We, the undersigned current and former members of the Pomona College community, call for the immediate renaming of the Millikan Laboratory for Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. We believe that Pomona College can no longer honor individuals who have championed racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic beliefs and actively supported the enactment of crimes against humanity.

Robert Millikan served as a Trustee for the Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated for “race betterment” through forced sterilization (https://bit.ly/2ZwpJ8f). A pamphlet published by the organization describes eugenic sterilization as “one of the greatest advances of modern civilization”. The Human Betterment Foundation went on to distribute 140,000 copies of this pamphlet across the United States (https://bit.ly/2CINLEZ). Members of this organization actively shared their materials with officials in Nazi Germany, including a publication summarizing 6000 forced sterilizations in California (https://bit.ly/3891AIL). The results of this study informed legislation enacted by Nazi administrators (https://bit.ly/2NCAuQQ) that would ultimately lead to the forced sterilization of nearly 400,000 Germans. The International Criminal Court defines forced sterilization to be a crime against humanity (https://bit.ly/3gZtni2; Article 7.1.g) and all members of the Human Betterment Foundation, Robert Millikan included, were complicit in the perpetuation of these heinous acts.

In addition to his work with the Human Betterment Foundation, Millikan personally celebrated California as “the farthest western outpost of Ar[y]an civilization” (https://bit.ly/3dGValc). He saw Southern California as “the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization”, with the “exceptional opportunity” of having “a population which is twice as Anglo-Saxon as that existing in New York, Chicago or any of the great cities of this country” (https://bit.ly/2YIxmcu).

During his tenure as a Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Millikan was adamantly against women being hired to teach graduate-level physics, going so far as to publicly oppose the appointment of Dr. Hertha Sponer to a professorship at Duke University in 1936 (https://bit.ly/2WeE5cw). Throughout his life, he remained steadfast in his commitment to excluding women from accessing research opportunities in physics, writing that he would “get more for my expenditure if in introducing young blood into a department I picked one or two of the most outstanding younger men, rather than if I filled one of my openings with a woman” (https://bit.ly/390cdxN).

Currently, Millikan Laboratory is home to the Emmy Noether Lecture Hall. Dr. Noether was a Jewish mathematician who developed the mathematical framework that is fundamental to modern physics and who fled from Nazi Germany in 1933. We cannot truly honor her legacy in a building dedicated to a man who opposed her right to exist, both in scientific spaces and in the world at large.

Robert Millikan’s enduring legacy is his involvement in an organization that proudly advocated for forced sterilization and actively encouraged the adoption of sterilization laws in the United States and in Germany. His well-documented racist statements and sexist academic gatekeeping are inexcusable in their own right, standing in fundamental opposition to the values and ideals which are now imparted across  Pomona College’s campus. Keeping Millikan’s name on a hall of learning undermines the College’s stated goal of using education as “a mechanism for addressing historical injustices and for grappling with contemporary inequities” (https://www.pomona.edu/administration/diversity-pomona).

Therefore, we call for immediate action in the removal of Millikan’s name from the Pomona College campus.

See the full list of signatories here: https://bit.ly/3eAbpB7