Column: UM shows double standard toward its past
The campus left at the University of Michigan is demanding the name C.C. Little, a former university president and eugenicist, be erased from a university classroom building.
Yet Little’s detractors conveniently overlook he co-founded a group with Margaret Sanger that would later become known as Planned Parenthood, an organization the university continues to support.
From 1925 to 1929, Clarence Cook “C.C.” Little served as president of UM. While president, Little was consistently at odds with other university leaders due to his outspoken views on birth control, euthanasia and eugenics. In 1929, he left the university and became president of The American Eugenics Society, a group dedicated to “improving the genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people.”
This is compelling professors and students at the university to advocate for a name change of the building currently inscribed with Little’s racist name and history.
These “advocates” of social justice are only proving their hypocrisy and revealing their true intentions of wanting to ignite chaos. If they truly opposed what Little stood for, the students and faculty would face the truth that he created their beloved “health clinic” Planned Parenthood, on those same principles they allegedly despise.
Indeed, Little co-founded Planned Parenthood with Sanger, which would later become the primary home of the “great eugenic advances of our time,” as told by Frederick Osborn in his essay “Organized Eugenics.” Sanger, with the help of Little, successfully planted her clinics in the lowest income regions of the country, targeting the poor, the disabled and African-Americans.
While many challenge the belief that Planned Parenthood remains rooted in this troubled past, the statistics demonstrate otherwise. Only 15 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S. are predominantly non-white, yet they contain more than 40 percent of the abortion clinics. According to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, black women make up 14 percent of Michigan’s female population, yet accounted for 51 percent of abortions in 2016.
As professors and students at the University of Michigan reject C.C. Little for being a racist and eugenicist, they turn a blind eye to his true impact. The university has links on its websites promoting Planned Parenthood, reaching out to college students in need of “pregnancy care.”
While the protesters profess to denounce the former UM president’s support of eugenics, they ignore the de facto eugenics being practiced by Planned Parenthood.
Alex Hostetler is a freshman engineering student at the University of Michigan and a member of Young Americans for Freedom.