First of all I just want to say how honored
I am to get the chance to meet all of you,
and to be involved with such an excellent
series of classes, initiatives, and organizations.
Thanks to the University of Delaware Center
of the Study for Diversity and thanks to the
University of Delaware English Department;
and thanks to Stephanie Kerschbaum, one of
my academic heroes, for this invitation. You
have something very unique and important happening
here at the University of Delaware, and I
am excited to get to contribute a little bit
to further your own very active pursuit of
diversity not just as a set of statistics
or photo opportunities, but as an active,
engaged, and researched practice � a practice
of advocacy, pedagogy, and activism. I just
heard about the newly NSF-sponsored program
to increase recruitment, retention and advancement
of women faculty and women faculty of color,
and I want to say that it is initiatives like
this that will, in the future, do the most
work to counter the �academic eugenics�
I mention in my title.
For several years now, I have been doing archival
research, looking at the ways that disability
was constructed through immigration processes,
practices, discourses, artifacts, images,
and technologies in the peak period of North
American immigration, 1900-1925, which was
also the peak period of North American eugenics.
So I am going to talk to you about some of
this research today. I am going to eventually
try to build a bridge between Ellis Island
and this University � to investigate the
ways that eugenics exists at the foundation,
really, of any college or university. Let�s
see if I can actually pull that off.
As I begin today, I want to start with my
own definition of eugenics, as this phenomenon,
this philosophy, this foundation for thinking
of the body, is central to my talk. I define
eugenics as the �science� of positively
advocating for particular forms of human regeneration,
coupled with the negative restriction of the
propagation of certain classes and ethnicities.
It is a way of controlling who lives, who
procreates, and who dies, based on flawed
ideas about our genetic makeup. Beginning
at the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics
characterized and drove North American national
health and immigration policy. Ellis Island
offered an extremely attractive set of possibilities
for eugenicists. In addition to the �negative�
eugenic programs of sterilization, lynching,
and so on, carried out over decades across
the country, immigration was ideal for �positive�
eugenics, literally offering opportunities
to control and edit the gene pool, using immigration
stations as an elaborate sieve. Eugenics led
to practices and processes that selected and
sorted bodies into geographical areas, classes,
and regimes of discipline. Eugenics also inspired
genocide. Eugenics was a philosophy, a dogma,
a rhetoric, a religion. Beginning at the turn
of the twentieth century, eugenics was �anointed
guardian of [American] health and character,�
as Nancy Ordover has shown, �constructing
immigrants as both contaminated and contaminators�
(xiv). Angus McLaren argues that, for eugenicists,
their final �chief success� wasn�t necessarily
even the drastic increase in restriction and
deportation focused on specific groups of
immigrants; it was �in popularizing biological
arguments� (67). Not only did eugenic immigration
restriction actually reshape the North American
body, it reshaped how North Americans thought
about bodies and minds.
I have been able to develop theses about the
ways in which the immigration stations at
Ellis Island in the U.S and Pier 21 in Canada
were in fact used as laboratories for eugenicists.
Immigration, to eugenics proponents, felt
like the perfect experiment for shaping the
racial future of America. I have tried to
show that, at Ellis Island for example, the
key triumph of eugenics was the creation of
new categories of disability, and photography
readily facilitated these inventions. The
terms �moron� and �feeble-minded�
were both created at Ellis Island to classify
immigrants. A regime of literacy and I.Q testing,
but also a regime of vision, was responsible
for the solidification of these terms, terms
that are still used to this day, despite their
racist and pseudo-scientific roots. Perhaps
the most overt example of this fusion can
be found in the 1918 Manual of the Mental
Examination of Aliens, published by the U.S
Public Health Service for the use of medical
officers performing medical examinations at
Ellis Island. The images I am showing now
come from the pages of this Manual.
Show slide.
Walter Benjamin has argued that one of the
earliest functions of photography was as a
physiognomic tool, to catalogue the human
body in a way that translated embodied signs
into insinuations of a mental hierarchy: �up
to the highest representation of civilization,
and�down to the idiot� (�Small History�
252). The Manual is an example par excellence
of this physiognomic photography. The document
clearly outlines a visual grammar for discerning
�feeble-mindedness.� This grammar, providentially,
could lead inspectors to any number of possible
rhetorical usages. The Manual warns that,
�A great many feeble-minded persons on ordinary
inspection present no physical signs whatever
[sic] which would indicate real lack of intelligence.
