Eugenics, Dispossession and Reparations at Middlebury
The College’s decision, announced on September 27, to remove the name of John A. Mead from one of the tallest structures of the campus’s built environment should be just the beginning of a deeper institutional and broader historical introspection into the college’s relationship to structural forms of injustice. In the history of eugenics in the state of Vermont, Mead, as a governor who advocated for eugenics legislation in the early 1900s, is merely the tip of the iceberg.