A year or two ago, the vast majority of Indiana University faculty, students, and alumni could not have told you who David Starr Jordan was, what he did for IU, or why he has become controversial. Today, probably most still couldn’t.

Jordan, a biologist, was IU’s seventh president, in office from 1884 to 1891, and his presidency, though short, is universally regarded as one of the most consequential in the University’s history.

But in the national moment we’re in, Jordan has become toxic. That is because, after he left IU, Jordan became a prominent advocate for eugenics, “the science of improving the human race through selective breeding, often seeking to control who can and who cannot reproduce.” Eugenics was not Jordan’s scholarly focus (he studied fish), but as an intellectual leader, his advocacy of eugenics was influential.

Like many eugenicists of his time, Jordan’s embrace of eugenics led him to subscribe to beliefs about the superiority of some racial and ethnic groups and the inferiority of others, beliefs that are rightly regarded today as abhorrent. These views, however regrettably, were mainstream among educated people in Jordan’s time.

IU President Michael McRobbie this Friday will ask the IU Board of Trustees to remove Jordan’s name from all significant features of the campus landscape where it now appears: the biology building, a beloved campus stream, and a street that runs through both the city and the campus. (There is also a parking garage with Jordan’s name, but only because it is located on Jordan Avenue).

President McRobbie is following the recommendations of a committee of faculty and administrators who provided a 60-page study. I deeply respect that committee, most of whose members I have known for many years. (It was co-chaired by my own dean.) Its report is scholarly, deeply researched, thoughtful, and nuanced. But its conclusion — that Jordan’s name should be removed from everything — is flawed and extreme, and thus so is McRobbie’s recommendation. In this essay, I will explain why and propose a better way forward.

IU should follow a principled middle path, one that captures the balance and complexity the committee acknowledges in its report — “people are morally complex,” it says, and “no generation ‘stands alone at the end of history with perfect moral hindsight’” — but which is not reflected in its ultimate recommendation.

Jordan Hall should be renamed, because David Starr Jordan does not represent the best of our scientific history and traditions. But Jordan’s name should not be removed from the river or the street, because he earned those distinctions through his unique contributions to IU’s emergence as a first-rank university, and also because they remain important to many alumni and local residents whose voices have not been heard in this process.

Jordan and eugenics

Jordan is generally recognized as an important intellectual leader of the eugenics movement. Most of his involvement with eugenics came after he had left IU.

Eugenics was both a scientific movement (one that grew out of misinterpretations of the new science of genetics) and a social movement. In the world of Jordan’s time, it was not a fringe set of beliefs to be found only among crackpots and Klansmen. Its principles were subscribed to by countless educated people — including the towering legal philosopher and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica predicted that the future would bring “the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.”

The Jordan committee agrees with all this, and more discussion can be found in its report. In Jordan’s time, it notes, “eugenics was widely accepted in mainstream thought.” Five U.S. presidents “hailed its promise.” “[E]ugenics courses were taught at prestigious universities all across the country.”

Jordan’s contributions to IU

In the eugenics movement, Jordan was a noted voice in a large chorus. At IU, he was a singular builder and leader. IU has had 18 presidents. Jordan’s presidency was one of the very most significant.

Jordan was the first layman (i.e., non-clergyman) to lead IU. According to IU’s web site, he oversaw the move to the new campus at Dunn’s Woods in 1885, secured money for new buildings from the legislature, introduced the major department system, and lectured on IU’s value to the state of Indiana. The Jordan committee calls his presidency “transformative.” “He ‘oversaw the university’s growth … improved the university’s finances and public image’ and increased the size of both the faculty and the student body.”

According to Thomas Clark’s authoritative history of IU,

Jordan’s greatest influence … lay in bringing Indiana into the main stream of the new education of late nineteenth century America. He had the good judgment to realize that this could only be accomplished by hiring the best young faculty members available. In his seven years as president his choices were on the whole exciting ones…. Like Moses of old, the ubiquitous and egotistical, but imaginative, young scientist had brought Indiana to within sight of promise, but he left it to others to scale the mountain to university status and academic maturity.

IU’s current Bicentennial Strategic Plan, developed under President McRobbie’s leadership, includes Jordan in a list of IU’s three most significant past presidents, men who helped make possible “outstanding achievements of generations of faculty members in a dazzling array of fields of inquiry.” It also suggests Jordan deserves credit as the first IU president to truly engage the University with the rest of the world. My former boss, the late IU Bloomington Chancellor Ken Gros Louis, frequently invoked Jordan in speeches when he was giving lessons about IU history.

Jordan was, in many ways, a great progressive. He was a noted peace activist. He served as an expert witness on the validity of the theory of evolution at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Herman Wells writes in his autobiography,

During his years at the university David Starr Jordan espoused the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species and was bitterly attacked by the clergy of Indiana, but he did not yield. Instead he continued to stump the state and by overcoming his opponents established a precedent that helped to sustain us in the Kinsey battle.”