Nevertheless, the examiner should have made
close examination of facial expressions, both
in normal and abnormal persons, especially
as to whether they might be gloomy, sad, anxious,
apprehensive, elated, hostile, confused, sleepy,
cyanotic, exalted, arrogant, conceited, restless,
impatient, etc. An examination of the photographs
which appear herewith may prove interesting
and instructive in this connection� (13).
The photographs then show several men (and,
on other pages not shown, women) labeled as
varying grades of �imbecile� or �moron.�
The images make direct connections between
facial characteristics and defect. As Elspeth
Brown suggests, eugenicists at this time assumed
that �photography could map intelligence�
and the Manual reflected this belief (118).
As Martin Elks has shown, there was a clear
visual protocol used to classify the �feeble-minded�
through photography in this era (381). Such
protocols were produced and reproduced at
Ellis Island. These techniques then rhetorically
influenced the ways that everyone, from eugenics
proponents, to Ellis Island inspectors, to
common citizens, looked at one another.
I am also going to talk about a small series
of photographs that extended this work across
American culture, making every non-white alien
a possible eugenic menace, a body and mind
to be framed according to criminological,
pathological, and even freakshow referents.
As Nancy Ordover explains, �American eugenicists,
armed with charts, photographs, and even human
skulls, were there to provide the visual and
mathematical support that rendered racism
scientifically valid and politically viable�
(9). I have been working to show some of the
key ways that photography provided this grounding,
and developed eugenic rhetorics that linger
to this day.
Beginning in 1905, Augustus Sherman, an Ellis
Island clerk, took a series of pictures of
immigrants who had been stranded at Ellis
Island. Sherman took more than 250 of what
he called �immigrant type photographs�
between 1905 and 1920. These images became
incredibly popular at the time, circulated
as postcards, framed and displayed in prominent
locations, reprinted in periodicals, religious
texts, and governmental reports. The majority
of photographs simply capture an ethnic group
or racial category on film, and label the
subjects�for instance as �Russian Hebrews,�
�South Italians,� �North African Immigrant�;
or sometimes Sherman labels a type more generally
as, for example, �Eastern European Immigrant.�
As Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk from
1892 to 1925, Sherman had special access to
potential subjects for his photographs. Andrea
Temple writes that he told staff, �if you
see an interesting face [�] contact Gus
Sherman immediately!� (16). He sought out
the strange��there could never be [�] anything
too exotic to capture on plate� (Temple
16). He photographed only detained immigrants�those
who could sit still for a long photo shoot
because their future was uncertain. These
were people who had been already processed
through the snapshot diagnosis of the line
inspection, and seen as somehow questionable.
They then became available for further viewing
and �capture� on film, because they were,
at least temporarily, not allowed into America.
Because of the length of the photographic
process, the cumbersomeness of the technology,
Sherman was compelled to capture subjects
in a literal state of limbo�without a country.
Those with nowhere to go could be made to
be still long enough to be photographed. Sherman
photographed his subjects in their full ethnic
costume, capturing them in their traditional
dress often for the last time�before they
were rejected and sent home, or made their
way to New York, leaving their traditional
dress behind nearly as soon as they landed
in Manhattan. As Andrea Temple writes, Augustus
Sherman �captured these people as they would
never look again, as they might want to forget
they had ever looked� (17).
Sherman�s photographs are examples of the
emerging form of �documentary photography�
in this era. This propensity for human documentation
overlaps with the rhetorical function of the
Manual photos, as physiognomic and comparative
texts. Indeed, having an inventory of over
250 photos, each labeled according to race
and ethnicity, allows for a cataloguing and
sorting of bodies. Further, the idea that
these images are also effigies is noteworthy.
In an 1907 National Geographic article featuring
Sherman�s photographs, the unnamed author
begins by noting that the immigrants photographed
�are here shown just as they landed, most
of them being still clad in their native costume,
which will be discarded, however, within a
few hours� ("Some" 317).
Matthew Frye Jacobson has written that in
this era, the concept of �variegated whiteness�
became prominent, and it was important to
be able to mark ethnic others, even if they
may have been previously understood as �white,�
as now somehow not authentically or fully
white. He explains that �the salient feature
of whiteness [before this era] had been its
powerful political and cultural contrast to
nonwhiteness,� yet artifacts like Sherman�s
photographs reveal how �its internal divisions,
too, took on a new and pressing significance�
(41). In his estimation, texts like these
offered �fundamentally a hierarchical scale
of human development and worth� based on
this idea of both marking out non-whiteness,
and on selective distinctions in a field of
variegated whiteness (Frye-Jacobson 79). The
process manufactured brand new populations
of non-whites, or not-fully-whites. Sherman�s
pictures further helped people to �see�
these new populations and to define the American
through the creation of the alien.
