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The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley
The incendiary story of conquest, racism, warfare, and historical amnesia at one of the world’s most celebrated and ostensibly enlightened public universities.
"This is a land acknowledgment." —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Essays towards Liberation
"The Scandal of Cal is a template for scrutinizing other land-grant universities … This is a beautifully written and heartbreaking narrative." —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as "Cal"—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley’s history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university’s desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school’s complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution’s decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal’s culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.
"This is a land acknowledgment." —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Essays towards Liberation
"The Scandal of Cal is a template for scrutinizing other land-grant universities … This is a beautifully written and heartbreaking narrative." —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
The University of California, Berkeley—widely known as "Cal"—is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. As Tony Platt shows in The Scandal of Cal, these original sins sit at the center of UC Berkeley’s history. Platt looks unflinchingly at the university’s desecration of graves and large-scale hoarding of Indigenous remains. He tracks its role in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics in the early twentieth century. He sheds light on the school’s complicity with the military-industrial complex and its incubation of unprecedented violence through the Manhattan Project. And he underscores its deliberate and continued evasions about its own wrongdoings, which echo in the institution’s decision-making up to the present day. This book, above all, illuminates Cal’s culpability in some of the cruelest chapters of US history and sounds a clarion call for the university to undertake a thorough and earnest reckoning with its past. It is required reading for Cal alumni, students, faculty, and staff, and for anyone concerned with the impact of higher education in the United States and beyond.
375 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 29, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 21, 2023
There is a lot of grave-robbing in the history of UC Berkeley, well into the twentieth century. The university’s poor track record with indigenous people is the major focus of The Scandal of Cal, but it is not the only focus. I would recommend this to anyone who has been affiliated with Cal or has lived in the East Bay; at the least, you will learn a lot about the names that have dotted places on campus and nearby, such as Wheeler, Hearst, Kroeber, Moses, Gilman, LeConte, etc.
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November 19, 2023I'm sure this topic is important, and I'd like to know these things about my alma mater, but this was the most boring thing that I have read in a very long time.
I couldn't get into it. I didn't finish it. I have no idea about the contents.
Life is too short for boring books.
I couldn't get into it. I didn't finish it. I have no idea about the contents.
Life is too short for boring books.
May 26, 2026
The Scandal Beneath the Campanile: UC Berkeley, Genocide, Eugenics, and the Violence Beneath California’s Most Revered University
“Every song, every story is a living moment that we can access again many years later. We are not sad, dying Indians.”
— Cutcha Risling Baldy, quoted in Tony Platt, The Scandal of Cal, p. 19
When Californians speak about UC Berkeley, they often speak about it with something close to civic reverence. Berkeley is not merely a university in the public imagination. It is treated as the crown jewel of public higher education: brilliant, progressive, scientific, diverse, radical, humane, and morally advanced. People think of free speech, antiwar protest, Nobel Prizes, student movements, scientific achievement, the Campanile, and the prestige of the University of California system itself.
Tony Platt’s The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley tears directly through that mythology.
This is not a book about a university with a few unfortunate blemishes. It is not a polite institutional history. It is an indictment. Platt shows that beneath Berkeley’s cultivated image lies a history of genocide, Indigenous dispossession, grave desecration, racial science, eugenics, forced sterilization, militarized research, nuclear weapons development, and systematic concealment. Berkeley did not simply exist beside the violence that built California. It helped organize it, intellectualize it, archive it, legitimize it, and transform it into prestige.
That is the scandal.
And the deeper one goes, the worse it becomes.
There are still anti-DEI activists, anti-CRT ideologues, right-wing media figures, politicians, and even highly educated academics—including some teaching literally blocks away from UC Berkeley itself—who insist that institutional racism is imaginary, exaggerated, or reducible to individual prejudice. Berkeley’s own history destroys that claim almost effortlessly. One does not need abstract theory to refute it. The evidence sits physically inside the institution itself.
The human remains are there.
The stolen funerary objects are there.
The anthropology archives are there.
The eugenics networks are there.
The sterilization advocacy is there.
The military and nuclear research infrastructure is there.
The commemorations are there.
The silence is there.
Institutional racism at Berkeley is not metaphorical. It is historical architecture.
At the center of Platt’s book is one of the most horrifying facts in the history of any American university: Berkeley possesses what is widely regarded as the largest collection of Native American human remains held by any institution in the world. The numbers are staggering: roughly 10,000 to 15,000 Indigenous ancestors, alongside more than one million funerary and cultural objects taken from burial grounds, sacred places, villages, shellmounds, and ceremonial sites throughout California and beyond.
These were not “specimens.”
They were human beings.
They were ancestors of communities who had lived on the land for millennia before Berkeley existed, before California existed as a state, before the United States claimed the authority to excavate, classify, possess, study, warehouse, and delay the return of their dead.
