda.

Maud A. Merrill (1888 - 1978) was a psychologist who worked alongside Terman in the development and application of quantified intelligence tests. After coming to Stanford to pursue a degree in Education, she studied under Terman and earned a Ph.D. in 1923. She later became faculty at Stanford University.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Merrill co-authored Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem: A True Story of the Social Aspect of Feeble-Mindedness in 1919, an account of several families living along the Mississippi River in Minnesota. The text portrayed these families as “degenerates” and “defectives,” drawing from an explicitly eugenic framework.

During her tenure at Stanford, Merrill continued to support forced and coerced sterilizations, often praising California’s state sterilization law. While she was critical of the extent of eugenic laws in Nazi Germany, she saw the intent behind them as praiseworthy, perhaps even “taking up our methods on a large scale,” as she remarked in 1934.

Ellwood Cubberley (1868 - 1941) was a professor of Education and the first dean of the Graduate School of Education. His approach to education was shaped by his adherence to Terman's theory of quantifiable and heritable intelligence as well as eugenicist racial theories of intelligence.

Drawing from Terman's theory of inherited intelligence, Cubberley believed that students had a set level of intelligence which education could not alter. Instead, education could merely develop the pre-existing intelligence. Additionally, Cubberley believed in racial intelligence: that different races had different levels of innate ability. In his 1909 Changing Conceptions of Education, Cubberley argued that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe "dilute[d] tremendously our national stock" and that the task of education was teach these immigrants Anglo-Saxon values they could not grasp inherently.

Paul Popenoe (1888 - 1979) studied English and biology at Stanford University, studying heavily under David Starr Jordan who considered him a “disciple.” Later, he was one of the most influential advocates of eugenic forced sterilizations and other eugenic measures, focusing his efforts on California, the state responsible for sterilizing over 20,000 people out of the national total of 64,000.

In 1928, Paul Popenoe, David Starr Jordan, and Lewis Terman aided in the founding of the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenic organization dedicated to promoting forced sterilizations in California. It printed pamphlets that were widely read from California to Germany.

Later, Popenoe founded the American Institute for Family Relations in 1930, where he worked to promote happy - and eugenic - marriages, seeking to make good reproductive pairings for the sake of the race. Marriage counseling offered by Popenoe and his Institute often included advice on heredity. In this photo, Popenoe is explaining the heredity of talent among Black artists to a couple.

At Stanford University, marriage education courses were also encouraging eugenic marriages. In the 1948 class “Marriage and the Family,” students attended a guest lecture on “Eugenic Considerations in Mate Selection,” as shown in this Stanford Daily article.

Thomas A. Storey (1875-1943) was a professor at the School of Hygiene, where he taught students about both physical health and eugenic racial health. He also received both his A.B. and Ph.D. at Stanford.

In his 1920 published notes and syllabus General Hygiene, Storey instructed teachers and students to study the relation of mental degeneracy to hereditary and the need for "community interference" as well as the "Field of eugenics." Additionally, Storey promoted the theory that war had a negative impact on society due to the deaths of the most eugenically fit, a theory popularized by David Starr Jordan.

In his 1924 Constructive Hygiene, a textbook intended for students, Storey instructed readers to marry only healthy partners and to avoid those of "an inferior heredity" to ensure the creation of "superior men or superior women," theorizing that a rigorous albeit improbable eugenic marriage program could produce a race of "tall, strong, vigorous, highly intelligent, and long-lived" people.

Storey was not alone in his teaching of racial hygiene. During the first decades of the 1900s, Stanford Hygiene and Physical Education classes also commonly taught eugenics in their curriculum, as seen in this 1912 Annual Report discussing how women students were taught “Hygiene, Eugenics, and Kindred Topics.”

Leonas Burlingame (1876 - 1941) was a professor of biology specialized in botany. Alongside classes on botany, he also taught on the topic of heredity and eugenics. His course on heredity and social problems later became the basis for his 1940 book Heredity and Social Problems.

In 1922, Burlingame co-authored a biology textbook alongside three other Stanford professors: Harold Heath, Ernest Martin, and George Pierce. The authors purported that eugenic measures were necessary to prevent human degeneration, emphasizing the importance of a eugenic education. The textbook ended with a call for racial betterment through eugenics.

In 1940, Burlingame published a textbook examining social issues such as poverty through a hereditarian lens. In an attempt to solve what he deemed the "Negro Problem," Burlingame drew from intelligence tests (namely, the Army Alpha test which Terman aided in development) to argue that Black people were inherently less intelligent than white people.

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