Near the turn of the 20th century, Connecticut’s elites began feeling uncomfortable about immigrants and people with disabilities mudding the state’s “Yankee stock,” descendants of the state’s earliest colonizers. This frustration became manifest when the state legalized forced sterilization in 1909, the modus operandi of eugenicists in thirty-odd states across the United States. Among the country’s foremost eugenicists was the acclaimed “experimental” psychologist and 14th president of Yale University, James Rowland Angell. Between 1924 and 1929, on the block that is now Jonathan Edwards College, he established the Institute of Psychology, which became an intellectual hub for the American eugenics movement. Angell, alongside Yale Professor of Psychobiology Robert Yerkes, psychological researcher and future Professor of Anthropology Clark Wissler, and future Professor of Psychology Raymond Dodge, hoped to empirically demonstrate a connection between race and behavior to establish racial hierarchies and justify discriminatory policies. Over a hundred years on, their work has left Yale with a dark eugenicist legacy it has no choice but to look in the eyes today.
Daniel Martinez HoSang is a Professor of American Studies and the faculty advisor of the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale (AECY). His Humanities Quadrangle office is bare-bones: just two desks, two chairs, a computer, a whiteboard, and cardboard boxes scattered around the room gave me the impression he has just begun settling into one of his many roles at Yale. Professor HoSang used to study public and political discourse surrounding reproductive justice, including access to prenatal care, birth control, and the right to reproductive autonomy. The latter topic introduced him to histories of sterilization. In the summer of 2021, a group of Yale students convinced him to begin the AECY as a means of understanding the university’s role in propagating eugenics.
As a Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry student, the AECY’s work is critical for learning the history of my own research today. Every week, I spend 15 hours writing and pipetting on the top floor of the Anlyan Center, learning to become a cell biologist. Anchoring the intersection of Cedar and Congress Street, the gargantuan research complex looks like a modernist interpretation of a ship, manned by thousands of scientists vanguarding biomedical science. I stand at its north-facing windows and imagine I am the captain, surveying a panorama of the Yale School of Medicine and downtown New Haven. I fixate on an old green dome just down the street—the Sterling Hall of Medicine. It has two names carved onto its wide concave face: on the right, “THE STERLING HALL OF MEDICINE,” and on the left, “THE INSTITUTE OF HUMAN RELATIONS.” The Institute of Human Relations (IHR) was the successor to the Institute of Psychology, studying a broad spectrum of social sciences, all rooted in its original eugenicist faculty and research interests.
Almost a century after Angell’s presidency, Yale’s Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (MB&B) department began to reckon with this history. In the fall of 2022, the department began mandating its students to take a “Science and Society” course exploring the “intersection of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry with human identity and society.” This requirement is fulfilled with courses like MB&B 268 “Identity, Society, and STEM” or HSHM 406 “Healthcare for the Urban Underserved.” This allows future doctors and molecular biologists to critically examine health inequalities and the politics of science and medicine, improving patient care and biomedical research. The problem is, of the four undergraduate life science majors at Yale, MB&B is the only one with this requirement. Thus, for many of my peers, conversations surrounding these topics, especially relating to eugenics, begin and end with a few non-descript sentences in the introductory biology sequence (BIOL 101–104). What is an academic department, if it doesn’t know or interrogate its own history?
In the spring of 2024, I found myself dissatisfied with my BIOL 101 section leader’s short and nervous explanation of James Watson’s beliefs surrounding race and intelligence. Nevertheless, these topics were enough for me to understand that this history was imperative to my interest in biomedical research. If Yale is to seriously reckon with its history, it is incumbent upon our administrators, educators, and students to speak honestly about our university’s century-long entanglement with the eugenics movement and what we can do to counteract its effects today.
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Professor Hosang speaks with a great deal of intention and his knowledge is encyclopedic, contextualized with the specific people and places that shaped Yale’s eugenics movement. He cites Yale alumni John Doyle, BK ’14’s senior thesis in the History of Science, History of Medicine (HSHM) as foundational to the AECY’s work. It kickstarted the collective, providing a detailed early history of Yale’s involvement in eugenicist psychology and sociology. Professor HoSang said “a hiring cluster around eugenics in the 1920s,” consisting of Yerkes, Wissler, and Dodge, was responsible for propelling Yale’s involvement in race-based pseudoscience.