Show slide.
This image pictures three men, on the roof
of an Ellis Island building (a common backdrop
for Sherman's photos). At the left, seated
on a bench, we see a man with his head turned
to our right, wearing a knee-length jacket,
beside him another man stands on the bench,
so as to draw attention to his smaller stature
� he stands at about the same head-level
as the seated man. He is wearing an ankle-length
jacket with fur trim, and his chin is raised
in the air. On the far right, we see a third
man, also standing on the bench and just slightly
taller than the man in the middle of the picture.
He wears a turban and his head is larger than
those of the other two men. He also wears
an ankle-length coat, and he holds his hands
on his waist. The image is labeled �Subramaino
Pillay (Right) and Two Microcephalics."
This image shows a side angle of "Perumall
Sammy" and the hand-written notation at the
top of the photo suggests he was "ceritifed
for congenital deformity of the abdomen, two
arms and legs being joined at the abdomen�"
He wears a long jacket, opened at the front
where a pair of legs and arms, bound and partially
covered with silk, are shown to be attached
to his stomach. He has a mustache, long hair,
and a hat perched at the very top of his head.
The original Sherman photographs contain short
captions, written on the photographs themselves
in pen or typed. These include simple classifications
like �Russian Giant� or �Burmese�;
Histories of arrival and origin; Or a combination
of histories of origin, classifications, and
specific diagnoses (�Perumall Sammy, Hindoo,
ex SS Adriatica April 14, 1911, certified
for congenital deformity of the abdomen, two
arms and legs being joined at the abdomen�).
Walter Benjamin suggests that the captions
that accompany a photograph carry an �altogether
different character than the title of a painting�
(�Work of Art� 6). These captions are
often �directives,� and can be �explicit�
and �imperative� (Benjamin �Work of
Art� 6).
Sherman�s own, hand-written captions catalogue
difference, but also direct our view explicitly,
training us to classify each individual according
to race and ethnicity at a glance. Further,
in the images that he captures of bodily �abnormality,�
the scribbled caption asks us to view the
human as sum of his or her dysfunctional parts
and to fuse race and supposed bodily �abnormality�
or disability: not just deformed, but a deformed
"Hindoo." In this way, the photographs of
Augustus Sherman work to fuse pseudo-scientific
�evidence� of racial difference with �evidence�
of bodily �abnormality.�
In other projects, I carefully examine how
Sherman�s images were reproduced and circulated
through immigration inspection manuals, popular
books and venues like National Geographic,
as well as through the landmark �Dictionary
of Races and Peoples� presented to Congress
in 1921. In short, the images were ubiquitous
and popular. They did 
a lot of rhetorical work.
The key to Sherman�s rendering of the �deviant�
other was the fact that this reading of the
body�s signs was connected to a clear nationalist
project at Ellis Island. As mentioned before,
while the photographs are part of a program
of assimilation, they are also part of a process
of abjection. The photographs construct a
binary relationship between the American reader
and the Alien subject, a ghostly national
type as the inverse of an array of alien and
�defective� types.
The larger thesis of this project is that
we all carry Ellis Island and this history
with us today. We are subject to the same
gaze, governed by the same rhetorical vision.
Also, a somewhat larger leap I am hoping to
make is that the actual technology of photography
developed, from the very beginning, as an
ableist and eugenicist tool. I think that
studying these photographs, together with
the rhetorical space of Ellis Island, and
the discursive explosion of eugenics, allows
us to recognize unique and complicated connections
between spaces, words, images and bodies.
As bleak and pessimistic as the message may
be, I also think that studying these texts
allows us to recognize the historical�and
the current�predominance of specific visual
rhetorics. This study should hopefully allow
us to "view" the other ways that, through
technologies like photography, or through
other "explosions" of media, we continue to
frame and develop race and disability, as
we freeze and arrest difference.
