“In 1912, two years before the chapel gift was made, in his outgoing speech as governor, John Mead strongly urged the legislature to adopt policies and create legislation premised on eugenics theory. His call to action resulted in a movement, legislation, public policy, and the founding of a Vermont state institution that sterilized people—based on their race, sex, ethnicity, economic status, and their perceived physical conditions and cognitive disabilities. John Mead’s documented actions in this regard are counter in every way to our values as an institution, and counter to the spiritual purpose of a chapel, a place to nurture human dignity and possibility, and to inspire, embrace, and comfort all people.”
However, Douglas and others continue to cry foul over how the college has brushed over its far more significant ties to eugenics and scapegoated the former governor. The brief claims that “Middlebury College was literally, a Eugenicist factory, for over 50 years” with required classes on the practice and widespread support for the sterilization of what were called “defectives & degenerates.” The college was recognized as one of the schools teaching and advancing eugenics in the United States.
Douglas compares that history with the single reference to eugenics cited by the college in Mead’s 1912 Farewell Address. He claims that “reviewing the long history of Eugenics at Middlebury College from 1895 to 1946, brings one to the inescapable conclusion that it was Middlebury College itself which contributed to the philosophical and scientific basis for the Nazi program of Eugenics, not one speech in 1912 by Governor Mead.” This allegedly included press conferences and courses advancing the theory.
As discussed in my book, The Indispensable Right,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld such sterilizations in his infamous Buck v. Bell decision where he declared that “three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough.”
Douglas told The College Fix the issue is one of integrity and the commitment to donors. He insisted that it must be courts, not colleges, that should make such decisions.
Critics have accused the college of using the name removal as a type of historical cancel campaign and virtue signaling. The alternative would have been to keep the name while acknowledging the troubling connection for both Mead and the college to the study of eugenics.