Within the Institute of Psychology, these academics worked for years to legitimize eugenicist policies through seemingly objective research methodologies—justifying “a culling of the population,” as Professor HoSang put it. Yerkes was perhaps the most prominent of the three hired at the Institute. A comparative psychologist working for the United States Army during World War I, he developed the Army Alpha and Beta tests and became famous for claiming to have determined a method for objectively measuring intelligence. These exams, particularly Army Alpha, favored individuals with privileged educational and cultural backgrounds. Doyle, in his uncovering of Angell’s response to Yerkes, finds that these biases helped reinforce eugenicist connections between intelligence and race. Angell is reported to have said of the exams, “Certain…recruits in the army exhibited an intelligence capacity which marked them as morons and accordingly comparable with the most backward races.”
Although the pair held eugenicist beliefs, Professor HoSang explains that they were subtle in expressing them, refusing to use the title “Professor of Racial Psychology” as a means of avoiding criticism from the growing anti-eugenics movement that gained traction after World War II. Nevertheless, the two then selected Wissler, one of the most outspoken proponents of scientific racism of his time. Wissler had made a name for himself through comparative studies of Indigenous cultures throughout North and South America at the American Museum of Natural History. However, much of his research was dedicated toward reinforcing hierarchical views of humans, consistently claiming what Doyle called “the superiority of Nordic stock in relation to other races of the world.” Wissler would bring suppositions about racial differences into conversations with psychology, strongly influencing the Institute’s eugenics-based research.
In 1924, Angell, Yerkes, and Wissler completed their team with Dodge, an experimental psychologist interested in physiological measurements. His precise methodologies for measuring humans’ physical and mental responses gave a veneer of objective science to the Institute’s work on human difference. Although a less vocal proponent of eugenics, Dodge was a strong supporter of the National Origins Act of 1924, which sought to limit Asian, Southern European, and Eastern European immigration into the United States. Doyle and Professor HoSang both believe that such contemporaneous discussions surrounding immigration were a driving force behind Connecticut’s eugenics movement. Despite the Institute’s attempts to deny accusations of eugenicist bias by using nebulous phrases like “research in problems of animal, human and racial behavior,” Doyle finds that anti-immigrant sentiment was central to its day-to-day work.
Despite the Institute’s attempts to deny accusations of eugenicist bias by using nebulous phrases like “research in problems of animal, human and racial behavior,” Doyle finds that anti-immigrant sentiment was central to its day-to-day work.
Beginning work with a five-year endowment from the Rockefeller family in 1924, the faculty of the Institute began pursuing a varied set of specific objectives, all united by the advancement of race science. Doyle explains that although Dodge and Yerkes later moved away from eugenics at the Institute, Wissler remained steadfast in his race-based work. His group investigated topics that seem almost comically repugnant today. This includes the work of one of Wissler’s research assistants, Beatrice Blackwood, who studied what Yerkes described as the “sexual life of primitive and semi-primitive peoples.” Still, Wissler wasn’t the only guilty party; Doyle finds that the entire group retained close ties to Professors Irving Fisher, Ellsworth Huntington, and their American Eugenics Society (AES) (One location of the AES was headquartered next door to what is now the former Department of Psychology building, Kirtland Hall, on the corner of Hillhouse and Grove Street). Fisher, who was particularly influential in the AES, commended the team for their eugenicist leanings, which he believed would help hold off America’s “race suicide” by “awful contamination” from unwanted populations.
In 1929, Yale’s Institute of Psychology dissolved. Another grant from the Rockefeller family enveloped Yerkes, Wissler, and Dodge into the IHR, whose name remains carved into the Sterling Hall of Medicine. Anyone walking down Cedar Street would not be blamed for thinking the IHR is or was just another university initiative, and according to Professor HoSang, this was Angell’s intention. The AES left New Haven in 1938 as openly eugenicist research began to fall out of public favor. Nevertheless, Angell wanted Yale to continue doing research in race science. Sifting through Angell’s private correspondence, the AECY found the true nature of the IHR’s work: “Large parts of the program are…in effect in the field of eugenics, although not carrying this name.” So, the IHR hobbled on until 1963, and as formalized eugenicist work became increasingly rejected, the institute moved away from its foundational beliefs rooted in the proliferation of race science. In a retrospective analysis of the IHR’s work in postwar social science, published in 1986, J. G. Morawski describes the IHR’s final years as “[relying] on mundane knowledge about social organization” and returning to “tacit notions” about social sciences. However, this slow fade from explicit eugenics obscures the responsibility we have to acknowledge and atone for the university’s complicity in such a harmful ideology.