With President Harding�s passage of 
the National Origins Act in 1924, the door
on immigration essentially shut. As Roger
Daniels wrote, with this act Congress �wrote
the assumptions of the Immigration Restriction
League and other nativist [and eugenicist]
groups into the statute book of the United
States� (2004, 55). The eugenic message
was clear. Prescott Hall, writing on behalf
of the IRL in 1920, simply stated that America
must �exclude the black, the brown, and
the yellow altogether. As to the white, favor
the immigration of Nordic and nordicized stock.�
�We need to become and to remain a strong,
self-reliant, united country, with the only
unity that counts, viz, that of race� (1920�21,
6). And this is essentially what the Johnson-Reed
Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of
1924 did. These developments were celebrated
by eugenicists on both sides of the ocean�from
Henry Laughlin to Adolf Hitler.
President Harding�s own rise to power was
fueled by the immigration restriction rooted
at Ellis Island, and he relied on some of
the same rhetorical tools that restrictionists
had made useful. In his famous 1920 speech
on �Readjustment,� Harding used (or perhaps
even invented) the term �normalcy� to
describe an idealized state, attainable once
America was again at peace and had closed
its doors to foreigners (see Murray). While
many believed this was a lexical mistake,
the word perhaps nicely summed up a new system
of making-normal. Of particular note is Harding�s
strong push for �not submergence in internationality
but sustainment [sic] in triumphant nationality�
(n.p). He was referring here both to the end
of war overseas and the end of the stream
of immigration. He promised to close the gates,
and he did just that. As Roger Daniels points
out, his speech �served as a stimulus for
congressional action on immigration restriction�
(Daniels and Graham, 18). The rhetoric of
an idealized American �normalcy� is what
allowed Harding and others to paint the international
world as irrational, crooked, impaired, while
the new America would be straight and sure
on its feet. The traditional concept of the
norm, defined by Canguilhem as �a polemical
concept which negatively qualifies� also
applies to Harding�s �normalcy��he
does not have to say what America will be,
only to qualify what it will not be. In such
cases, �the abnormal, while logically second,
is existentially first� (243). The Jew,
the Asian whom the Dictionary stated had �insufficient
brain capacity,� the black, the brown and
the yellow, the �tainted� white, and all
other conveniently unfit or enfeebled aliens,
are the ground against which some fiction
of the �normal� American comes into relief.
What is remarkable about the �normalcy�
that Ellis Island spawned in the United States
was not that racist and eugenic sentiments
and policies were new, but that now the mechanisms
for marking out difference, and thus fortifying
the �normal� position only ever in contrast,
were multiplied. While the National Origins
Act was blunt and finite, the bodily attitudes
interpellated at Ellis Island were nuanced
and profligate.
Let me pause to say this: Eugenics is not
a historical narrative; eugenics is a contemporary
rhetoric.
Post-1924, eugenics became a widespread projection
of Ellis Island across the entire country.
The rhetoric surrounding the Ellis Island
process and spectacle helped to inculcate
�normalcy� into the American everyday,
to bury systems of downward comparison and
stigmatization into the citizen�s psyche.
When Harding used the term �normalcy�
in his presidential campaign of 1920, he solidified
an ongoing rhetorical reality: America had
defined and would continue to define itself
most successfully by what it rejected, not
by what it was.
Within a year of the 1924 act, the Commissioner
of Immigration at Ellis Island, Henry Curran,
reported proudly, though ridiculously, that
�all immigrants now look exactly like Americans�
(n.p). The dangerous hope and the seeming
lack of logic in a statement such as this
nicely sums up the frantic play for �normalcy�
and the tragic comedy of this drama. To say
that �all immigrants now look like Americans�
simply reveals that, all along, the idea of
American-ness has been an opportunistic projection.
Restrictionists shifted more emphasis to the
deportation of new Americans within the country,
communists, and other threats, and the eugenic
focus shifted to the lower classes within
America, maintaining racial and ethnic prejudice
that had been defined and applied at Ellis
Island.36
One specific relocation for Ellis Island as
a rhetorical space has been the U.S-Mexico
border. The U.S-Mexico border patrol was founded
on May 28, 1924�three days after the passage
of the National Origins Act. As Kyle Lytle
Hernandez has shown, the patrol, to this day,
allows for �perseverance of racially differentiated
systems of coercive force . . . racial profiling
[by the border patrol is] a wormhole of racial
domination; a practice in which past articulations
of white supremacy live in the present�
(13). In this way, Ellis Island lives on in
current American anti-immigration rhetoric.