Meanwhile, Indigenous ancestors remained beneath the ground—or inside Berkeley storage rooms and institutional dungeons—without reverence for their sacred burial places, without dignity for the people themselves, and without honest acknowledgment that part of Berkeley’s scientific and anthropological prestige was built through systematic grave desecration. Burial sites became excavation sites. Ancestors became inventory. Sacred objects became collections. The dead became institutional property.
That is not enlightenment.
That is organized desecration under the language of science.
Platt documents this directly. Berkeley’s own campus and surrounding city are recognized as a burial and habitation site, yet the university has not meaningfully marked or acknowledged that history:
“Today, California’s Office of Historic Preservation lists the university and city of Berkeley as a ‘burial and habitation site.’ Cal Berkeley has not officially acknowledged the specifics of this history. There are no markers or plaques on campus to commemorate what was widely recognized in the university’s early decades.”
— p. 26
That sentence alone exposes the lie of Berkeley’s public self-image. The institution claims historical sophistication while refusing to mark the Indigenous dead beneath its own prestige.
Platt also describes how the university’s own workers excavated human remains and handed them over to researchers:
“On a regular basis the university’s buildings and grounds department excavated human remains of Ohlone ancestors and turned them over to archaeologists who measured and recorded their findings according to the dictates of eugenic anthropometry…”
— p. 25
This is the institutional reality. Not rumor. Not exaggeration. Berkeley’s own development brought up the dead, and Berkeley’s scientific apparatus transformed those ancestors into measurements, categories, specimens, and collections.
Platt’s discussion of California genocide is essential here because Berkeley emerged from the same historical order that made the university possible. Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 documents in overwhelming detail the systematic killing, starvation, forced removal, kidnapping, enslavement, militia violence, and state-supported extermination campaigns directed against California Indigenous peoples.
The word genocide is not rhetorical excess.
It is historically accurate.
Platt makes this unavoidable through Peter Burnett, California’s first governor, who openly declared:
“a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
— p. 40
This was not fringe language. This was state formation. Berkeley grew within that exterminatory order. The university’s rise cannot be separated from the destruction of Native California or from the conversion of Indigenous land into settler wealth, mining capital, academic prestige, and elite institutions.
Platt also cites the older historical description of what happened to California Native peoples as:
“the heartless liquidation of the California Indian.”
— p. 37
That phrase is brutal because it names process. Not accident. Not tragedy. Not inevitable decline. Liquidation.
Berkeley anthropology then helped turn that liquidation into knowledge.
This is one of the central achievements of The Scandal of Cal: Platt shows that anthropology did not merely study Native peoples after conquest. It helped create the intellectual machinery through which Native peoples were classified, measured, collected, displayed, and declared vanishing.
His chapter title “Misanthropology” is exact. Too often this was not anthropology as the study of humanity. It was anthropology as the denial of humanity through academic authority.
Alfred Kroeber sits at the center of this contradiction. Kroeber preserved important linguistic and ethnographic materials, some of which later mattered for Native revitalization. That fact should be acknowledged. But it does not absolve him or Berkeley. It sharpens the indictment because Kroeber also helped institutionalize salvage anthropology: the idea that Native peoples were disappearing and that white academic institutions had the right to collect whatever remained.
Platt shows Kroeber’s direct involvement in grave excavation through the case of Llewellyn Loud:
Kroeber instructed Loud to devote all his time “to exclusively archeological matters, digging up corpses and artifacts for Berkeley’s collection.”
— p. 5
That sentence should be impossible to sanitize. “Digging up corpses and artifacts for Berkeley’s collection.” That is not preservation in any morally serious sense. That is extraction.
Platt’s larger judgment on Kroeber is devastating:
“One consequence of this moral cowardice and academic specialization was that until the 1960s a crude and racist imagery about California Indians dominated the state’s public discourse…”
— p. 109
That is one of the book’s most important claims. Berkeley anthropology did not merely reflect racist public discourse. It helped shape it. It helped naturalize the myth that Native peoples were disappearing through some inevitable process, rather than being destroyed through deliberate human action.
This connects directly to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. The myth of the “disappearing Indian” remains one of the central myths of settler colonial power. It allows institutions like Berkeley to imagine Native peoples as past tense while keeping their lands, remains, stories, and sacred objects under institutional control.
Platt makes clear that Kroeber was not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense. His claims had political consequences. He wrote Bay Area peoples out of living history. Platt notes that Kroeber claimed “racially pure Ohlone were extinct” and that such claims:
“shaped the politics of powerlessness for the Ohlones for many decades.”
— p. 110
That is not a minor academic error. That is scholarship functioning as political erasure.
