Project Lead: Prof. Kent McClelland, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Vivero Fellow (2026-2027): Oleksandr Nerubay
The eugenics movement arose as “scientific racism” in the late 1800s, and it gained widespread acceptance in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was so popular in the early twentieth century that leading colleges and universities included eugenics in their curriculum, and Grinnell was no exception. A person who taught eugenics at Grinnell was Fanny Cook Gates, one of the College’s first female faculty members, a world-class physicist who hadn’t been able to find a position as a research physicist and instead took the job of Dean of Women at Grinnell. She ended up teaching women’s health classes that promoted eugenic ideas. Another supporter of eugenics was Henry S. Conard, the botanist for whom the Conard Environmental Research Area is named. He published a paper about the hereditary bone density of different racial groups in one of the leading eugenics journals of the time.
The goal of this Vivero project is to create a website that recounts the history of eugenics at Grinnell by telling the stories of Gates, Conard, and other figures at the College associated with eugenics. The website will also provide context about the eugenics movement more generally, as well as the cultural views of Grinnell students a century or more ago, many of whom believed firmly in the political vision of the progressive movement, the aspirations of first-wave feminism, the missionary crusade of bringing Christianity to the world, and not least in the racist ideas of eugenics.
The Vivero fellow for this project will do archival research, take charge of the technical design the website, and help to build it by choosing images and writing stories for it. Because the area of eugenics is not a research specialty for me, as project lead I intend to work collaboratively with the Vivero fellow to make it a project we jointly own. My hope in proposing this project is that the website will educate Grinnellians about a fascinating and previously ignored chapter in the College’s history. Further, I hope it will encourage us all to consider which of the deeply held beliefs we regard today as self-evident may cause people a hundred years from now to shake their heads at our folly.
