[Please use https://bit.ly/2AgRlWg to share this petition.]
[Press coverage of this petition: "Caltech’s effort to confront its racist past hits a snag," by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2020 (https://lat.ms/3nsA6VE), "Caltech faces reckoning over its links to eugenics and sterilization movement," by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2020 (https://lat.ms/3fak4uS).]

As members and friends of the Caltech community, we believe that Caltech cannot honor individuals who actively supported and encouraged crimes against humanity. Therefore, we call for Caltech to rename all buildings, spaces, and programs named after Robert A. Millikan, including the Robert A. Millikan Memorial Building, Millikan Library, Millikan Pond, and the Athenaeum's Millikan Suite. We call for the removal of the bust of Millikan on the Caltech campus.

Millikan, together with individuals including E.S. Gosney, A.B. Ruddock, Harry Chandler, and William B. Munro, led an organization that widely advocated for forced sterilization of people with disabilities and actively supported and encouraged, and even took pride in, Nazi Germany's 1933 forced sterilization law. Accordingly, we also call for the renaming of the Gosney Research Fund, Ruddock House, Harry Chandler Dining Hall, and the William Bennett Munro Memorial Seminar.

Millikan, Ruddock, Chandler, and Munro were members of the Board of Trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, whose president was E.S. Gosney (https://bit.ly/2ZwpJ8f). In 1938, the Human Betterment Foundation published a pamphlet, "Human Sterilization Today," (https://bit.ly/386pkND) advocating for the forced sterilization of "defectives," saying that "modern sterilization is not a mutilation in any sense of the word," that "eugenic sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization," and that the foundation aims to "investigate the possibilities of race betterment by eugenic sterilization, and publish the results." The Human Betterment Foundation distributed 140,000 copies throughout the United States (https://bit.ly/2CINLEZ).

R.B. Von KleinSmid, the fifth president of the University of Southern California, was also a member of the Human Betterment Foundation. On June 11, 2020, USC President Carol L. Folt announced that Von KleinSmid was "an active supporter of eugenics and his writings on the subject are at direct odds with USC’s multicultural community and our mission of diversity and inclusion," and Von KleinSmid's name and bust were removed from university buildings (https://bit.ly/2NA4b4R, https://lat.ms/2NDrLxv).

In the 1920s, Millikan wrote, "California marks now, as England did three centuries ago, the farthest western outpost of Arian civilization" (https://bit.ly/3dGValc). Millikan also wrote that Southern California "is today, as was England two hundred years ago, 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, https://wapo.st/2AfsZMA).

In his 1924 book _Science and Life_, Millikan wrote, "[L]ook at the difference between our own civilization and the static civilizations of Asia, where Nirvana is the goal of human life and a large fraction of the population reaches it quickly through starvation. Why is it that 'fifty years of Europe is better than a cycle of Cathay'? Is it not simply because in certain sections of the world, primarily those inhabited by the Nordic race, a certain set of ideas have got a start in men's minds, the ideas of progress and of responsibility?" (https://bit.ly/3iaUE2k)

Grant Venerable was the first African American to graduate from Caltech, in 1932. After he had applied to live in one of the student residences on campus, Millikan took the issue of whether a "colored" student would be allowed in student residences to the Caltech Board of Trustees (https://bit.ly/3eNuOzq).

When E.S. Gosney died in 1942, the trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation, including Millikan and other Caltech trustees, decided to dissolve it and grant its assets to Caltech, establishing the Gosney Research Fund (https://bit.ly/3icncZ6).  The announcement of this fund (https://bit.ly/2CGmLpE) in 1947 stated, "In collaboration with Dr. Paul Popenoe and other scientists Mr. Gosney carried on an extensive study in the field of eugenic sterilization, including particularly its medical, legal and social aspects. In 1929 and 1930 an exhaustive survey was made of 6000 cases of sterilization of eugenically unfit." This refers to the book _Sterilization for Human Development: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California_ by Gosney and Popenoe, published by the Human Betterment Foundation, which contains the sentence, "This, again, is no reason for not doing whatever is possible to purify the race" (https://bit.ly/3891AIL).

In 1993, historian Lily E. Kay wrote: "The Gosney/Human Betterment Foundation Papers are deposited at the California Institute of Technology Archives. Because these papers are closed to researchers, it is impossible to establish the precise nature of the relationship between Gosney's organization and the biology division. It is clear from the administrative record, however, that some connection did exist" (https://bit.ly/3eHVD7R). Peter Sachs Collopy, University Archivist and Head of Archives and Special Collections at Caltech, has informed us that the Human Betterment Foundation records have been available in the Caltech archives since 1995 (https://bit.ly/3eRHWmN). According to Caltech's Biology and Biological Engineering Division's 2019 Annual Report (https://bit.ly/386Kefu), Gosney postdoctoral fellowships are still being awarded today.

