Caltech confronted its racist past. Here’s what happened

Photo caption: The Robert A. Millikan Memorial Library was this week renamed Caltech Hall. Photo credit: Sam Comen for Nature. Article by Nidhi Subbaraman. Nature – November 10, 2021.

After a few hours leafing through documents in the basement of a research building, Jane Panangaden was shaking with rage. It was 2017 and she was reading case records for hundreds of people who had been sterilized, usually without their consent, in the 1920s and 1930s. The physician reports had been collected to support the eugenics movement, a racist, pseudoscientific ideology with a history, Panangaden now realized, that was deeply entwined with that of her university, the California Institute of Technology — or Caltech — in Pasadena. […]

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