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Stanley Porteus
Testimony of Beverly Ann Deepe Keever Member of the President's Commission on Diversity, Presented to the President's Ad Hoc Committee on Porteus Hall (March 4, 1998, Campus Center Ballroom) Porteus Works With Shockley in Late 1960s University of Hawaii President Calls For Comment On Porteus Protest
Student Protest at University of Hawaii
Students and campus leaders protested November 17 demanding Porteus
Hall -- the social sciences building on the UH-Manoa campus
-- be renamed. Protestors argued that Stanley
Porteus promoted "blatantly racist" theories.
Students spread a banner across Porteus Hall calling for an end
to racism at the University of Hawaii. They plan to petition the
Board of Regents to rename the Hall.
Porteus was a eugenics activist and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Mankind Quarterly and on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology -- two notorious eugenics organizations of the 1960s. Two other University of Hawaii faculty were also associated with Mankind Quarterly - A. James Gregor and Raymond B. Cattell. Regents named the building after Stanley Porteus in 1974 in the face of a full-scale campus protest led by students and faculty "who believed that Porteus had promoted racist views which were detrimental to society, and that, therefore, the name of Porteus ought not to be given to the building." Despite the protest, the Regents decided to stand firm by its original decision to keep the name of Porteus Hall. The Coalition called the decision a "victory for racism." (Jane Takahashi, "Building a Rainbow: A History of the Buildings and Grounds of the University of University of Hawaii."
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