UVM has had a bittersweet history with diversity and inclusion like many other institutions of higher education in the U.S. However, we have worked steadfastly and hard to move further away from a painful history of discrimination and bias seen during the Kake Walk era to one that today advances a positive climate of diversity and inclusivity through visible leadership, resources and institutional commitment. We see the positive results in UVM's annual Our Common Ground Award, our 2015 HEED Award recognition by Insight Magazine honoring U.S. colleges and universities that have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion, and in many more efforts across our campus. At the time of Kake Walk, students, including those writing for The Cynic, played a key role in advocating for its elimination and deserve great credit. I am hopeful that the current generation of students, in partnership with the administration, will play an equally important role in helping create a society that is free of the painful effects of racial discrimination and insensitivity.

The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1865 in Tennessee and quickly spread throughout the South. The Klan’s main purpose was intimidation of freedmen and restoration of white supremacy in the post-Civil War South. In 1915, a second Klan movement began in Georgia inspired by the film Birth of a Nation. This new Klan spread to the West and North and targeted not only Blacks but also other races and groups including Irish Catholics and Jews. Ku Klux Klan membership rose to an estimated five million people, in the 1920s, with thousands of Vermonters joining local chapters. (Source: Flow of History)

Eugenics -- the study of human racial progress through selective breeding-- frequently invokes images of social engineering, virulent racism, immigrant persecution, and Nazi genocide, but Vermont’s little-known adventure in eugenics shows the inherent adaptability of eugenics theory and methods to parochial social justice. Beginning with genealogies of Vermont’s rural poor in the 1920s, and concluding in the 1930s with an exposé of ethnic prejudice in Vermont’s largest city, this story of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont explores the scope, limits, and changing interpretations of eugenics in America and offers a new approach to the history of progressive politics and social reform in New England. Inspired and directed by Zoology Professor Henry F. Perkins, the survey, through social research, political agitation, and education campaigns, infused eugenic agendas into progressive programs for child welfare, mental health, and rural community development. Breeding Better Vermonters examines social, ethnic, and religious tensions and reveals how population studies, theories of human heredity, and a rhetoric of altruism became subtle, yet powerful tools of social control and exclusion in a state whose motto was “freedom and unity.

In 1925, Henry F. Perkins, professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, organized the Eugenics Survey of Vermont as an adjunct to his Heredity course. Its mission was threefold: eugenics research, public education on their findings, and support for social legislation that would reduce the apparent growing population of Vermont's "social problem group." Most notorious of these reforms was Vermont's 1931 eugenic sterilization law, "A Law for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization.

Eugenics in Vermont did not begin with the Eugenics Survey, nor did it disappear after the Survey closed in 1936. This enterprise, however, with the support and endorsement of social reformers, government agencies and private philanthropies, acted as the official agency of the American eugenics movement in Vermont.