The case of Ishi reveals the horror even more clearly. Ishi, the Yahi survivor long mythologized as “the last wild Indian,” survived massacres, bounty hunting, starvation, and the destruction of his people, only to become an object of anthropological fascination under Berkeley’s authority. Visitors watched him demonstrate “authentic” Native practices while the institution reinforced the mythology of disappearance. The genocidal violence that produced his isolation became background. His survival became spectacle.
Even after death, Ishi was denied dignity.
His brain was removed and sent to the Smithsonian, against Native objections and contrary to his cultural traditions. Platt records the cold procedural language of the act:
“He instructed Kroeber that the brain should be ‘packed in plenty of absorbent cotton saturated in liquid in which it is preserved.’ Kroeber complied.”
— p. 97
That line is almost unbearable because of its bureaucratic calm. It shows exactly how scientific procedure can coexist with desecration.
The violence did not end with death. Anthropology extended possession beyond the grave.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s role reveals the larger imperial structure behind Berkeley’s collections. Hearst is remembered in university mythology as a philanthropist, patron of culture, and benefactor of education. Platt shows a darker truth. Hearst-funded expeditions helped build Berkeley’s anthropology empire through the extraction of human remains and sacred objects from California, Peru, Egypt, and other colonized places.
Platt writes:
“Anthropology was at the heart of Hearst’s philanthropy.”
— p. 93
That sentence matters because it reverses the usual story. Hearst was not simply funding innocent education. She helped fund an institutional machine of collection, possession, and display.
The money behind that philanthropy matters too. George Hearst’s fortune emerged through mining, conquest, western expansion, and the transformation of Native land into extractive wealth. Platt connects Hearst wealth to the Black Hills, Custer, treaty violation, and the seizure of Indigenous territory. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, Custer’s expedition into the Black Hills opened the way for gold extraction and the enrichment of men like Hearst.
Platt notes that Hearst himself understood the brutality of his business:
“I will hurt a good many people.”
— p. 51
That wealth later became philanthropy. Philanthropy became prestige. Prestige became institutional mythology.
This is one of Platt’s most important moves: he shows how violence becomes benefaction once enough time passes and enough buildings are named.
The university’s relationship to racial domination extended beyond anthropology into eugenics. Berkeley was not marginal to American eugenics. It was part of its intellectual center.
Platt makes the point plainly:
“Eugenics at Berkeley was not a fringe science. It was popular. And it was institutionally driven…”
— p. 164
That sentence is crucial. Eugenics was not some embarrassing side project carried out by a few cranks. It was respectable. It was interdisciplinary. It involved anthropology, biology, zoology, anatomy, education, public health, and social science.
California became the national center of forced sterilization. Between 1909 and 1979, the state forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 people under eugenic laws targeting those labeled “feebleminded,” disabled, poor, incarcerated, immigrant, Mexican, Indigenous, Black, or otherwise “unfit.” Berkeley scholars and affiliates helped construct the intellectual legitimacy for this violence.
The Human Betterment Foundation is especially important. Platt explains that Berkeley faculty and affiliates were involved in this eugenics organization, which promoted sterilization and racial “improvement.” Its influence extended far beyond California.
Platt writes:
“The HBF’s publications on sterilization were translated and circulated in Nazi Germany.”
— p. 165
That sentence should haunt any honest reader.
California eugenics helped provide a model for Nazi racial policy. Nazi lawyers and racial theorists studied American sterilization laws, including California’s, while developing their own programs. The relationship between California eugenics and Nazi science was not metaphorical. It was historical.
This destroys the comforting myth that Nazi racial science emerged in isolation somewhere else, disconnected from American universities, foundations, law, public health, and scientific authority. Berkeley was part of that intellectual ecosystem.
Platt also shows how these ideas reached public education. Berkeley anthropologists and museum educators helped produce a public-school version of California history in which Native peoples were primitive, passive, doomed, or already gone. Textbooks sanitized conquest through words like “settlement,” “mission,” and “exploration,” while leaving genocide unnamed.
One textbook asked:
“How did the Spanish change how California Indians lived?”
“And died.”
— p. 145
For a moment, the truth appears. Then the curriculum retreats back into colonial mythology.
This is why the textbook material matters so much. Berkeley’s violence was not only in collections and laboratories. It was pedagogical. It helped teach California how to misunderstand itself.
Platt writes about Edward Gifford, Kroeber’s student and later museum director, whose racial assumptions shaped public education:
“The responsibility for developing the museum’s curriculum and offering hundreds of classes to thousands of schoolchildren was delegated by Kroeber to a faculty member who believed that Indigenous peoples had been stuck in premodernity.”
— p. 111
That is institutional racism as curriculum.
Children were not simply learning “history.” They were being trained into a civilizational story: Europeans brought progress; Native peoples vanished; California became modern; the university inherited the future.
