We ask for your support in demanding the renaming of VKC and the removal of his bust from USC campus.

While Rufus B. von KleinSmid may have been the fifth president of the University of Southern California, his role as a leader of the Eugenist movement makes him a threat to not only USC’s vision of Equity, Diversion and Inclusivity (EDI), but also its mission: “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit".    

von KleinSmid was a well known eugenicist who advocated for forced sterilization and the segregation of the "mentally unfit" to create a “better race”. He was also a founder of the Human Betterment Foundation, which helped carry out over 20,000 sterilizations in the state of California between 1909 and 1960. This foundation was in direct contact with Nazi eugenists like Dr. Fritz Lenz, providing them information about forced sterilization.

In von KleinSmid's published paper "Eugenics and the State", he writes about how "defective" and "feeble-minded" children should not be allowed access to the same education as their peers. This view cannot be associated with an inclusive and diverse institution, thus this building should be renamed and the bust of von KleinSmid removed. 

Both students and university officials have made numerous attempts in the past few years to rename VKC, the building whose globe stands tall as a landmark of our campus. By way of protests, committees, and a previous petition, former attempts have made progress but ultimately failed to achieve the renaming of VKC. The Provost Task Force on University Nomenclature (begun in 2019) has acknowledged the building as “motivation” for their discussions on name assessment, but the delay and lack of both clarity and commitment in renaming VKC is no longer acceptable. This petition asks that we, as members of USC and the greater community, come together to demand the removal of VKC, both the title and his bust, from the building. Carol Folt, who has had past experience in removing racist and controversial monuments from university campuses, should understand the importance of cultivating a learning environment where all students, staff, and faculty feel welcome and supported. We must hold university leadership accountable for their passivity in not responding to our concerns and remind them that this lack of action is just another form of silence. In continually honoring a man who sought sterilization of those he deemed ‘lesser’, a group made up primarily of people of color, USC upholds white supremacy and betrays a large portion of its student body in this denial of equality and inclusion. 

Over this past week, USC has written that they are “listening and learning”, yet for years they have refused to hear the students’ demands to remove the title and bust of VKC from the building. USC has posted that it supports the Black Lives Matter movement but continues to honor a man whose life’s work was centered in the discrimination and mutilation of minorities that he viewed as inferior. USC has, in neglecting or delaying this removal, created a campus that condones silence over action and threatens values, like diversity and inclusion, which it claims to uphold.

(Cowritten by Sidney Ramsey, Win McCain, Sidney Chuckas, Aurora Vaughan, and Zack Torres)