Further, as Gary Gerstle has shown, it was
no coincidence that �the kind of eugenics-inflected
revulsion against �mongrelization� that
informed Congressional immigration debates�
leading up to the 1921 and 1924 crackdowns
�also triggered an expansion of and hardening
of state anti-miscegenation laws,� including
the 1924 Virginia law, which �powerfully
strengthened the nation�s substantial body
of racially and eugenically-based marriage
laws� (114). On March 20, 1924, the Virginia
legislature passed two closely related eugenics
laws: SB 219, entitled �The Racial Integrity
Act [1]� and SB 281, �An act to provide
for the sexual sterilization of inmates of
State institutions in certain cases,� referred
to as �The Sterilization Act.� The alien
�feebleminded� became larger targets within
the country as eugenic sterilization became
widespread. By 1932, thirty states had sterilization
statutes on the books, thanks in large part
to the rhetoric of immigration restriction.
In the United States, there were seventy thousand
total known sterilizations between 1907 and
end of World War II. Eugenic anti-immigrant
rhetoric reached into the bodies of those
racialized others made alien within the country.
The �integrity� of racial groups could
be qualified and policed in multiple, overlapping
ways. For instance, sterilization was always
explicitly linked to class, and black Americans
were specifically targeted for sterilization
when they could also be labeled as mentally
defective, because they were then seen as
more likely to be sexually promiscuous and
to thus breed interracially (Holloway, 56).
Ellis Island�s rhetorical �success�
allowed Americans to pick up the border, so
to speak, and lay it down across the bodies
of thousands of Others within the country.
Perhaps most notably, U.S. immigration restriction
efforts shifted from �filtering� arriving
bodies to detecting and deporting within the
country. The raids on Mexican workers in the
Southwest in the 1950s (and that continue
today) are one notable example of this new
emphasis. But these raids were preceded (and
in some ways, anticipated and allowed) by
the �Palmer Raids� between 1918 and 1921,
exemplified by the �Red Raids� of 1920,
during which three thousand suspected communists
were detained and deported, many of these
bodies held at Ellis Island. During the �Tong
Island for eventual deportation. Ellis Island
became a space, like Guant�namo Bay Prison
today, where suspect bodies could be held
indefinitely, all rights and protections countermanded
in this �special rhetorical space.� The
aggressiveness of current ICE (Immigration
and Customs Enforcement) efforts clearly rely
on similar suspensions of legal protections
and rights, and no longer relies on the fixity
of the physical border to apply these powers.
In fact, ICE detention centers can be seen
as contemporary Ellis Islands, towed onto
the mainland. (Notably, Delaware is one of
the only states without an ICE detention center
� though some of the country�s most controversial,
privately-run, for-profit ICE centers are
nearby, in New Jersey).
The attitudes incubated or accelerated at
Ellis Island led to the eugenic �racial
knowledge� that can be seen clearly in a
text such as the �Dictionary of Races or
Peoples.� There was a new catalogue of races,
ordered by deviancy. The use of terms such
as �moron� and �feeble-minded,� applied
nimbly for eugenic purposes, created the rhetorical
potential for opportunistic disablement and
incorporated a look and a lexicon of eugenics
into the American psyche.
Ellis Island helped to invent�and rhetorically
construct�disability as we know it today.
This construction continues to inflect our
understandings of race, �normalcy,� and
difference, continues to electrify and transport
our borders, continues to exist as a bodily
attitude, continues to shade and shadow how
we look at others and ourselves. The stories
of Ellis Island write and map for us much
broader narratives and cultural geographies.
We see not just the ways that spaces and discourses
work together to impose social order, creating
spaces in which deviation is sequestered;
we also see how spaces and discourses in part
create deviation and difference. Hopefully,
retelling these stories and remapping this
space also demands that we develop a new relation
to the history of Ellis Island and to immigration
that reevaluates the rhetorical uses of difference.
I now want to add one other image to this
archive.
When my mom was about nine years old, her
mother became pregnant and she began to prepare
to have a new baby brother. Her mom went to
the hospital to have the baby, but he never
came home. My uncle Robert was born with,
most likely, Down Syndrome. The doctors told
my grandmother that she really had no other
option but to send Robert away to an institution.
My grandmother also, then, refused to talk
about Robert ever again. My mom grew up missing
her brother, and she found out that he died
at the Huronia Regional Center, an institution
in Orillia, Ontario, before he was 10 years
old.
Later, she was able to get this picture of
him, from his files.
Show slide.
