Stanford’s White Supremacists

Long before the Varsity Blues scandal of 2019 drew attention to ways economic elites use educational institutions to launder privilege and literal cash, Gilded Age university presidents were shaping their institutions in response to the diversifying population of the United States, and the threat this diversity posed to the social dominance of a majority-white elite. Confident in the natural superiority of the white race, their principal concern was the degeneration of the national genetic stock as a result of demographic turnover. More than a century before white supremacists rallied against the “great replacement” and “white genocide” in Charlottesville, progressive education reformers were sounding the alarm about “race suicide.”

The Leland Stanford Junior University, founded in 1885 by one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious robber barons, offers a special view into the symbiotic mechanisms that connect elite economic interests, liberal progressivism, and academic racecraft. When former California governor and soon-to-be United States Senator Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Lathrop Stanford established a university in memory of their only child, they did so with the belief that their incredible wealth could supply the university with the endowment it needed to entice the nation’s finest faculty and make Stanford a competitive rival to its tony counterparts in the East. Unlike those universities, established by churches and weighted down by tradition, Stanford was founded as a non-denominational and coeducational institution that aimed to be a leader in the sciences, as well as the newly recognized disciplines in the emerging social sciences: psychology