Berkeley’s role in organized violence did not stop with anthropology or eugenics. Through Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory and its ties to the research networks that produced the atomic age, Berkeley became central to nuclear weapons development and Cold War military science. One of California’s most cherished educational institutions helped build the machinery of nuclear holocaust.
That fact must remain in the review because it exposes the deeper pattern. Berkeley repeatedly turns proximity to power into prestige. Colonial anthropology becomes science. Grave desecration becomes collection. Eugenics becomes public health. Sterilization becomes reform. Nuclear weapons become research excellence.
The university’s mythology depends on separating “knowledge” from the violence that knowledge serves.
Platt refuses that separation.
The result is a book that should be required reading for anyone educated in California, anyone teaching in California, and anyone working in the UC, CSU, community college, K–12, museum, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, or public humanities systems. This is not obscure history. It is foundational history. Anyone who teaches California students should know what Berkeley was built on. Anyone who invokes Berkeley as a symbol of progress should know what lies beneath that symbol.
Because the remains are still there.
The collections are still there.
The architecture is still there.
The archives are still there.
The institutional prestige is still there.
The silence is still there.
The Scandal of Cal matters because it forces the question Berkeley would rather avoid: what does “progress” mean when the institution still possesses the dead, still benefits from the prestige built through their possession, and still refuses a full public reckoning?
“You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches and say you are making progress. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it out all the way, then that’s still not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
Malcolm X
That is Berkeley.
They still won't even admit the knife is there.
“Every song, every story is a living moment that we can access again many years later. We are not sad, dying Indians.”
— Cutcha Risling Baldy, quoted in Tony Platt, The Scandal of Cal, p. 19
When Californians speak about UC Berkeley, they often speak about it with something close to civic reverence. Berkeley is not merely a university in the public imagination. It is treated as the crown jewel of public higher education: brilliant, progressive, scientific, diverse, radical, humane, and morally advanced. People think of free speech, antiwar protest, Nobel Prizes, student movements, scientific achievement, the Campanile, and the prestige of the University of California system itself.
Tony Platt’s The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley tears directly through that mythology.
This is not a book about a university with a few unfortunate blemishes. It is not a polite institutional history. It is an indictment. Platt shows that beneath Berkeley’s cultivated image lies a history of genocide, Indigenous dispossession, grave desecration, racial science, eugenics, forced sterilization, militarized research, nuclear weapons development, and systematic concealment. Berkeley did not simply exist beside the violence that built California. It helped organize it, intellectualize it, archive it, legitimize it, and transform it into prestige.
That is the scandal.
And the deeper one goes, the worse it becomes.
There are still anti-DEI activists, anti-CRT ideologues, right-wing media figures, politicians, and even highly educated academics—including some teaching literally blocks away from UC Berkeley itself—who insist that institutional racism is imaginary, exaggerated, or reducible to individual prejudice. Berkeley’s own history destroys that claim almost effortlessly. One does not need abstract theory to refute it. The evidence sits physically inside the institution itself.
The human remains are there.
The stolen funerary objects are there.
The anthropology archives are there.
The eugenics networks are there.
The sterilization advocacy is there.
The military and nuclear research infrastructure is there.
The commemorations are there.
The silence is there.
Institutional racism at Berkeley is not metaphorical. It is historical architecture.
At the center of Platt’s book is one of the most horrifying facts in the history of any American university: Berkeley possesses what is widely regarded as the largest collection of Native American human remains held by any institution in the world. The numbers are staggering: roughly 10,000 to 15,000 Indigenous ancestors, alongside more than one million funerary and cultural objects taken from burial grounds, sacred places, villages, shellmounds, and ceremonial sites throughout California and beyond.
These were not “specimens.”
They were human beings.
They were ancestors of communities who had lived on the land for millennia before Berkeley existed, before California existed as a state, before the United States claimed the authority to excavate, classify, possess, study, warehouse, and delay the return of their dead.
Meanwhile, Indigenous ancestors remained beneath the ground—or inside Berkeley storage rooms and institutional dungeons—without reverence for their sacred burial places, without dignity for the people themselves, and without honest acknowledgment that part of Berkeley’s scientific and anthropological prestige was built through systematic grave desecration. Burial sites became excavation sites. Ancestors became inventory. Sacred objects became collections. The dead became institutional property.
That is not enlightenment.
That is organized desecration under the language of science.
Platt documents this directly. Berkeley’s own campus and surrounding city are recognized as a burial and habitation site, yet the university has not meaningfully marked or acknowledged that history:
“Today, California’s Office of Historic Preservation lists the university and city of Berkeley as a ‘burial and habitation site.’ Cal Berkeley has not officially acknowledged the specifics of this history. There are no markers or plaques on campus to commemorate what was widely recognized in the university’s early decades.”
