Weeds in Linnaeus's garden: Science and segregation, eugenics, and the rhetoric of racism at the University of Minnesota and the Big Ten, 1900--1945.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In 1931, Lotus Delta Coffman, President of the University of Minnesota and noted Progressive educational reformer, refused to admit a black student to residence in the newly constructed Pioneer Hall. This project explores and elucidates the underlying consciousness and ideology that supported such racial segregation as a liberal, progressive, and necessary practice in the national interest. I analyze a rich trove of archived material revealing sedimented layers of institutional racism, much of it motivated by changing patterns of urban migration, immigration, and gender expectations. With astonishing candor, administrators from universities across the country shared strategies for justifying and enforcing segregated facilities, thereby muddying usual conceptions of the American Progressive movement and throwing into confusion traditional binaries of left and right. I interrogate administrative and faculty correspondence, census documents, international scientific journals, and other sources, to determine why segregation was implemented, who resisted it, and how it was defeated.
I use the University of Minnesota specifically, and land-grant universities more generally, as sites to link the imperial imperative to manage colonized populations abroad and "deviant" populations at home with the consolidation of categorization behind residential segregation was active throughout the university, shaping its social space and institutional structure, and that this system was supported by the work of many disciplines, from medicine to anthropology, from psychology to horticulture. In turn, this ideology of biologically based management was not only vindicated by these various other disciplines but was instrumental in shaping them---and the University itself.