The mysterious case of the disappearing speech in praise of IU’s David Starr Jordan

Update of 9/25/2020, 11:20 a.m.: The missing speech was just restored to the President’s web site. Also, I encourage everyone to read the report of the committee of faculty and administrators who advised McRobbie on this issue. It is possible to respect the committee and its work, as I do, while disagreeing with its ultimate conclusions.

Today, Indiana University President Michael McRobbie announced that IU will be officially dishonoring David Starr Jordan. It will remove Jordan’s name from all campus landmarks — including the Biology building and the little river that runs through campus — because of Jordan’s complicated public and intellectual history: he was an internationally renowned scientist and one of IU’s most significant presidents, but he was also an advocate for eugenics and its ugly ideas about race. It has become “abundantly clear that to continue to honor Jordan with these namings,” President McRobbie said, “would run counter to IU’s longstanding values and core missions.”

This suggests Jordan must have been quite vile. Yet only five years ago — in remarks that recently disappeared from IU’s web server — McRobbie delivered a 1,750-word public encomium in which he lavished praise on Jordan as (per the title of the speech) “Eminent Educator, Philosopher, and Scientist.”

The remarks were available this summer, when I first found them, in the online archive of speeches McRobbie’s office maintains. Today, the link brings up the error, “The requested URL was not found on this server.” All of McRobbie’s other speeches from the same year still appear just fine. So draw whatever conclusion you will.

Google’s cache, though, still has the speech archived here.

McRobbie’s speech was a serious address introducing the winner of a science prize named for Jordan. It was footnoted with sources, including a biography of Jordan which discussed his enthusiasm for eugenics (a belief Jordan shared with a great number of prominent and educated people of his day). In other words, Jordan’s involvement with eugenics — which mostly occurred after he had left IU for Stanford — is not newly discovered information.

Obviously, McRobbie in 2015 was not praising Jordan as a eugenicist (he did not discuss that part of Jordan’s history). He was, rather, delivering factual information which demonstrated that Jordan was — despite what we now recognize as a grave intellectual flaw — a preeminent scientist and university builder and leader.

I believe an appropriately nuanced solution would have been to remove Jordan’s name from the Biology building, because his advocacy of eugenics is today incompatible, to say the least, with sound science, but to keep it on the river as a tribute to the undisputed significance of Jordan’s leadership as an IU president. (Reportedly, when he departed from IU, Jordan rejected offers by the trustees to name a building for him, saying the only honor he wanted was to have the little creek that ran through campus named for him.)

Yet that sort of nuance and acknowledgement of complexity cannot co-exist with the demands of wokeness and political correctness.

Here is some of what McRobbie said in 2015 about Jordan. Judge for yourself.

“Jordan was, in the words of biographer Edward McNall Burns, ‘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,’ Burns continued, ‘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.’”

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

“Jordan was also, without question, one of the strongest proponents of evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He claimed to have taught the world’s first college course on evolution here at Indiana University, and he wrote a number of books and articles on the topic, including Darwinism (published in 1888) and Footnotes to Evolution (published in 1898). He chaired the Tennessee Evolution Case Defense Fund Committee for the ACLU in 1925 and raised funds for the defense in the infamous John Scopes trial.”

“Jordan oversaw the university’s move to the new campus at Dunn’s Woods in 1885, he secured state funds to build out the campus, and 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, and noted that Jordan’s contributions in this area alone justified the creation of the prize we award today in his name.”