— p. 26
That sentence alone exposes the lie of Berkeley’s public self-image. The institution claims historical sophistication while refusing to mark the Indigenous dead beneath its own prestige.
Platt also describes how the university’s own workers excavated human remains and handed them over to researchers:
“On a regular basis the university’s buildings and grounds department excavated human remains of Ohlone ancestors and turned them over to archaeologists who measured and recorded their findings according to the dictates of eugenic anthropometry…”
— p. 25
This is the institutional reality. Not rumor. Not exaggeration. Berkeley’s own development brought up the dead, and Berkeley’s scientific apparatus transformed those ancestors into measurements, categories, specimens, and collections.
Platt’s discussion of California genocide is essential here because Berkeley emerged from the same historical order that made the university possible. Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 documents in overwhelming detail the systematic killing, starvation, forced removal, kidnapping, enslavement, militia violence, and state-supported extermination campaigns directed against California Indigenous peoples.
The word genocide is not rhetorical excess.
It is historically accurate.
Platt makes this unavoidable through Peter Burnett, California’s first governor, who openly declared:
“a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
— p. 40
This was not fringe language. This was state formation. Berkeley grew within that exterminatory order. The university’s rise cannot be separated from the destruction of Native California or from the conversion of Indigenous land into settler wealth, mining capital, academic prestige, and elite institutions.
Platt also cites the older historical description of what happened to California Native peoples as:
“the heartless liquidation of the California Indian.”
— p. 37
That phrase is brutal because it names process. Not accident. Not tragedy. Not inevitable decline. Liquidation.
Berkeley anthropology then helped turn that liquidation into knowledge.
This is one of the central achievements of The Scandal of Cal: Platt shows that anthropology did not merely study Native peoples after conquest. It helped create the intellectual machinery through which Native peoples were classified, measured, collected, displayed, and declared vanishing.
His chapter title “Misanthropology” is exact. Too often this was not anthropology as the study of humanity. It was anthropology as the denial of humanity through academic authority.
Alfred Kroeber sits at the center of this contradiction. Kroeber preserved important linguistic and ethnographic materials, some of which later mattered for Native revitalization. That fact should be acknowledged. But it does not absolve him or Berkeley. It sharpens the indictment because Kroeber also helped institutionalize salvage anthropology: the idea that Native peoples were disappearing and that white academic institutions had the right to collect whatever remained.
Platt shows Kroeber’s direct involvement in grave excavation through the case of Llewellyn Loud:
Kroeber instructed Loud to devote all his time “to exclusively archeological matters, digging up corpses and artifacts for Berkeley’s collection.”
— p. 5
That sentence should be impossible to sanitize. “Digging up corpses and artifacts for Berkeley’s collection.” That is not preservation in any morally serious sense. That is extraction.
Platt’s larger judgment on Kroeber is devastating:
“One consequence of this moral cowardice and academic specialization was that until the 1960s a crude and racist imagery about California Indians dominated the state’s public discourse…”
— p. 109
That is one of the book’s most important claims. Berkeley anthropology did not merely reflect racist public discourse. It helped shape it. It helped naturalize the myth that Native peoples were disappearing through some inevitable process, rather than being destroyed through deliberate human action.
This connects directly to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. The myth of the “disappearing Indian” remains one of the central myths of settler colonial power. It allows institutions like Berkeley to imagine Native peoples as past tense while keeping their lands, remains, stories, and sacred objects under institutional control.
Platt makes clear that Kroeber was not merely wrong in some abstract intellectual sense. His claims had political consequences. He wrote Bay Area peoples out of living history. Platt notes that Kroeber claimed “racially pure Ohlone were extinct” and that such claims:
“shaped the politics of powerlessness for the Ohlones for many decades.”
— p. 110
That is not a minor academic error. That is scholarship functioning as political erasure.
The case of Ishi reveals the horror even more clearly. Ishi, the Yahi survivor long mythologized as “the last wild Indian,” survived massacres, bounty hunting, starvation, and the destruction of his people, only to become an object of anthropological fascination under Berkeley’s authority. Visitors watched him demonstrate “authentic” Native practices while the institution reinforced the mythology of disappearance. The genocidal violence that produced his isolation became background. His survival became spectacle.
Even after death, Ishi was denied dignity.
His brain was removed and sent to the Smithsonian, against Native objections and contrary to his cultural traditions. Platt records the cold procedural language of the act:
“He instructed Kroeber that the brain should be ‘packed in plenty of absorbent cotton saturated in liquid in which it is preserved.’ Kroeber complied.”
— p. 97
That line is almost unbearable because of its bureaucratic calm. It shows exactly how scientific procedure can coexist with desecration.
