Cancel Caltech

There’s a petition circulating around Caltech to remove Robert Millikan’s name and image from campus buildings and fixtures. Millikan won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his oil drop experiment and was the founding president of Caltech. But, it turns out he was also a proponent of eugenics, and that is Unacceptable.

I’m reminded of an incident a couple years ago, when one very woke Stanford student urged the university to rename Terman Library. You see, Lewis Terman was a eugenics supporter, and that kind of hate has no place on a diverse and inclusive campus like Stanford University.

That was all well received, until someone informed the kid that Terman was in fact named after Frederick Terman, the former Dean of Engineering and cofounder of Stanford Research Park. That’s why Terman is the name of the Engineering library and not the Race Science library. Lewis Terman, the eugenicist, was Frederick’s dad.

This mistake has happened multiple times.

I’m also reminded of that time the Palo Alto school board decided to rename Terman Middle School (this time they got the right Terman). A board committee chose the name Yamamoto Middle School, in honor of Fred Yamamoto, a Japanese-American who was sent to FDR’s concentration camps during WWII. Staunchly loyal to the country (or inordinately optimistic), Yamamoto later enlisted in the Army and died in battle.

A hero and inspiration to us all. BUT —

The school board somehow overlooked the fact that Fred shares a surname with another famous Yamamoto — Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Parents complained, and the school board swapped in the name of a Holocaust survivor, Ellen Fletcher. Fletcher Middle School it is.

Maybe the lesson here is that building names are stupid. It’s not an honor to have a namesake if names change with the latest Radical Chic. And if names are so impermanent, it’s stupid to affix one to a building. Just put a Victim-of-the-Month placard on the front entrance, if that’s what you’re trying to do.

I’m not surprised to see this kind of bullshit go down at Stanford, where they have multiple departments dedicated to Grievance Studies. But I always had higher expectations for Caltech. No athletic recruits, no diversity quotas, no humanities department. That’s what a real university should look like.

Many years ago, when Quora was still a thing, I answered a query: “Does Caltech have the hardest undergraduate experience in the world?

It’s all a matter of perspective: To a Caltech student, the Feynman Lectures might be a little bit hard. To a Stanford student, 8th grade algebra might be hard.

Hard as in demanding, time-consuming, you-must-surrender-your-soul. You’re not left with spare bandwidth to notice microaggressions, and it doesn’t matter because Demoralization is a Feature, not a Bug — That overwhelming sense of inadequacy is exactly how you’re supposed to feel when contemplating the Poincaré conjecture! There’s an old Caltech webcomic called Crippling Depression, which basically sums up the nature of scientific research and life at Caltech.

We always thought it was the challenging coursework that crushed our egos, but hey maybe it was actually the racist building names. The students should demand reparations.

5 thoughts on “Cancel Caltech

    1. Ehh… I think the author is making much ado about nothing. The freshman class size is only about 200 students each year, so the massive percentage losses are only, what, 20 students?

      That said, no school is too small for the diversity hustlers…

  1. I spat out my coffee at this line, “Does Caltech have the hardest undergraduate experience in the world?”, when I’m pretty sure the questioner meant “in the US” because the answer is obvious otherwise. And then sure enough all the answers on Quora seemed to have no experience outside America.

    Elite British universities don’t have grievance studies degrees at undergrad – and many don’t have them *at all* – and while there is some variation in academic exposure in earlier years, there is an intense focus in a single discipline in at least the final two years, so not even an opportunity to be distracted by non-subjects. Earning a first class degree in STEM from Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, UCL, or ICL is a substantially harder experience than anywhere in the US and the student is thus immensely more qualified than any undergrad from an American college. This is as true either for continued academic study or the general wordiness of not being a little shit out to infect functioning organisations with subversive propaganda.

    And don’t even get me started on how it works in Germany and Austria. If you think it’s hard in the UK, jeez …

    1. wait, REALLY?? My mind is totally blown. I always assumed that the universities in the UK and continental Europe would just be a poofier version of what we have in the US. Europe is our bitch. How could they not have grievance studies? Wait, a quick Google search returns this.

      It never occurred to me that there are decent STEM universities outside the US. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed with American exceptionalism, but maybe European universities don’t do as much marketing? It now occurs to me that a lot of my opinion of universities is shaped by Hollywood. Eg, Big Bang Theory takes place at Caltech! Do international elite families try to bribe their way into Oxbridge &co the way American families bribe their way into Harvard?

Leave a Reply to dumbestbloggerCancel reply