We have since discovered that dozens of kids
at the institution died the same month that
he did, all from simple colds that progressed
into pneumonia. My mom became a social worker,
and her first job was at this institution,
where she discovered horrible conditions � other
people saw them too, but very few tried to
do anything about them. She left the job,
but stayed connected with many people from
Huronia, including Patricia Seth and Marie
Slark. Last Fall, my parents acted as litigation
guardians for Pat and Marie in a class action
lawsuit that was settled with the Government
of Ontario, admitting to the abuse experienced
by those who lived at the institution. I grew
up in the small town where the Huronia Regional
Center was located, and where the institution
was the main employer. Going out with my brother
Matt, who himself was disabled, in Orillia,
people looked at us like he was on a day pass
from the institution; entire families were
grounded and supported on the idea that people
with disabilities should be warehoused out
of sight, and could be treated as less than
human. Orillia was actually, when I look at
it now, a thoroughly eugenic place � that
is, its main industry warehoused a huge group
of people to keep them out of the gene pool
and out of sight, and so the entire town was
invested in those values. I hope that some
of that experience underpins or puts into
relief my push to try and find the neglected
stories throughout history. This is an impulse
that starts at home. I have also always tried,
when I am writing and researching about other
institutions, like the college or university,
to remember that they have historically been
grounded in their inverse image, in the places
where difference and disability were sequestered
and where life chances weren�t portioned
out, but were taken away.
My current project centers on trying to connect
eugenic history with what is actually happening
on campuses and in classrooms at the modern
North American university, even at places
like the University of Delaware or my own
institution, the University of Waterloo.
Just as Orillia had its Huronia Regional Center,
originally called the Orillia Asylum for Idiots,
the state of Delaware had the Delaware State
Hospital at Farmhurst, originally called the
Insane Department and Hospital, a place where
Tuberculosis patients were also housed.
Show slide.
I spoke earlier about the ways that eugenic
control on the borders slowly spread into
forms of more regionalized control, in which
negative and �positive� eugenic programs
were developed from state to state. Delaware
was no exception, in fact Delaware was a model
of eugenic efficiency.
There were 945 sterilizations in Delaware.�Of
the victims, 50% were female and 50% were
male. Close to one third of those sterilized
were considered mentally ill, while more than
two thirds were considered mentally deficient.�
During the peak sterilization time of 1927
to1937, Delaware sterilized an average of
18 people per 100,000 state residents per
year. Delaware sterilizations continued long
past WWII. �30% of the sterilizations occurred
after the war, and Delaware was ranked as
having the highest sterilization rate in the
country in both the late 1940�s as well
as 1962-1963 (J. Paul 321; D. Paul 97). Delaware
sterilization laws included habitual criminals,
those who were �chronically insane,� inmates
of mental institutions who were �insane,
feeble minded or epileptic�, and �those
committing criminal acts in or outside of
Delaware as a result of mental defectiveness
(Landman 82-3; Painter). Homosexual men were
also victimized because they were considered
to be suffering from a mental deficiency.
After being arrested for taking part in homosexual
activity, many were sent to mental institutions
where they could be involuntarily sterilized
(Painter). Additionally, laws existed preventing
the marriage of the insane, or those who had
been in an insane asylum (Schuler 312). By
law, Delaware had also prohibited the marriage
of two �poor people� (Kevles).
I was just in Philadelphia over the weekend,
and while I was there I recall an earlier
trip to the city to do research at the American
Philosophical Society Archives, where most
of the records of the Eugenics Society of
American are kept. There 
you can see reams and reams of correspondence
between the Society and professors and administrators
at the nation�s top universities, where
the Society was hoping there could be a curriculum
built around key eugenic principles; one project
had the goal of getting every undergraduate
in America to write out their own family tree,
both as a form of research, so that the Eugenics
society could learn exactly what genetic stock
was being educated, but also as a form of
Foucauldian discipline, a way to increase
students� self awareness of their own eligibility
(or non-eligibility) for procreation.
I did a little digging, and I found two specific
courses taught at UD:
Heredity and Eugenics 303: A study of the
fundamentals of Mendelian heredity and human
inheritance including a consideration of the
factors underlying race betterment and race
deterioration,� taught (at least) from 1920
to 1921. I also found this genetics course:
�a study of heredity with especial reference
to the methods and results of recent investigations,
and their applications to eugenics.�
Show slide.
The latter class was taught by Dean Winifred
Robinson, the first Dean of the Women�s
College, and from what I can tell a very significant
figure in the history of the university.
More recently, in the early 1990s, a pair
of researchers at UD (Gottfredson and Blits)
were embroiled in a national scandal over
the acceptance of research funds from the
Pioneer Fund, an organization widely believed
to actively promote neo-eugenic practices
(see William Tucker�s The Funding of Scientific
Racism).