The violence did not end with death. Anthropology extended possession beyond the grave.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s role reveals the larger imperial structure behind Berkeley’s collections. Hearst is remembered in university mythology as a philanthropist, patron of culture, and benefactor of education. Platt shows a darker truth. Hearst-funded expeditions helped build Berkeley’s anthropology empire through the extraction of human remains and sacred objects from California, Peru, Egypt, and other colonized places.
Platt writes:
“Anthropology was at the heart of Hearst’s philanthropy.”
— p. 93
That sentence matters because it reverses the usual story. Hearst was not simply funding innocent education. She helped fund an institutional machine of collection, possession, and display.
The money behind that philanthropy matters too. George Hearst’s fortune emerged through mining, conquest, western expansion, and the transformation of Native land into extractive wealth. Platt connects Hearst wealth to the Black Hills, Custer, treaty violation, and the seizure of Indigenous territory. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, Custer’s expedition into the Black Hills opened the way for gold extraction and the enrichment of men like Hearst.
Platt notes that Hearst himself understood the brutality of his business:
“I will hurt a good many people.”
— p. 51
That wealth later became philanthropy. Philanthropy became prestige. Prestige became institutional mythology.
This is one of Platt’s most important moves: he shows how violence becomes benefaction once enough time passes and enough buildings are named.
The university’s relationship to racial domination extended beyond anthropology into eugenics. Berkeley was not marginal to American eugenics. It was part of its intellectual center.
Platt makes the point plainly:
“Eugenics at Berkeley was not a fringe science. It was popular. And it was institutionally driven…”
— p. 164
That sentence is crucial. Eugenics was not some embarrassing side project carried out by a few cranks. It was respectable. It was interdisciplinary. It involved anthropology, biology, zoology, anatomy, education, public health, and social science.
California became the national center of forced sterilization. Between 1909 and 1979, the state forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 people under eugenic laws targeting those labeled “feebleminded,” disabled, poor, incarcerated, immigrant, Mexican, Indigenous, Black, or otherwise “unfit.” Berkeley scholars and affiliates helped construct the intellectual legitimacy for this violence.
The Human Betterment Foundation is especially important. Platt explains that Berkeley faculty and affiliates were involved in this eugenics organization, which promoted sterilization and racial “improvement.” Its influence extended far beyond California.
Platt writes:
“The HBF’s publications on sterilization were translated and circulated in Nazi Germany.”
— p. 165
That sentence should haunt any honest reader.
California eugenics helped provide a model for Nazi racial policy. Nazi lawyers and racial theorists studied American sterilization laws, including California’s, while developing their own programs. The relationship between California eugenics and Nazi science was not metaphorical. It was historical.
This destroys the comforting myth that Nazi racial science emerged in isolation somewhere else, disconnected from American universities, foundations, law, public health, and scientific authority. Berkeley was part of that intellectual ecosystem.
Platt also shows how these ideas reached public education. Berkeley anthropologists and museum educators helped produce a public-school version of California history in which Native peoples were primitive, passive, doomed, or already gone. Textbooks sanitized conquest through words like “settlement,” “mission,” and “exploration,” while leaving genocide unnamed.
One textbook asked:
“How did the Spanish change how California Indians lived?”
“And died.”
— p. 145
For a moment, the truth appears. Then the curriculum retreats back into colonial mythology.
This is why the textbook material matters so much. Berkeley’s violence was not only in collections and laboratories. It was pedagogical. It helped teach California how to misunderstand itself.
Platt writes about Edward Gifford, Kroeber’s student and later museum director, whose racial assumptions shaped public education:
“The responsibility for developing the museum’s curriculum and offering hundreds of classes to thousands of schoolchildren was delegated by Kroeber to a faculty member who believed that Indigenous peoples had been stuck in premodernity.”
— p. 111
That is institutional racism as curriculum.
Children were not simply learning “history.” They were being trained into a civilizational story: Europeans brought progress; Native peoples vanished; California became modern; the university inherited the future.
Berkeley’s role in organized violence did not stop with anthropology or eugenics. Through Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory and its ties to the research networks that produced the atomic age, Berkeley became central to nuclear weapons development and Cold War military science. One of California’s most cherished educational institutions helped build the machinery of nuclear holocaust.
That fact must remain in the review because it exposes the deeper pattern. Berkeley repeatedly turns proximity to power into prestige. Colonial anthropology becomes science. Grave desecration becomes collection. Eugenics becomes public health. Sterilization becomes reform. Nuclear weapons become research excellence.
The university’s mythology depends on separating “knowledge” from the violence that knowledge serves.
Platt refuses that separation.
