Complicated Histories: Sensemaking in the Archives

In 1876, the University of Michigan awarded its first Ph.D. degrees, making it the first public university in the United States to do so. While this national milestone is certainly something to celebrate, examining institutional histories invariably reveals inequities and harms as well.

Such is the case with Rackham alum Victor C. Vaughan (M.S. 1875, Ph.D. ’76, M.D. ’78, LL.D. ’00). Vaughan earned one of the first two doctorate degrees bestowed by U-M in 1876, the other Ph.D. that year going to zoologist William Henry Smith. 

While Smith made a name for himself as a researcher of and author on Midwestern reptiles and amphibians, Vaughan turned his attention to the human body, earning his M.D. at Michigan before becoming the dean of the U-M Medical School for 30 years, from 1891 to 1921. 

With research areas in bacteriology and hygiene, Vaughan also played a leading role in the national public health responses during the 1898 Spanish-American War typhoid outbreak and the 1918 influenza pandemic. 

As a dean and active researcher, Vaughan’s institutional influence extended deeply into the structure of graduate education at U-M. On October 30, 1900, a small group of faculty members who called themselves “the Research Club” met at Vaughan’s home, electing him as its first president. As physiology professor W.P. Lombard recalled in a 1925 retrospective address, the club was formed specifically “to further research and graduate work at U-M,” advocating university leadership for a focus on graduate student and faculty research output at a time when that was not the norm for all academic disciplines. The club was successful in their advocacy, with the establishment of the Department of Graduate Education in 1912 to manage graduate research across the institution. In 1935, the department was re-named the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, with the grand opening of the iconic Rackham Building following in 1938.

In a letter celebrating the club’s 25th anniversary, Vaughan wrote to a colleague: “This club urged that professors should select as instructors only those who had shown capability in research. I am glad to know that after 25 years, this purpose is being realized.”

While empirical study and advancing new knowledge seemed to be foundational to Vaughan’s professional practice, he was also a leading figure in the advocacy of the pseudoscience of eugenics, or controlled, selective “human breeding” to improve a population’s genetic composition. 

As commonplace as eugenics was during the late 19th century, the idea was debunked as a non-scientific belief shortly after Vaughan died in 1929. Following World War II, mainstream medical beliefs about eugenics shifted as the world bore witness to its horrific applications in Nazi Germany, where it underpinned much of the ideology that drove the Holocaust. Still, the cultural presence of eugenics lingered in the United States throughout the 20th century, taking shape at county fairs as “better babies” competitions and in state politics as forced sterilizations. It took a federal court ruling in 1974, Relf v. Weinberger, a case involving the coerced sterilization of two Black sisters—12 year-old Mary Alice Relf and 14 year-old Minnie Lee Relf—to stop involuntary or coerced sterilizations by federally funded programs. At the time, the majority of sterilizations were being performed, often without consent, on Black and Native American women and children, making this a landmark case for the United States.

While deep racial disparities still exist in medicine today, eugenics is seen as a deeply discreditable practice by contemporary researchers and physicians, with widespread acknowledgement of its role in deepening white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and class privilege.

Vaughan’s primary and most widely cited university lecture, titled “Eugenics from the Point of View of the Physician,” was delivered at the University of Michigan in December 1912 and at the University of Wisconsin in January 1913, during the time of his tenure at the university. 

In addition, Vaughan actively corresponded with state legislators in support of eugenics legislation, testifying that a proposed sterilization bill was “a good one” and offering his full assistance to secure its passage. As dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, president of the Michigan State Board of Health (1912 to 1914), and president of the American Medical Association (1914 to 1915), Vaughan provided “scientific” validation for eugenic policies. He framed eugenics not as an isolated intervention, but as an essential component of state public health policy. 

Michigan passed compulsory sterilization legislation in 1913. While the legislation was declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1918, revised statutes were enacted to overcome constitutional hurdles in the early 1920s. Following a major state-sanctioned expansion of the practice in 1929, at least 3,786 sterilizations were carried out on Michigan residents.