My intent, of course, is not to single out
the University of Delaware. In fact, quite
the opposite: what I want to show is that
when you begin digging, you can find the historical
evidence of eugenics nearly anywhere you look,
and especially at any institution of higher
education in North America.
You 
may have seen a recent news item about the
University of Mississippi discovering a graveyard
on land it was clearing to build a Medical
Center. In clearing the land, they found over
1000 unmarked graves, believed to be those
of patients at the Mississippi State Lunatic
Asylum.
The shock registered in news stories seems
to be that this discovery would halt the building,
and there is definitely a little bit of drama
invoked in articles about the discovery, mentioning
the idea of �ghosts� and �haunting�
and a �horror movie.� But nowhere is there
any outrage or horror about the fact that
these graves were unmarked, that these patients
weren�t deemed deserving of a proper burial,
that these lives were so demeaned. In the
cemetery at the Delaware state hospital, graves
are marked with numbered stones. There is
just one grave marked with a private stone
showing a name. There are 776 numbered stones
arranged in concentric circles. At the Huronia
Regional Center, graves are also unmarked,
and at one point, someone removed the gravestones,
flipped them upside down, and turned them
into a patio. Clearly, these were never valued
lives, and the function of such places was
to keep these bodies out of public life, out
of mind, and out of the gene pool; this disrespect
and devaluation continued even after death.
But these stories reveal, first of all, the
steady pattern of setting up such sites in
close proximity to universities, where one
group of humans could be held and studied
by another. This also might begin to reveal
what the binary relationship has always been
between universities and asylums.
Indeed, one way to map the spaces of academia
and disability would be to look at the ways
land was parceled out in the U.S in the early
to mid- 1800s. While land-grant universities
were popping up in rural spaces, asylums and
�idiot schools� were popping up in other
adjacent settings�on old farms and abandoned
land. Like buildings at the University of
Delaware, the buildings at the State Hospital
at Farnhurst were built in a Georgian Revival
style, with red Flemish bond brickwork and
white wood trim. From the outside, the two
state institutions look remarkably similar.
Yet from within one privileged space, academics
were deciding the fate of others in similar,
yet somehow now pathological, other and impure
spaces.
As James W. Trent and others have shown, the
history of eugenic research, testing, and
promotion at Western institutions such as
Stanford and Harvard shows us that universities
have been the arbiter of ability in the United
States. Eugenics justified the creation of
biological and scientific bases for maintaining
�traditional� and unequal social relations.
American academics have delineated and disciplined
the border between able and disabled, �us�
and �them.� These line-drawers were able
to solidify their own positions as they closed
the doors upon others. The disabled, in this
history, were more than left out: disabled
people have been sterilized, imprisoned and
killed. As Trent and others have pointed out,
American academics systematically developed
the means to segregate society based upon
often arbitrary ideas of ability�the university
was the place for the most able, the mental
institution the space for the �least.�
Charles Benedict Davenport, a Harvard Ph.D
and instructor and David Starr Jordan, president
of Stanford University, are recognized as
two of the fathers of the American eugenics
movement. Here is a quote from Jordan that
nicely sums up his views: �It is not the
strength of the strong, but the weakness of
the weak which engenders exploitation and
tyranny. The slums are at once symptom, effect,
and cause of evil. Every vice stands in this
same threefold relation� (qtd. in Quigley,
2). Starr Jordan and Davenport worked to apply
these ideas to bodies they deemed weak. Margaret
Quigley and others chart the outcome of these
ideas, an outcome made possible by the privileged
position of these men within North America�s
�finest institutions.�
As Quigley, Welsome, Trent, Sharav, Smith
and others have argued, institutional basements
were labs for the social and biological experimentation
of scholars from the Ivory Towers. Paul Yakovlev,
a Harvard scientist and resident at several
Boston institutions, built a collection of
nearly 1000 brains, turning mental institution
morgues into labs and making some inmates
dissect these specimens (Welsome 233). His
collection was later donated to Harvard, where
they are still proudly displayed. Fernald
School (for the feeble-minded) came to be
known by Boston academics as ��the zoo�
because of the wide range of ailments represented
there, and the bodies held there for easy
viewing and study. In the 1950s, �residents�
at this and the similar Wrentham School (for
the feeble-minded) were fed radioactive isotopes
in a scientific experiment. Young boys at
these schools signed up to be part of the
�science club,� a club invented by the
M.I.T faculty club, and they were given Mickey
Mouse watches and armbands, and taken on special
outings, in return for taking part in a �nutritional
study.� 74 boys were fed oatmeal injected
with radioactive iron or calcium (Welsome
231, 235). Welsome suggests there was �nothing
unique� about this study, as the school
had become a �veritable laboratory� with
a �captive population� for academics from
Boston (231, 233). Many of the pictures used
(and still found) in medical textbooks came
from these schools. These phrenological and
physiognomical (now re-named �neuropathological�)
studies led to a catalogue of dysgenic deterioration,
the inverse of the pursuit of perfection at
the university. Upward academic movement was
fueled by the objectified bodies and minds
in these basements and later in these unmarked
graves.