The result is a book that should be required reading for anyone educated in California, anyone teaching in California, and anyone working in the UC, CSU, community college, K–12, museum, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, or public humanities systems. This is not obscure history. It is foundational history. Anyone who teaches California students should know what Berkeley was built on. Anyone who invokes Berkeley as a symbol of progress should know what lies beneath that symbol.
Because the remains are still there.
The collections are still there.
The architecture is still there.
The archives are still there.
The institutional prestige is still there.
The silence is still there.
The Scandal of Cal matters because it forces the question Berkeley would rather avoid: what does “progress” mean when the institution still possesses the dead, still benefits from the prestige built through their possession, and still refuses a full public reckoning?
“You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches and say you are making progress. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it out all the way, then that’s still not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
Malcolm X
That is Berkeley.
They still won't even admit the knife is there.
September 3, 2024
Excellent research and pungent opinions from a former Cal professor about UC Berkeley’s history, especially the anthropology department. The author, a refugee from 1960s activist culture, fills this book with little known facts about the movers and shakers who created UC Berkeley.
Most of those facts are negative. For example, John Le Conte, President of the university in the 1870s, was a former Confederate from a slave-owning family who remained an unreconstructed racist.
Benjamin Ida Wheeler, President of the University in the early part of the 20th century, advocated eugenics to prevent the “unfit” from taking over the world.
The university benefited from the Morrill Land Grant Act, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, taking possession of 150,000 acres of “unpeopled public domain land“ which of course was still home to many Native Americans.
There was a Native American village along Strawberry Creek near the football stadium. Artifacts recovered from the site confirmed continuous use for perhaps thousands of years, but the university described it publicly as just “temporary campgrounds.”
With the backing of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the University amassed a huge collection of native American remains from burial sites in California. Although the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act became federal law in 1990, the university continues to hold thousands of skeletal remains.
The chief fault I find with this narrative is that the author consistently measures the conduct of people in the past using today’s standards as the yardstick. There is little balanced discussion of actions taken in light of the standards applicable at the time. Tony Platt often portrays figures in two dimensions as mustache-twirling villains.
There is, however, a somewhat balanced discussion of legendary anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. “Kroeber‘s reputation among tribes today is mixed. Many respect him for his advocacy, albeit belated, of native land rights.”
Platt summarizes the criticisms of Kroeber as follows:
He failed in his responsibility to speak out publicly about the Native American genocide that followed the Gold Rush.
He did not explore the extent to which Native Americans’ recollections of pre-contact life was “remediated by their direct or indirect knowledge of the catastrophe that swept through their tribes in the second half of the 19th century.”
Kroeber was so preoccupied with pre-contact cultures that he never introduced us to the living people
He chaired a department that “plundered Native grave sites and made eugenic anthropometry a respectable component of its search and curriculum.”
At the end of the book, Professor Platt includes an interesting discussion of how 5 buildings on campus came to be “denamed” in recent years.
Although his far-left liberalism frequently scorches the page, the saving grace is that Platt wants the University to be better; to do a better job of living up to its brand as one of the world’s great public universities dedicated to improving the world. He wants Cal to fulfill its reputation as an agent of social change and a public trust. So do I.
Most of those facts are negative. For example, John Le Conte, President of the university in the 1870s, was a former Confederate from a slave-owning family who remained an unreconstructed racist.
Benjamin Ida Wheeler, President of the University in the early part of the 20th century, advocated eugenics to prevent the “unfit” from taking over the world.
The university benefited from the Morrill Land Grant Act, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, taking possession of 150,000 acres of “unpeopled public domain land“ which of course was still home to many Native Americans.
There was a Native American village along Strawberry Creek near the football stadium. Artifacts recovered from the site confirmed continuous use for perhaps thousands of years, but the university described it publicly as just “temporary campgrounds.”
With the backing of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the University amassed a huge collection of native American remains from burial sites in California. Although the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act became federal law in 1990, the university continues to hold thousands of skeletal remains.
The chief fault I find with this narrative is that the author consistently measures the conduct of people in the past using today’s standards as the yardstick. There is little balanced discussion of actions taken in light of the standards applicable at the time. Tony Platt often portrays figures in two dimensions as mustache-twirling villains.
There is, however, a somewhat balanced discussion of legendary anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. “Kroeber‘s reputation among tribes today is mixed. Many respect him for his advocacy, albeit belated, of native land rights.”
Platt summarizes the criticisms of Kroeber as follows:
He failed in his responsibility to speak out publicly about the Native American genocide that followed the Gold Rush.
He did not explore the extent to which Native Americans’ recollections of pre-contact life was “remediated by their direct or indirect knowledge of the catastrophe that swept through their tribes in the second half of the 19th century.”
Kroeber was so preoccupied with pre-contact cultures that he never introduced us to the living people
He chaired a department that “plundered Native grave sites and made eugenic anthropometry a respectable component of its search and curriculum.”
