BUZZ
Professor’s burial ground dig was ‘unethical,’ college president says
Swarthmore College plans to unveil new names for its former Trotter Hall and Trotter Lawn this fall after campus leaders discovered that their namesake, natural history Professor Spencer Trotter, excavated a Native American grave site and removed human remains.
President Val Smith plans to review the renaming taskforce’s recommendations, submitted last week, and announce a final decision about the names in the fall, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Taskforce Chair Cat Norris told the Swarthmore Phoenix that the recommendations are based on feedback from the community as well as research to ensure the new names are not problematic.
“It turns out individuals are really complicated,” Norris told the student newspaper. “Their histories have been really complicated.”
The taskforce also took into consideration the priorities identified in a campus survey over the winter: including “expanding the diversity of representation on campus, and … selecting the name of an individual with a direct association to the college,” according to the Phoenix.
The college’s president created the taskforce in December after conducting an investigation into Professor Trotter’s actions around the turn of the 20th century, according to an announcement on the college website. Trotter taught at the private, Pennsylvania college for more than 30 years.
“No matter the educational intentions or that these practices may have been commonplace at the time they occurred, these remains should have been treated with dignity and respect and should never have been removed from their burial site,” President Smith stated.
“Considering these actions today, with our values, convictions, and compassion, the act of collecting any Native American remains is unethical and inexcusable. I deeply regret these actions, and on behalf of Swarthmore College, I apologize for the harm they have caused,” she stated.
The Inquirer characterized Trotter’s work as legal but likely unethical:
Swarthmore’s process started after a 2022 article in The Inquirer that mentioned how a former Swarthmore professor and student had dug up a burial ground and moved a skeleton and objects buried with it to the college.
Swarthmore researched and discovered the professor was Trotter. The college first checked to make sure there were no remains from Trotter’s collection being improperly handled at the school — there were not. Officials found a collection of unidentified human bones that the college likely had obtained legally — but probably were initially acquired unethically — and moved them into storage.
Some of Trotter’s published works also have been described as “scientific racism: the use of purportedly objective criteria to justify racial hierarchies and colonial expansion,” according to the student newspaper.
For example, the Phoenix cited a 1917 article, “The Fundamental Nature of Population,” in which Trotter wrote of Native Americans: “The whole question turns upon the intelligent exploitation of the soil; a people of low agricultural instincts may occupy a land that would yield a hundredfold to another people of high agricultural instincts …
“Just such a condition prevailed among the aborigines of America … living a hand-to-mouth existence in a land that later was capable of supporting many millions of intelligent, agricultural Europeans,” Trotter wrote.
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