The Eugenic University

Abstract

This dissertation examines the university and institutions of schooling as technologies of power imbricated in the state violences they purport to be separate from or the solution to. I examine the logics of the university within the assemblages of policing, settlement, and empire of the U.S. state and its racial capitalist regime. I use methodological practices of “curation” to draw together disjunctive moments, theories, and analytic techniques in order to highlight new analyses and openings for contestation. I explore Northern California universities in the Progressive Era as a case study of these assemblages, examining key university administrators, professors, and researchers who were involved in the burgeoning eugenics movement. These include August Vollmer, the “father of modern policing” and the founder of the first university criminology department; Leo Stanley, chief surgeon and researcher at San Quentin State Prison; David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford University and preeminent philosopher of eugenics; and David Prescott Barrows, president of UC Berkeley, phrenologist, and architect of the public school system in the Philippines. Data sources include Bancroft Library Archives, including the major collections of the August Vollmer Papers and David P. Barrows Papers; the Marin County Free Library archives, including the David Starr Jordan Papers, Leo L. Stanley Papers, and archives related to the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition; and the published works available online of Vollmer, Stanley, Jordan, and Barrows. The first chapter interrogates writings of August Vollmer and Leo L. Stanley with a discussion of prisons and policing in the context of racial capitalism. The second chapter brings theorizations of David Starr Jordan together with an analysis of democratization of land and education in the context of settler colonialism. The third chapter analyzes the work of David P. Barrows and colonial and international education in the context of U.S. imperialism. Together, these chapters discuss the technologies and logics of education, schooling, and universities in order to curate a broader critique of the institutions and the nature and structure of the United States.