In 2015, President McRobbie gave a public address praising Jordan without reservation. Quoting Jordan’s biographer, Edward McNall Burns, McRobbie affirmed Jordan’s status as

one of the most versatile men America has produced, winning distinction not only as an educator, philosopher, and scientist, but also as an explorer, a crusader for peace and democracy, and an advisor to Presidents and foreign statesmen. … It would seem no exaggeration to say that (Jordan) belonged to the great tradition of the 18th century, personified by such giants as Franklin and Jefferson, who took the whole world of knowledge as their province.

A few other passages from that same speech, in which President McRobbie introduced the winner of a science prize named for Jordan:

He was, of course, the most eminent and influential American ichthyologist [a scientist who studies fish] in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jordan … instituted the revolutionary concept of curricular majors and electives, based on his belief — inspired by Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White — that students should have the freedom to choose what they would study.

As Rollin Richmond, a former IU faculty member who recently retired as president of Humboldt State University noted at the first Jordan Prize ceremony: ‘Both at Indiana and at Stanford, Jordan helped to convert biological research from the emphasis on natural history to one on experimentalism.’ Richmond called this shift in tradition one of the most important events in the history of biology.

A year later, President McRobbie again acknowledged Jordan as a “visionary IU leader” in a speech on “The international university in the 21st century.” In 2013, in a speech marking the 125th anniversary of IU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, McRobbie had called Jordan one of the “great leaders in the history of Indiana University” and “a model of the new professional scientist.”

The flaws in the Jordan committee’s report

The report of the Jordan committee appointed by President McRobbie, as admirably done as it is, suffers from three major flaws.

1. Portraying the name decisions as all or nothing

The committee did not portray its ultimate decision as an easy one. The report contains numerous “one the one hand, on the other hand” passages. The factors weighed, the committee said, “point in ambiguous directions.” Such decisions must be made with “humility.” Still, in the end, the committee believed the balance tipped in favor of removing the Jordan name — that is, removing it from everything.

What’s most surprising and disappointing is that the committee, at least as far as we can tell from its report, imagined its decision as binary; as all or nothing: strip Jordan’s name from everything, or leave things exactly the way they are. There is no evidence in its report that the committee considered a more balanced, nuanced approach that would be consistent with the complexities and ambiguities it acknowledged.

The factors supporting de-naming weigh differently for the science building, the river, and the street, and require different analyses.

Jordan’s embrace of eugenics, his role in the American eugenics movement, and the racism that these commitments led him to espouse stand today as a discredit to his reputation as a scientist. Jordan Hall is the home of IU’s Biology Department. It is anomalous for one of the campus’s major science buildings to be named for someone who would be regarded by today’s standards as a quack.

Jordan Hall is not a monument to David Starr Jordan. It was built in 1955 (and rededicated in 1984 with the same name) and has always housed the biological sciences. When it was built, Jordan happened to be the best-known biologist to have been affiliated with IU. The honor of the naming went hand in hand with Jordan’s professional identity as a scientist.

The name on the building should represent the best of what the faculty and students who work in the building strive to accomplish. On that measure, Jordan falls short. Renaming Jordan Hall would acknowledge that Jordan did not represent the standards of science and intellectual achievement we strive for today.

But Jordan Avenue and the Jordan River are different. They acknowledge Jordan the builder of IU, the innovator, the visionary university leader, the person whose presidency was, as the committee says, “transformative.” The committee’s report documents many ways in which the Jordan River has become intertwined with campus traditions and lore. It is, the committee says, nothing less than a “synecdoche for the entire campus” and “a useful metaphor for University activities.”

The story goes that when Jordan left IU to become president of Stanford, the board of trustees wanted to honor him by naming a building after him. Jordan felt that a building was too much and quipped that he would rather have the little creek on campus named after him. The name remained informal until the trustees made it official in 1994 at the request of retired president and University Chancellor Herman Wells, the chair of the Names Committee.

By 1994, Jordan’s highly public involvement in eugenics was hiding in plain sight; it is not information that has only recently been unearthed. Also by 1994, our political, scientific, and moral standards firmly rejected eugenics. Yet the Trustees named the river anyway.

The committee appointed by President McRobbie claims it “does not second-guess considered decisions of the past.” The history of the river’s name is inconsistent with that assertion. Shall we also condemn Herman Wells for his complicity in celebrating Jordan in our modern times?

2. Deferring to the misperceptions of uninformed people

The committee worried that if IU did not disavow Jordan completely, it “could be viewed as mistakenly celebrating his advocacy of negative eugenics.” Not removing Jordan’s name “could be perceived as endorsing views and beliefs at odds with our fundamental values, and would likely reflect poorly on the University and its reputation.”

But this comes distressingly close to bowing to a heckler’s veto — in First Amendment terms, the idea that speech or ideas must be suppressed because of the negative reactions they might cause other people to have.

No one who is actually informed would believe IU is celebrating Jordan as a eugenicist or is unaware of the moral evil of eugenics. But the University can explain that such past beliefs do not change the fact Jordan laid the groundwork for the modern university we enjoy today. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The committee acknowledges that removal of a name must be done with “awareness of the fallibility of our own judgments,” recognition that “people are morally complex,” and the caution that “it can be too ‘easy to blame those in the past for lacking the knowledge, wisdom, and values that we seem to possess’” today. But all that suggests the decision to de-name should not be influenced by the misperceptions of uninformed people who might mistakenly believe we are “celebrating [Jordan’s] advocacy of negative eugenics.”

