WashU announced plans to rename the Robert J. Terry endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine and the annual Robert J. Terry Lecture Series in the Neuroscience Department, following a recommendation made by the University’s Naming Review Board (NRB). The removal request was submitted to the NRB in fall of 2024 by then-senior Paul Scott, with support from 11 student co-signers and a letter from the WashU Native American Students Association. 

The decision stems from Dr. Robert Terry’s outspoken support for the eugenics movement and the unethical means by which he collected human remains for research. 

In a statement to The Source, Chancellor Martin emphasized that the decision to rename the Professorship and Lecture series was in line with University values.

“At WashU, we are committed to confronting the difficult aspects of our institutional history with honesty, rigor and care,” Martin told The Source. “After a thorough and thoughtful review, we believe removing Robert Terry’s name from University features is necessary and appropriate. This decision is consistent with our core mission to foster an inclusive, respectful, and forward-looking academic community.” 

At the Chancellor’s annual State of the University Address this February, he commended student activism surrounding the Terry Collection and said that it was influential on the NRB. The following month, WashU’s Sudent Union passed a resolution demanding that the University both renounce Terry’s legacy through renaming the professorship and lecture series and also make efforts to repatriate the remains in the collection.

The NRB, composed of about 20 faculty, administrators, and students, was founded in February 2024 to systematize the University’s process for considering requests for either renaming or for adding greater contextualization to University features. The Terry renaming request was the first request both received and reviewed by the NRB.

Following a process of review from October through April — which included combing through over 3,000 pieces of documentation about Terry in University archives — the NRB recommended to Chancellor Martin that the Terry Professorship and Lecture Series be formally renamed at the start of the next academic year, a decision which the Board of Trustees unanimously approved on May 2.              

In addition to his support for eugenics, during Terry’s tenure at WashU, he compiled the Terry Collection, consisting of over 1,700 human remains, some of which were previously used by WashU’s Anthropology Department for educational purposes. The collection contains many remains of individuals from marginalized groups, especially Black Americans and Native Americans. In many cases neither the deceased nor their families consented to the collection of their remains.  

The NRB said that reviewing the collection itself — the majority of which was moved to the Smithsonian in 1967, although portions of the collection are still housed on both WashU’s Medical and Danforth campuses — was outside of their purview. However, in a press release in The Source, the University said that it would “continue efforts already underway to develop and implement a process for the ethical handling of the Terry specimen collection.” 

Julie Flory, Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications at WashU, confirmed in an email to Student Life that the Terry Collection is no longer used for teaching, research, or any other purpose at WashU.

One driving force behind the renaming was the work of then-seniors Paul Scott and Jai-Laan Blackmon, the former Vice President and Community Engagement Chair of the WashU Association of Black Students (ABS), respectively.

Scott first came into contact with the collection when it was used for instruction in his “Introduction to Human Evolution” class in 2021, and has been working to bring attention to the issue since it came to light in 2022. Through ABS, he advocated for the University to address Terry’s legacy, and used his internship at the Missouri Historical Society to raise awareness among the St. Louis Community.  

Blackmon and Scott also did extensive research through the WashU archives and at the Missouri Historical Society to compile evidence to submit in the renaming request. 

“[We put] multiple weeks and days and hours going into the archives and going into these boxes, full of 20 plus files, and each file itself had over 20 plus papers in them,” Blackmon said, “Terry was very meticulous in his notekeeping, and I think that was something that was really troubling to us, given that the collection hadn’t been moved since the 1960s.” 

Scott was similarly taken aback by the amount of available evidence concerning Terry’s practices.

“Terry wrote about the racial inferiority and intellectual inferiority of African Americans so that he sought to obtain, ‘pure strain Negro embryos for his research’,” Scott said. “These are the kind of shocking revelations that we came on through a cursory Google search that brought us to the medical archives and the Missouri historical archives.” 

Both felt that the renaming of the lecture series and professorship was valuable progress.

“Five years from now, I really hope that WashU can say that we’re no longer formally attached to this collection outside of bridging the gaps between families who never got to see their family members off into the next phase of life,” Blackmon said. 

Dr. Peter Kastor, Samuel K. Eddy Professor of History, Associate Vice Dean of Research in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the NRB, expressed that he appreciated both the students who served on the NRB, then-senior Sarai Steinburg and graduate student Jean Brownwell, as well as the students who submitted the renaming request. 

“I was delighted that our first submission came from students,” he said. “I recognize that students have a particular vision for how the University should engage these issues, and there are times when student mobilization is different from University process, and I have no qualms with that.” 

Kastor also expressed that he was impressed with the willingness of those involved to engage with difficult questions, and said that he appreciated the School of Medicine’s openness and efforts to better understand Terry and his legacy.  

Both Blackmon and Scott cautioned that the renaming was not the end of the process. One issue is the future of the Terry Collection itself, which they both would like to see repatriated, a process which the two say involves “providing dignified burial, identifying descendants, and engaging impacted communities to begin repairing the harm caused.” 

“Before you can even move towards repatriation, there needs to be greater informing of the public, so that you can try to figure out if there are any gaps in their family histories,” Blackmon said, citing guidance from the American Anthropological Association’s Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains. 

Additionally, both think more needs to be done to address Terry’s legacy. Kastor echoed this sentiment and also said that with the proper contextualization, there is a lot that can be learned from Terry. 

“One of the things that the members of the NRB believed very strongly is that in situations like this, renaming is necessary, but only part of the process,” Kastor said. “We don’t want people to forget Robert Terry. There’s an enormous amount to learn from him. There’s an enormous amount to learn about medical ethics, about the history of medicine, and how race and healthcare interact.”  

Overall however, Scott expressed that removing Terry’s name from the professorship and the lecture series was a step in the right direction. 

“It is so moving and powerful to see WashU, a powerful institution, say in no uncertain terms, ‘we are dedicated to addressing this legacy’ and taking the first steps to really acknowledge these histories of structural violence and medical racism.”