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To administrators tasked with discussing the dark parts of Yale’s history, the IHR’s dissolution may represent a quiet and comfortable conclusion to the university’s interactions with the American eugenics movement. Still, it is impossible to ignore that our institution’s role in legitimizing eugenics continues to have far-reaching implications. For instance, hidden in the depths of the Connecticut state code, a horrifying reality emerges: as of February 2025, the eugenicist practice of forced sterilization remains legal. Although amendments to the relevant statutes have added precautions against medical malpractice and domestic abuse, the principle of the text remains the same: the state has the authority to sterilize people against their consent.
For instance, hidden in the depths of the Connecticut state code, a horrifying reality emerges: as of February 2025, the eugenicist practice of forced sterilization remains legal.
This law is just one example of what the AECY calls “eugenics’ afterlives”: the repackaging of eugenicist ideologies into euphemisms and abstractions for the sake of palatability and avoiding direct criticism. Professor HoSang sees these afterlives everywhere, discrediting common narratives of institutional redemption. Just as Yerkes refused to be a “Professor of Racial Psychology” and Angell established the IHR to avoid the controversy associated with explicitly eugenicist work, eugenics lives on through euphemisms, abstractions, and the justification of cultural norms. For example, in a 2024 AECY blog post, Mayah Monthrope, SM ’25 describes how she received an email from a solicitor for wealthy couples searching for Ivy League eggs and sperm. The payout for one of her eggs was $7,000. Many Yale students receive these emails every year and the solicitor’s ads are occasionally posted around campus, according to Monthorpe’s post. They all operate under the same premise: our social position as Yale students somehow reflects genetic superiority, an inherited intelligence or ambition. Thus, as you might expect, Monthrope was offered even more money for increasingly “desirable” traits.
I spoke with Tara Bhat, BK ’25, a student researcher at the AECY, to learn more about eugenics’ afterlives. Through her role at the AECY, Bhat has become deeply familiar with Yale’s archives, particularly files connected to specific individuals involved in the American eugenics movement. Currently, she is working to democratize access to information about the university’s role in propagating scientific racism, especially in the realm of criminal justice. I was particularly interested in learning how Yale’s history can inform our community’s efforts to confront eugenicist heuristics in our education and research. Although I entered our conversation expecting it to revolve around psychology and the biosciences, I was left blown away by how extensively eugenics impacts day-to-day work in all disciplines at Yale. Bhat explains how “statistical terms were created and used to figure out…who are the least intelligent or valuable or worthy and who are at the top.”
At Yale, Irving Fisher revolutionized statistical economics, inventing index numbers and building the foundations of econometrics with the Fisher equation, Fisher hypothesis, international Fisher effect, Fisher separation theorem, and Fisher market. He drew upon the work of revolutionary British statistician Karl Pearson, who in 1894 rephrased what Carl Friedrich Gauss had called “mean error” to “standard deviation.” From there, he generalized the chi-squared distribution to its most common contemporary form. He also gave his name to the Pearson correlation coefficient. These are names which appear in hundreds of Yale classes; the extent to which these theorems, equations, and hypotheses are used in dozens of fields every day is indescribable. But, as Audrey Clayton points out for Nautilus, statisticians and race scientists like Pearson and Fisher often first applied these concepts to advance white supremacy. In a remarkable juxtaposition, Pearson is known to have written about statistically non-homogeneous data while writing another paper claiming that successful nations are homogenous, “not a mixture of superior and inferior races.”
So, what is there to be done? Modern statistics should not be thrown out; after all, concepts like the index numbers and Pearson correlation coefficient are fundamental to how we quantify our world. Bhat takes a utilitarian approach: “I’m not saying that everything you’ll do as an economist or scientist will be racist or bigoted, but we should know the histories of the work that we’re doing so we don’t recreate these problems in the future.” She also emphasizes a need for collaboration between archivists, historians, and scientists. To this end, the AECY has spoken with psychiatrists at the Yale School of Medicine, asking them to contextualize their work in the history of our university. These discussions will undoubtedly catalyze anti-racist and anti-eugenicist medical practices in the future. Still, I remained concerned about how we might confront our university’s past.
