Photo by Cory Dawson/VTDigger
University of Vermont trustees on Friday voted to remove former UVM president Guy Bailey’s name from the school’s undergraduate Bailey-Howe library complex.
The name change comes at the request of Jacqueline Weinstock, a UVM professor in the department of leadership and developmental sciences, who petitioned trustees to remove Bailey’s name from the library for his role in the Vermont eugenics movement.
Her request was signed by over 100 faculty members, and was a key demand made by racial justice activists who staged protests on campus last year.
The student activist group NoNames for Justice, which advocated for the name change, celebrated the move on Facebook.
“Hey Friends the library name was changed!” the group wrote on its page. “ACTIVISM WORKS.”
The name change is not official yet. Trustees took the unanimous vote on Friday as a committee of the whole, and will have to take formal action to finalize the change when they convene as the Board of Trustees on Saturday. Once they do that, the library will become the David W. Howe Memorial Library.
The renaming proposal was studied over the summer and fall by a special subcommittee, which also gathered input from the wider campus community. It ultimately unanimously recommended changing the library’s name.
“We reached our recommendation based primarily on the fact that Bailey’s active involvement as president of the university in supporting and promoting the Eugenics Survey of Vermont is fundamentally at odds with the university’s mission. We also considered Bailey’s mismanagement of university financial resources,” said trustee Ron Lumbra, who chaired the renaming committee.
Bailey served as UVM’s 13th president, from 1920 until his death in 1940. The committee took care to note Bailey’s contributions to the college – he was credited with dramatically expanding the campus, growing enrollment, and keeping the school afloat during the Great Depression.
But in supporting the name change, the committee noted that trustees had discovered, upon Bailey’s death, that the school was deeply in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy.
And they cited his role in “heartily” supporting and fundraising for the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, an initiative spearheaded by UVM zoology professor Henry Perkins. The survey conducted eugenics research and also advocated for social reforms, including Vermont’s 1931 sterilization law.
“In Vermont, eugenics research was largely motivated by concerns about the supposed degeneration of native-born Yankee ‘stock,’” the committee wrote. “Although sterilization records are not available, it appears likely that it was mostly poor women, along with darker-skinned French-Canadian and Native-American populations, who were targeted by the Vermont eugenic sterilization program.”
The renaming committee also recommended the school dig deeper into its past. It suggested the school “work to establish a lasting educational effort with respect to the history of eugenics, UVM’s role in it, and its impacts on populations in Vermont and beyond.”
The committee suggested such an initiative could include classes, speakers, displays or public works of art.