It is the business of universities to educate; to challenge and correct misperceptions and misinformation; to (in the words of former Chancellor Gros Louis) instill appreciation, and ultimately comfort with, “complexities, ironies, contradictions, ambiguities, inconsistencies.”

Activists and others who reflexively insist on making Jordan disappear entirely from IU know little about his contributions to the University and aren’t interested in learning about them. Because they don’t have responsibility for the consequences of what they advocate, their minds are closed to a process of reasoned consideration and nuanced decision making. Accordingly, their views should be strongly discounted.

3. Would Jordan believe in eugenics today?

In rebuking and disavowing an historical figure like Jordan because he falls short of modern standards of knowledge and morals, we necessarily assume that, were he alive today, he would still hold the same abhorrent views. But why should we assume that? Interestingly, this is a question the committee apparently never explored.

Jordan was not a Klansman. He was not Hitler. There is no evidence his beliefs ever led him to personally mistreat anyone. True, some of his writings indeed, as the committee says, make for “disturbing reading” when judged by our standards today. But his embrace of eugenics, and the ugly racism that was its byproduct, was driven by his understanding of science and ideas at the time he lived more than a century ago.

It is said that Jordan was a well-known skeptic of pseudoscientific claims. Were he alive today and given the benefit of our knowledge and intellectual standards, it seems possible he would come to understand eugenics as also being pseudoscience.

Jordan is dead, and so we can only speculate about how his commitments might have changed with the benefit of contemporary knowledge. But starting in the 1930s, some eugenicists began to recant their earlier views. (Jordan died in 1931.) If Jordan really was the caliber of scientist and philosopher that Michael McRobbie told us five years ago that he was, then it is reasonable to imagine that, were he alive today, Jordan would understand the abhorrent scientific and moral flaws of eugenics, and would repudiate his earlier views.

The trustees should make a more balanced decision

The Jordan committee delicately recommends that IU “no longer use the Jordan name on structures and places.” But “no longer use” is a euphemism. This isn’t about ordering new stationery or revamping a web site. This would be an affirmative discommendation; a cleansing ritual; an exercise in abnegation. Let’s just be clear about that.

IU’s naming policy says removing a name demands “extraordinary circumstances,” and that there is a strong presumption against doing so. In other words, the burden was on the committee (and now is on McRobbie) to justify removal.

The speech by President McRobbie five years ago, giving unqualified praise to Jordan’s accomplishments as an educator, president, scientist, and intellectual and comparing him to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, was quietly removed recently from his office’s web site. (It was later restored after I drew attention to the matter.) That’s telling. It underscores that it is impossible to reconcile that speech with the president’s recommendation now to strip Jordan’s name from everything on the campus.

Every word of the 2015 speech was as true today as it was then. Yet the speech was incomplete, because it did not grapple with Jordan’s history with eugenics, all of which was known at the time. But the recommendation now to eradicate his presence from the campus also is incomplete, because it does not adequately account for what Indiana University owes to Jordan.

The pattern of events suggests President McRobbie believes most people paying attention to this issue aren’t interested in balance and complexity. He is recommending that IU completely disavow Jordan and cleanse itself of the name because, if he doesn’t do so, a small but determined group of student activists and others will make things difficult. IU would also look like an outlier compared to other universities that have caved to pressure in similar controversies.

President McRobbie could make a strong statement reconciling these two things. He could explain why the Bicentennial Strategic Plan whose creation he oversaw named Jordan as one of IU’s three most significant past presidents. He could explain why the things he said about Jordan in 2015 remain true. He could explain how Jordan’s involvement with eugenics gives us a more complex and less admirable portrait of him, but does not undo the other parts of his legacy. Jordan can continue to be commemorated for accomplishments that had nothing to do with the enthusiasm for eugenics he pursued after he left IU. And at the same time, we can acknowledge this serious flaw. Again, an all-or-nothing approach is unsound.

The Jordan committee report discusses whether recognizing Jordan is compatible with IU’s “values.” But a key value of a great university is that it does not make important institutional decisions based on political pressure or intimidation. A university understands that humans are fallible, and a university is not ahistorical. Simplistic righteousness and reductive fundamentalism are incompatible with the values and processes of an academic community.

Again, the Jordan committee clearly understood those things, and its deeply researched and nuanced discussion of all the facts surrounding Jordan is a credit to the University. But the committee’s ultimate conclusion — that Jordan’s name be removed from all landmarks — is too extreme. While perhaps not the committee’s intent, it gives President McRobbie cover for acceding to unreasoned demands for moral purity.

There is a balanced solution available that acknowledges both Jordan’s singular contributions to IU and the errors of his advocacy for eugenics: remove the name from the science building, but keep it on the river and the street. (Does anyone really care about the parking garage?) And as for those who would scoff at this logical and sensible approach, we should not be guided by what a few students and faculty might “mistakenly” believe or how the Jordan namings might be erroneously “perceived.” Instead, we should work in the best spirit of a university to educate them and help them understand the world in all its complexity.