Caltech will scrub the names of six eugenicists, including its founding president Robert A. Millikan, from campus buildings and other dedications, according to a university announcement.

“The decision of the Board of Trustees is one of seminal importance to Caltech’s future,” Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum said in a statement. “Renaming buildings is a symbolic act, but one that has real consequences in creating a diverse and inclusive environment. It is an act that helps define who we are and who we strive to be.”

Millikan — alongside Harry Chandler, Ezra Gosney, William Munro, Henry Robinson and Albert Ruddock — were proponents of the eugenics movement.

The discredited and racist philosophy was adopted by Nazi Germany, which its leaders used to justify the systemic murders of 6 million Jewish people.

Some eugenicists aimed to improve humankind’s genetic makeup by killing or sterilizing people who were judged to be inferior. Simultaneously, the movement’s proponents promoted those people or groups who were believed to be superior.

Beyond Nazi Germany, it was used as a justification to sterilize more than 60,000 people in the United States, including some in California, targeting immigrants, minorities, people with disabilities and those who were impoverished.

“It is fraught to judge individuals outside of their time, but it is clear from the documentation presented that Millikan lent his name and his prestige to a morally reprehensible eugenics movement that already had been discredited scientifically during his time,” Rosenbaum said.

Millikan, Gosney, Robinson and Munro were all board of trustee members in a Pasadena-based eugenics organization, the Human Betterment Foundation. When Gosney died in 1942, his daughter reportedly liquidated the foundation’s assets and donated them to Caltech.

Caltech’s decision to strip their names and others from the university comes after months of deliberations among campus leaders — discussions that were spurred by two petitions submitted over the summer, one from the Black Scientists and Engineers of Caltech and another from an alumnus.

Those petitions came after weeks of protests for racial injustice, ignited by the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in May.

Caltech is far from the only university to consider such an action: Pomona College said it would rename its Millikan Laboratory after community members called for it in a 1,000-person petition. Similarly, in June, the University of Southern California removed the name of a former university president who was also affiliated with the eugenicist movement.

In December, Cal State Northridge officials announced it would rename its library after students raised concerns about the building’s namesake.

Dianne Harrison, then-president of CSUN, announced on Dec. 18 that Delmar T. Oviatt’s name would be stripped from the library immediately, and that the building will now be called “University Library.”

Oviatt was a former administrator who served as interim president in the late 1960s during an era of intense campus protest. In spring 2019, the Students of Color Coalition penned a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, alleging that Oviatt was a racist who opposed cultural studies programs. They demanded that his name be removed from the library and adjoining lawn.

Harrison commissioned a group of students, faculty, administrators and alumni to study Oviatt’s role as a university leader. The group issued a report last September and recommended the name removal. The recommendation was unanimously affirmed by the Faculty Senate and the Associated Students Senate.

“After a thorough year-long review … it became clear that some of Oviatt’s decisions and actions did not reflect leadership supportive of advancing campus diversity as related to enrolling students of color and the creation of the Black Studies and Mexican American Studies departments,” Harrison wrote in a letter to the campus community.

“Given the importance of diversity and inclusion to CSUN today, and in order to make the campus as welcoming and inclusive as possible, the President’s Cabinet supported the working group’s recommendation to retire the Oviatt name from our iconic library and neighboring lawn,” she stated.