Microbiologist Werner Maas wrote in 2013 that he received the Gosney Fellowship along with Ray Owen in in the late 1940s. Lois Gosney, the daughter of E.S. Gosney, invited Maas to the opening of the Palomar Observatory in 1948. Maas writes, "On the way back to Pasadena, we passed a large resort hotel in the desert. Lois turned to me and said, 'This is a great place, and the best part is, they don't take Jews' " (https://bit.ly/2VpvbbA).

Caltech physicist David Goodstein notes (https://bit.ly/2AczoYT) that when writing to his wife Greta, Millikan described physicist Paul Ehrenfest as "a Polish or Hungarian Jew [Ehrenfest was, in fact, Austrian] with a very short, stocky figure, broad shoulders and absolutely no neck. His suavity and ingratiating manner are a bit Hebraic (unfortunately) and to be fair, perhaps I ought to say too that his genial openmindedness, extraordinarily quick perception and air of universal interest are also characteristic of his race." Goodstein writes that "Millikan’s biases were typical at the time of a man of his upbringing and background." Being a trustee of an organization that passionately advocated for forced sterilization was not.

In 1933, Nazi Germany passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” mandating forced sterilization of people with certain disabilities. Section 12 of this law stated, "Once the Court has decided on sterilization, the operation must be carried out even against the will of the person to be sterilized, unless that person applied for it himself. The state physician has to attend to the necessary measures with the police authorities. Where other measures are insufficient, direct force may be used" (https://bit.ly/3g4vekW). In 1933–1934, the Human Betterment Foundation mailed its pamphlet "Human Sterilization" to Nazi administrators responsible for enforcing the law (https://bit.ly/2BJc0T6). In 1934, Popenoe wrote: "The law that has been adopted is not a half-baked and hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime, but is the product of many years of consideration by the best specialists in Germany. . . . I must say that my impression is, from a close following of the situation in the German scientific press, rather favorable" (https://bit.ly/2BhgT62). This law caused the sterilization of roughly 400,000 people (https://bit.ly/2VuOYX8).

In the American Sociological Review in 1936, Marie E. Kopp wrote: "The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California experiment as reported by Mr. Gosney and Dr. Popenoe. It would have been impossible, they say, to undertake such a venture involving some one million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere" (https://bit.ly/2NCAuQQ). C.M. Goethe, also a trustee of the Human Betterment Foundation along with Millikan, Ruddock, Chandler, and Munro, often traveled to Germany, and wrote to Gosney: "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60,000,000 people" (https://bit.ly/3ibd8zy).

In summary, Millikan was a trustee of an organization that keenly advocated for forced sterilization, published books and pamphlets that provided inspiration and scientific legitimacy for Nazi Germany's forced sterilization law, took sustained efforts to communicate with Nazi administrators of the law, and indeed delighted in having "jolted into action" the Nazi regime. Millikan himself also made racist statements, inexcusable in themselves, which must be understood in the light of his public advocacy for forced sterilization.

Given this information, it is not possible for Caltech to retain the names of Millikan, Ruddock, Chandler, Munro, and Gosney on its campus and claim moral decency. If Caltech does not act, it admits to being comfortable with lower moral standards than the following institutions.

• USC removed Von KleinSmid’s name on exactly comparable grounds (weaker, actually, as Von KleinSmid was only a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, while Millikan was a trustee) (https://bit.ly/2NA4b4R).
• Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, where Millikan was a long-time member and co-founder, removed Millikan’s name in 2019 from a room named after him (https://bit.ly/2BJ25gH).
• Polytechnic School removed Gosney’s name in 2013 from a hall named after him, stating that “Gosney was also a prominent supporter of the eugenics movement, a racist doctrine under the guise of science that was embraced by those seeking to justify white supremacy” (https://bit.ly/31OoaVE).
• Sacramento State University removed C.M. Goethe’s name in the mid-2000s from a mansion and arboretum on its campus which had been named after him (https://bit.ly/3guZnds).
• The Burbank Unified School District removed the name of David Starr Jordan, a member of the Human Betterment Foundation, from a middle school in 2019 (https://lat.ms/2W3x5iq).
• The Palo Alto Unified School District removed the names of Jordan and Lewis M. Terman, members of the Human Betterment Foundation, from two middle schools in 2017 (https://bit.ly/3gMoskq).
• Princeton University recently removed Woodrow Wilson’s name from its campus because of Wilson's racist statements and actions, which are horrific but less appalling than Millikan’s (https://bit.ly/2CQwxWr).
• Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed Margaret Sanger’s name from their Manhattan Health Center in July 2020 (https://cnn.it/3eRzLX3).
• Pomona College removed Millikan’s name from their math, physics, and astronomy building on October 6, 2020 (https://bit.ly/3lrxwNY).

Please act immediately.

To see the list of 1113 signatories, please go to http://chwe.net/millikan/.