8 minute read
Slater Museum
from Issue 26
The Story of a Name
BY GRACE EBERHARDT
Advertisement
Introduction
My sophomore year of college was the first and last time I was lab partners with another student of Color. I remember we would speak Spanish to each other as we attempted to reach the light pink coloration a titration lab required of us. I felt a sense of belonging and freedom to be myself, something I hadn’t realized I was missing. To a student of Color in the sciences, Thompson Hall can feel lonely as monochromatic crowds of students and professors pulsate in and out of classrooms. And as my concerns about isolation and loneliness took over, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable when I learned that the Slater Museum of Natural History was named after a professor who had taught eugenics from 1919 to 1951, well after the end of the Second World War, when many people assume eugenic thinking disappeared in the wake of the Holocaust. What makes matters worse is that the historic timeline in front of the museum makes no mention of Slater’s eugenic teachings. This history, perhaps unintentionally, has been erased. My heart sank every time I passed the museum, which was most days on my way to class. I had to do something about it. I decided to research the history and ethics of the name with the guidance of Professor Kristin Johnson (in the Science, Technology and Society Department) and Professor Peter Wimberger (the Director of the museum). Professor Dexter Gordon, of the African American Studies Department and the Race and Pedagogy Institute, helped me find my positionality and narrative during this research. I needed to know: Who was Professor Slater? What was taught in his eugenics courses? Were Slater’s eugenics courses taught relatively late compared to other local universities? And, given the history, should the Slater Museum of Natural History be renamed?
Slater: A Pacific Northwest Herpetologist
Professor James R. Slater obtained his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University after serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War I and later received his graduate degree from Syracuse University in 1917. Slater then went on to teach biology at the College of Puget Sound (CPS) from 1919–1951. During that time, Slater founded the natural history museum, serving as its director until 1951. Contrary to popular belief, Slater was not the first professor of science at the College of Puget Sound. A woman named Mabel R. Simpson A.M. taught the first botany and biology courses from 1908 to 1918. Slater did, however, direct the biology department for over three decades (1).
Slater was a herpetologist, researching amphibians of the Pacific Northwest. Although his research interests had nothing to do with eugenics, and he probably taught the course because it was a standard component of biology curricula by the 1920s, evidence suggests he supported a range of eugenic ideas. This evidence includes Slater’s teaching of eugenics throughout his entire career at CPS, his membership in the American Eugenics Society, a eugenics pamphlet he kept from 1910, his notes on eugenics in his journal dated 1917–1955, exam questions he wrote for his eugenics class in 1939, and his advisee James Legg’s 1947 thesis in support of eugenic sterilization.
“Mental Hygiene and Eugenics”: A College of Puget Sound Biology Course
Slater taught the course entitled “Mental Hygiene and Eugenics,” later titled “Eugenics,” at the College of Puget Sound from 1919 until his retirement, when Professor Gordon D. Alcorn took it over until (presumably) removing it from the bulletin in 1954. Though there are few archival documents that show the course content, I was able to find the course description in the Puget Sound bulletin (Figure 1) and Slater’s 1939 eugenics test questions (Figure 2). The most compelling evidence as to what Slater taught and supported can be drawn from his advisee’s 1947 thesis on eugenic sterilization.