State of Michigan statutes targeted individuals classified in three primary categories: the “feebleminded,” as those who were illiterate, living with cognitive differences, living with disabilities, or in need of psychiatric care were known; “sexual deviants,” as LGBTQ+ individuals were labeled; and those living in “chronic pauperism,” as people experiencing poverty were called. While the majority of individuals sterilized in Michigan were low-income white residents, eugenic sterilization nationwide and in subsequent decades impacted vastly disproportionate numbers of Indigenous people and Black women. 

Over the course of his career, Vaughan’s contributions ranged from dehumanizing to lifesaving—and while he was one of Rackham’s first two alums, he certainly isn’t the only alum in the graduate school’s history to advance and perpetuate systemic harm.

We can learn a lot from a historical figure like Vaughan if we examine the full scope of his contributions, harms, impact, and context, according to Elizabeth Cole, director of the Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice, co-chair of the Inclusive History Project, and a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor. 

“There are probably celebratory stories that are unalloyed, and certainly there are stories of harm that are unalloyed, but many of the stories that we’re trying to tell are more complex than that,” she says.

Cole urges caution when characterizing figures like Vaughan as “a man of his time,” while also acknowledging the ubiquitousness of eugenics in the early 20th century.

“When we say he’s a man of his time, it makes it sound like those ideas are all in the past, and I think that’s very much not true,” Cole emphasized, noting that aspects of eugenics rhetoric have re-emerged in some contemporary political conversations. 

Cole adds that viewing historical figures in context should prompt self-reflection in the present: “If we think of him as a man of his time, I think it invites us to think, how am I a person of my time? What kind of assumptions, or values, or policy decisions still entail human judgments?”

Kim Clarke, who previously managed the U-M Heritage Project, a narrative site exploring the university’s past, concurs with Cole, adding that while context is critical it cannot be used as an excuse for unethical behavior. She also emphasizes that historical university storytelling must balance the “celebratory and cerebral” to maintain institutional integrity. 

“The university exists to pursue and tell the truth,” Clarke observed. “If we can’t do that with our own history, what are we doing?”

Terrence J. McDonald, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History and former director of the Bentley Historical Library, notes that collaborations with living descendants can be critical to understanding the university’s history and impacts.

“We are wedded to our past with all that is uplifting and troubling within it,” McDonald says. “But a better understanding of our past can be a very good reason for changing the way we commemorate a person in our history.”

In 2018, McDonald helped U-M course correct its honoring of Clarence Cook Little by removing the former university president’s name from the science building at 1100 North University Avenue due to his active leadership in eugenics and his promotional work for the tobacco industry.

McDonald, who chaired the President’s Advisory Committee on University History at the time of the unnaming, distinguishes sharply between historical memory and commemoration, emphasizing that while understanding the past is a necessity, deciding whom to commemorate is an active choice that must reflect an institution’s current values. 

Furthermore, McDonald argues that removing an honor or unnaming a building does not erase or destroy history. Instead, the unnaming process produces a deeper, more rigorous historical record.

“We didn’t erase Little’s history, far from it. We extended it, and deepened it,” he says. “No one has the right to be honored by a later generation. No one.”

While there is still an administrative building named for Vaughan on the U-M campus today, it’s also true that people are learning more about Vaughan’s history and finding ways to more accurately reflect their contemporary values of inclusivity.

In 2019, after the Black Medical Association raised concerns regarding Vaughan’s advocacy for forced sterilization, a student medical history group chose to drop his name, transforming the Victor Vaughan Society into the Society for the History and Philosophy of Medicine. That same year, at the request of the chairholder, the Board of Regents renamed an endowed professorship from the Victor C. Vaughan Chair to the Elizabeth Farrand Chair, honoring an early U-M librarian and medical graduate. 

Reflecting on the role we all play in inclusive community building through understanding and action, Cole calls to mind a quote from Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents: “The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not.”

Cole agrees with Wilkerson’s analogy that we are all current occupants of a society with structural flaws—and with her suggestion that reparative actions are imperative. 

“You don’t have to be guilty of something to be responsible for it,” Cole says. “I think part of stewardship for an older home—or a university—is taking on that responsibility.”

Learn more about Victor C. Vaughan.
Learn more about the Inclusive History Project.