But in the early 1900s, eugenics was mainstream. Well-known figures including Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, and W.E.B. Du Bois supported it. It was a legitimate subject of public discourse and academic study.
So it’s not surprising that Vermont’s Middlebury College, like many other schools at that time, promoted eugenics ideology.
What is surprising, though, given its recent righteous indignation over the subject, is that Middlebury College was a eugenics hotbed: For years, its course catalogs offered and even required its study; one professor was a member of the second International Congress of Eugenics; another lectured on eugenic marriages. And Middlebury’s 20-year president, Paul Dwight Moody, chaired the state committee that studied and reported on Vermont’s racial stock.
It’s rich, because in September of 2021, the college expiated those sins by pushing someone else off the cliff: former Vermont Governor John Abner Mead, Middlebury’s renowned benefactor—all because of a speech he once gave about eugenics. For that crime, Middlebury ripped Mead’s family name off the iconic chapel he endowed.
The Mead estate, led by former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, is suing Middlebury over the de-naming.