CPS student James Legg’s thesis “Eugenic Sterilization” can be found in Puget Sound’s Collins Memorial Library. Legg defended eugenic sterilization after the removal of Washington State sterilization laws, indicating late support for sterilization. In his thesis, Legg wrote a synopsis of state eugenic laws across the country and the different sterilization procedures done on women and men, but he did not tackle the ethical questions regarding sterilization being raised by others at the time. Furthermore, Legg wrote multiple statements in support of negative eugenics (policies aimed at preventing those with “undesirable” traits from procreating) (2). For example, Legg wrote:
Given some might be tempted to dismiss Slater’s teaching of eugenics as simply representative of contemporary thinking, one of the most helpful parts of Legg’s thesis for my research was his testimony regarding opposition to eugenic thinking in Tacoma Public Schools and in local colleges at the time he wrote his thesis. Legg wrote about an instance where a college student was asked to discuss the field of his interest on the radio station KMO. Once he announced his topic as eugenics, the radio host, hired by the station and Tacoma Public schools, refused to allow the student to speak on the subject. Legg then criticized the popular idea that eugenics was, as he wrote, a “Nazi persecution measure” (3). This shows that the general attitude in Tacoma in the late ’40s probably leaned against eugenics, yet Slater continued to teach his course and presumably endorsed certain kinds of eugenic thinking and policies. Since Slater’s student defended eugenics as late as 1947 amid criticism inspired by knowledge of what happened during the Holocaust, it is not historically accurate to claim that Slater was “a man of his time” who can or should not be judged by a later standard. “It seems to me immaterial whether we hold that a boy is a bad citizen because he has inherited bad traits for his forebears or whether we blame his childhood environment for these; in either case, if he is the child of bad parents he has not had the right start, and they ought never to have produced him. (3) ”
Figure 1. Course descriptions for Mental Hygiene and Eugenics from the 1927-1928 Puget Sound Bulletin
Eugenic Teachings: When Were Eugenics Courses Typically Taught in Pacific Northwest Universities?
In order to determine whether Slater’s eugenics teachings were taught past the time when such courses were considered socially and scientifically acceptable, I compared CPS to other local universities (Figure 3), including Willamette University (WU), a liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington (UW), a public state
Figure 2. Eugenics test questions found in Slater’s grade book from 1939. (Visit the online archive at the link on page 7 to view hypothesized answers to these test questions.)
school, and Washington State University (WSU), formerly called Washington State College (WSC), a land grant university (LGU). Land grant universities like Washington State College influenced the science curriculum nationally (4). Thus, I am using WSC, an LGU, to represent the national standard for science curriculum, and thus the national and local standard for eugenics course offerings.
When comparing these four schools, I expected larger state schools and smaller liberal arts schools to have similar start and end dates for eugenics course offerings, since larger state schools tended to provide the model for science curricula at smaller schools (4). However, this prediction did not match with the years the UW, WSU, WU, and CPS offered eugenics courses. As seen in Figure 3, CPS offered eugenics courses for 35 years in contrast to their liberal arts college counterpart, WU, which taught eugenics for 14 years. Additionally, WSC stopped eugenics course offerings four years prior to CPS and UW stopped offering eugenics courses five years prior to CPS. Although Slater’s eugenics offerings do not seem late compared to WSC and UW, they were late when compared to the liberal arts college WU.
Figure created by Grace Eberhardt
Figure 3. The start year and end years of eugenics course offerings at four different universities: Washington State College (WSC) now called Washington State University, Willamette University (WU), University of Washington (UW), and the College of Puget Sound (CPS) now called the University of Puget Sound
Given the research I did over the summer of 2019, here are my recommendations as to how we should move forward with the name of the Slater Museum of Natural History. First and foremost, we cannot let this history be hidden any longer. Thus, I recommend that there be a permanent historical exhibit on this topic placed in front of the museum. Secondly, I do recommend that the name of the museum be changed. I do not believe we should memorialize Professor Slater because, though he may have started teaching eugenics when it was an
accepted component of biology curricula, he continued the course after it was being removed from other universities and local, state, and national criticisms were growing. Although Professor Slater founded the museum and the museum was renamed in 1979 to honor him as the founder, in making my recommendation I prioritize the symbolic meaning and values conveyed by the names we choose to commemorate the past. There are many accounts of students of Color not feeling a sense of belonging in STEM disciplines (5, 6, 7). I believe the priority of the University and of the Slater Museum of Natural History should be one of inclusion. Given that STEM fields are mostly made up of White students and professors (8), we need to improve the learning environment and culture of STEM altogether. Providing a historical exhibit about Puget Sound’s history of eugenic teaching and changing the name of the Slater Museum of Natural History is a good place to start.
LEFT: Professor Slater and Alcorn in the natural history museum, circa 1948
Photo courtesy of Collins Memorial Library Digital Collections
ELEMENTS