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Professor HoSang teaches a class titled “Eugenics and Its Afterlives” for the Yale Prison Education Initiative, a Yale program that brings professors to local correctional facilities to teach incarcerated people college-level courses. Many of his students there, according to Professor HoSang, have explained an ongoing apprehension towards Yale’s School of Medicine and the Yale New Haven Hospital from the local community. Patients are often hesitant about having their blood drawn because they think of Yale “as the place where they’ve [the IHR] experimented on us.” It’s easy for physicians to chalk this up to public ignorance surrounding medicine, but there are undoubtedly deep-seated historical factors at play. As such, Bhat doesn’t believe it would be effective for Yale to issue a statement apologizing for its involvement with eugenics. Instead, she finds it would be more productive for the university to engage with “the facilitation of people becoming aware, in Yale, in the New Haven community, of the horrors of eugenics and thinking about how we can resist them going forward.” Bhat’s work in the archives goes a long way toward increasing the New Haven community’s access to the primary documents that shaped eugenics at Yale, with a particular emphasis on helping public school teachers educate their students about eugenics.
However, as she mentioned, this has to run alongside changes to the university’s educational norms. Recalling my own experience learning the introductory biology sequence, I reached out to Tenzin Dhondup BR ’26 to learn about his efforts in reforming the BIOL 101-104 curriculum. Like Bhat, he is an undergraduate researcher at the AECY; they both agree that the best thing Yale can do for its students when it comes to confronting our university’s past is fostering critical thinking surrounding eugenicist norms. For instance, Dhondup finds it important to teach “how the very techniques and concepts that we learn are tied to long histories of justifying social inequality through biological essentialism.” That means asking students hard-hitting questions early on, like “why there’s genetic screening for ‘desirable traits’ that attempt to link the social (intelligence, athleticism, etc.) to the biological.” He hopes this will encourage students to consider how eugenicist modes of thinking touch their day-to-day lives, even through quotidian phrases like, “‘it’s just in his genes.’”
Dhondup’s work builds on Emme Magliato, PC ’23, Kelly Long, JE ’23, and Gemma Yoo, JE ’23’s 2023 assessment of how eugenics impacts the modern life sciences. Most notably, they found repeated instances of genomics research attempting to correlate particular genes with income and education. These aren’t hidden papers in unreviewed journals, either; they’re in Nature Communications and Nature Genetics, some of the most prestigious publications in science. This research has striking similarities to the work of Yerkes, Wissler, and Dodge, and it is this present-day continuation of eugenicist thinking that encouraged Dhondup to propose changes to the introductory biology curriculum. Currently, he’s working alongside the BIOL 101-104 course coordinators to craft engaging discussion section topics related to eugenics for each of the four courses, realizing “[eugenics’] interdisciplinary roots… urge similarly interdisciplinary solutions.”
The AECY’s work is critical to Yale’s stated mission to educate “aspiring leaders worldwide,” now more than ever. Amidst a global shift towards authoritarianism and isolationism, explicit conceptions of eugenics risk making a comeback. In 2024, a century after the passage of the National Origins Act, President Donald Trump remarked during his campaign in Juneau, Wisconsin, that there are “a lot of bad genes” in immigrant communities: “…a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes.” The irony shouldn’t be lost on us: this is eerily reminiscent of Representative Albert Johnson’s 1924 speech on the House floor, which declared “our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood.” This all comes alongside Trump’s recent executive orders to significantly downsize the National Institutes of Health and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at schools and universities across the United States.
The irony shouldn’t be lost on us: this is eerily reminiscent of Representative Albert Johnson’s 1924 speech on the House floor, which declared “our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood.”
Because Trump’s orders—and eugenics altogether—are inherently national issues, this isn’t a Yale-unique problem. At its worst, a Trump administration will interfere in what can and cannot be taught in a science classroom, including the historical racial dynamics that contextualize research today. Thus, it is imperative for America’s scientists to be unafraid to teach their students and successors about the uglier histories of their field. We must take the opportunity to reverse the influence of eugenics in our work and become leaders in confronting its afterlives, ensuring our scientific and academic efforts promote equity and justice—rather than reinforcing historical hierarchies of human worth.