Eugenics can be seen, at least in large part,
as the invention of the American university.
The legacy of this invention is still part
of our collegiate identity.
The labs in Mississippi, or at Wrentham and
Fernald, were labs for the development of
negative eugenics�the destruction of supposedly
inferior �stock� through isolation and
sterilization. Many children from large immigrant
families were shipped here, and there was
a radically disproportionate number of African
Americans, Eastern Europeans, and poor children,
all expendable according to eugenic thinking.
Michigan, Harvard, M.I.T and other universities,
on the other hand, might be seen as arenas
for positive eugenics, the propagation of
(supposedly) superior �stock.� I hope
that there are ways you can all think to connect
this with things currently happening on your
campus � I certainly see these echoes on
mine.
We may like to believe that, today, practices
of eugenics have not only been rejected, but
that they�ve also been corrected. Yet the
all evaluate the ways in which we ourselves
continue to decide which bodies and which
minds will have access to the considerable
resources, privileges and advantages we bestow�and
as we ask these questions, we must wonder
whether what we �bestow� is truly worthwhile
if it translates into policies of exclusion,
programs of incarceration and reductive definitions
of human worth.
In my work, I have tried to re-map the history
but also much of the current policy at institutions
of higher education with respect to disability,
hoping to show connections to this eugenic
history. For too long, disability has been
constructed as the antithesis of higher education.
Or, disability has been positioned as a distraction,
a drain, a problem to be solved. Disability
has been located outside of academia, or invited
only in the back entrance. As Snyder and Mitchell
have shown, "historically, disabled people
have been the objects of study but not the
purveyors of the knowledge base of disability"
(198). Further, more than just these proximate,
local relations with asylums and hospitals,
the university has always had a mutually-reinforcing
and polarized relationship with societal institutions
like immigration stations, reservations, residential
schools, and prisons. That is, the privileged
status of the university as the grand arbiter
of ability has been an argument for other
spaces marking the opposite of ability privilege,
such as spaces of incarceration, sterilization,
and deportation.
The ethic of higher education encourages students
and teachers alike to accentuate ability,
valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything
that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical
weakness, even as we gesture towards the value
of diversity and innovation.
Before I finish, I have a digression � something
that I was thinking about just this morning,
and I am hoping it might wrap some of these
themes together. I�ve been working on a
chapter that looks at the ways disability
is represented in films about college life,
from to Back to School to Old School to Monsters
University. It occurred to me that actually,
the movie that best represents academic ableism
campus should all be available to him, is
spurned, and then creates a technology � remember,
this is how Facebook began, as �Facemash,�
a way to rank the hotness of Harvard girls
� a technology designed to rank co-eds,
using their faces as a baseline for insinuations
of their sexual and embodied desirability
and undesirability. This set off perhaps the
key technological �innovation� of the
21st century, a true and consistent elaboration
of the ways photography was used eugenically
at the beginning of the 20th century, except
now we don�t need Augustus Sherman to take
the pictures, because we can take them ourselves.
Maybe this digression is something we can
chat about in the Q and A.
But I actually want to end today by encouraging
us all to interrogate and re-map the spaces
and interfaces of the North American university,
analyzing the ways that educational institutions
have structured society by limiting access
and reorganizing undesirable traits and bodies,
as well as the ways that we might more actively,
inclusively design pedagogy in response to,
and with an awareness of, this architecture.
I encourage you to both map a particular spatial
history and forge a set of tactics that might
allow you to reform and revise and re-embody
these patterns and routines. I encourage you
to search for ways to re-cast the rhetoric
of disability, and therefore to re-shape our
relationships with our own embodiment, with
others, and with our critical differences.
 
 
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