40 v 0 Th MihgnDa U . ~dedy -etebrU- 20 w w w v w f 0 I Weneday Seteber27,206 . - e ichgnDiy 3 The strange career of C.C. Little Our Back Pages I Local History Column QUOTES OF THE WEEK sgIf you're going to hell, register to vote! The Bible says to register to vote!" - Slogans students seek- ing to register voters used to compete for bystanders' attentiarn with an evangelical preacher on the Diag Tuesday. "Well, some girl showing a fake ID? If somebody shows you a fake ID, you have every reason to believe that they're that age." - JOE FRANCIS, producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" vid- eos, in a "Dateline" interview Monday. Francis has been ordered to pay a $500,000 fine as part of a plea agree- ment regarding his videos' potential use of underage girls. " I got caught up in the moment and proposed. I then realized it was a hasty thing to do and I am not ready for marriage quite yet. - Pop star AARON CARTER, on his nine-day engagement to model/actress Kari Ann Peniche. side from the building that bears his name, former University Pres- ident Clarence Cook Little hasn't left a very visible legacy on campus. His signature proj- ect, the creation of a Univer- sity College that would teach a unified curriculum to all undergraduates for their first two years, never got off the ground. The automobile ban he instituted in an attempt to keep students from "necking" and driving to Prohibition-era speakeasies is a distant mem- ory, to which anyone who has ever tried to park in student neighborhoods can attest. It's perhaps just as well, though, that Little's time at the University was brief and the impression he made fleet- ing. On first glance, it's dif- ficult to see Little's career as anything but a blemish on our collective past. A Harvard-trained biologist and a cancer researcher by trade, Little's passion was eugenics, the scientific effort to improve the quality of the human gene pool. Nowadays, eugenics is invariably described as a "pseu- do-science," the discipline ter- minally discredited through its associations with Nazi doctrines of racial superiority that called for the "unfit" to be killed. In Little's day, however, eugenics was a legitimate if somewhat controversial science, an irre- sistibly logical and beneficial application of Darwin's ideas about natural selection. Little is indeed far from the only eugenicist associated with our fair University. Vic- tor Vaughn, a former dean of the medical school whose name remains on a building on Cath- erine Street, gave a series of speeches on eugenics that ulti- mately spurred state legislation to sterilize those deemed "fee- ble-minded." Physicians at the University's hospital carried out a large proportion of Mich- igan's court-ordered involun- tary sterilizations. But of the eugenicists in the University's past, President Little undoubtedly maintained the highest profile. He was an officer in the American Eugen- ics Society, later becoming its president. He strongly sup- ported contraception, in part because of his eugenic beliefs, and even went so far as to speak in favor of birth control from the pulpit, literally, when giving a guest sermon. He also aided Dr. John Kellogg - a prominent eugenicist who with his brother founded the cereal company - by serving as the president of a Race Betterment Conference held in Battle Creek in 1928. Eugenics has fallen out of favor in part because of its all but inevitable links to other unsavory ideas. It's a small step from arguing that the human gene pool must be protected from deterioration to argu- ing that the stock of "better" races must be protected from the influx of the inferior blood of "weaker" ones. Believing strongly in the power of hered- ity to determine fate, eugeni- cists tended to see in poverty a confirmation that some indi- viduals simply couldn't com- pete effectively; those selected for involuntary sterilization came overwhelmingly from the ranks of the disadvantaged and powerless. Yet during the Roaring Twen- ties, in those heady days before the world had heard much of Hitler's ideas about the "master race," a good Christian busi- nessman like Kellogg could, and did, safely sponsor a "Fitter Families Contest." Its winners were feted at the Race Better- ment Conference that Little pre- sided over, where Kellogg told them, "in this little town of ours the beginnings of a Better Race are being developed" Little's own address at the conference reflected his long- standing concern about the effects of overpopulation - a subject he had even broached in his inaugural address after becoming president of the Uni- versity. Speaking in Battle Creek in 1928, Little observed that due to advances in medicine, "varia- tions in physiology that would have been eliminated by Nature a few decades ago will careful- ly be allowed and encouraged to survive." He fretted that by counteracting natural selection, there would be greater num- bers of "the out-and-out public charge, the out-and-out defec- tive, the anti-social, the non- social individual, who has to be confined and kept at public expense," until the costs became so great that society would sim- ply have to "develop means to prevent the production of the unfit, and to spread information as to how this can be done to all intelligent people." Some of Little's comments at the Race Betterment Confer- ence would certainly cause a firestorm today; one can only imagine what would happen to University President Mary Sue Coleman if she repeated Little's speculation that perhaps "a number of the interesting crimi- nal and near-criminal cases that we find ... represent the results See LITTLE, page 12B TALKING POINTS Three things you can talk about this week: 1. Marc Jacobs and porn 2 Ouroboros 3. Zach Braff And three things you can't: 1. Simulated sex in University libraries 2. Preachers 3. Zack Braff DRINK OCF THE WEEK Kamikaze There's a reason professional wrestling legend Ric Flair claims he'd order literally 100 kamikazes at every bar, after every show. As punchy as it is savory (God bless triple sec!), the kamikaze is an elemental shooter, an essential block in an alcohol enthusiast's educa- tion and the foremost method to drink normally unpalatable quantities of vodka. But yet there's an element of danger. The triple sec and lime juice don't so much mask the vodka as they do surround - the cit- rus snap dulling vodka's caustic bear hug. You can down three and barely flinch. You can down six and start rambling about your parents. Or you can drink a truly heroic amount and execute your own version of the infamous Flair flop. - Evan McGarvey TREND OF THE WEEK Cutting sappy scenes from indie movies to include candy-rap songs like "Tip Drill." j Send fiction and poetry submissions Sto cyanj~umi chedu. BY THE NUMBERS The current seating capacity of the Michigan Stadium. Bleacher seats added under the the Big House Plan. Bleacher seats removed if the proposed stadium renovation goes through. RANDOM WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE OF THE WEEK Chloe O'Brian "Chloe O'Brian is a fictional character played by actress Mary Lynn Rajskub on the television show '24.' Introduced in the third season of the series, Chloe O'Brian is a senior analyst at CTU. Her other experience at CTU includes previous posi- tions as intelligence agent and Internet protocol manager. She received her education at the University of California-Davis, having received her BSc in Computer Science. In '24: The Game,' it's revealed that before coming to CTU Los Ange- les, she worked at CTU: Washington D.C. with Chase Edmunds. She displays extraordinary mastery of computer hardware and soft- ware but has horrible social skills, displaying symptoms consistent with Asperger syndrome. Spending most of her time behind a computer terminal, she rarely is sent on field assignments. However, she has demonstrated proficiency with handguns and semi-automatic weapons in seasons four and five."