At the end of the book, Professor Platt includes an interesting discussion of how 5 buildings on campus came to be “denamed” in recent years.
Although his far-left liberalism frequently scorches the page, the saving grace is that Platt wants the University to be better; to do a better job of living up to its brand as one of the world’s great public universities dedicated to improving the world. He wants Cal to fulfill its reputation as an agent of social change and a public trust. So do I.
December 6, 2023
Working on campus, I have seen a number of recent post-2020 changes to the rhetoric and thinking about Cal and it's history, it has been refreshing (well well overdue.) There have been sporadically intentional efforts by academics, workers and students to reframe the history of UC Berkeley in a more honest context. This book outlines, in detail, the many missteps and choices taken in establishing the campus as a vanguard of research and in service of that goal, obfuscation of certain inalienable truths about the land grant university.
This book shines a light on many hypocrisies of the enterprise, built atop and benefitting immensely from the legacy of the Ohlone that stewarded the area initially, and CONTINUE to inhabit the region. Probably should really be required reading for incoming students, as it allows a more full understanding and reconciliation with the names that are littered all over campus as honoraria to a hallowed past of greatness. Thirty years ago I was a freshman in Putnam Hall, Unit One, I lived in that space for one full year without any knowledge (or care really) of who Putnam was... As it turns out, Putnam was early physical anthropologist who made his bones quite literally, grave robbing indigenous lands in service of Phoebe Hearst's mandate to collect widely and voraciously human specimens to anoint the new campus with notable collections of osteological artifacts (to hell with how we get 'em).
And that Shellmound Bay Street Emeryville mall? that's one of the grave robbing spots! If you ever want to read the "provided" history of the Shellmound that existed there, it's placed in the hallways next to the bathrooms on the 2nd floor of that mall (ugh!). Again, CA has lots of work to do to reconcile it's ugly past with indigenous communities then and now in the present.
The book is a solid read, and should be adopted as a text for incoming freshman to consider their obligation to the space they will use in the course of their schooling, and so they do not go through their four years as blindly as I did when I was a student!
Still love this place, and the people who try to make it a bit better and more honest each day, like the author did in this text.
"Go Bears?!"
This book shines a light on many hypocrisies of the enterprise, built atop and benefitting immensely from the legacy of the Ohlone that stewarded the area initially, and CONTINUE to inhabit the region. Probably should really be required reading for incoming students, as it allows a more full understanding and reconciliation with the names that are littered all over campus as honoraria to a hallowed past of greatness. Thirty years ago I was a freshman in Putnam Hall, Unit One, I lived in that space for one full year without any knowledge (or care really) of who Putnam was... As it turns out, Putnam was early physical anthropologist who made his bones quite literally, grave robbing indigenous lands in service of Phoebe Hearst's mandate to collect widely and voraciously human specimens to anoint the new campus with notable collections of osteological artifacts (to hell with how we get 'em).
And that Shellmound Bay Street Emeryville mall? that's one of the grave robbing spots! If you ever want to read the "provided" history of the Shellmound that existed there, it's placed in the hallways next to the bathrooms on the 2nd floor of that mall (ugh!). Again, CA has lots of work to do to reconcile it's ugly past with indigenous communities then and now in the present.
The book is a solid read, and should be adopted as a text for incoming freshman to consider their obligation to the space they will use in the course of their schooling, and so they do not go through their four years as blindly as I did when I was a student!
Still love this place, and the people who try to make it a bit better and more honest each day, like the author did in this text.
"Go Bears?!"
Read
December 16, 2023Despite the system glitch saying I have, I haven't read this book and don't intend to, hence the lack of a rating. I just wanted to be sure, in case Mr. Platt neglects to mention it, that readers are aware that he was let go by Cal in the 1970s. Based on my personal experience with him, I think there's very little likelihood that he would be a reliable narrator; I'm not going to spend the time fact-checking the book to find out. I took one of the last courses he was allowed to teach and was appalled by the man's utter refusal - or inability - to consider or respect any point of view other than his own. This was Berkeley fergawdsake; it's not as if he had a classroom full of Young Republicans taking issue with everything he said, but he would brook no questioning of, or disagreement with, his rigid ideology. Almost everyone in the class, except for his mindless acolytes, regretted taking it.
January 27, 2024
Interesting book with lots of facts and strongly-held opinions. I'm more willing to tolerate, eg, atomic research than the author is, but disagreement on stuff like that isn't what drove my low rating.
One factor is that the list of offenses is exhaustive to the point of being exhausting. Perhaps it was important to document all of them in one place, or not to rank one act above or below another, but it got numbing to read of all the exhumations. Same for other historical crimes.
More importantly, Platt's just really angry. Some cause for that, and he's entitled to the emotion, but it interferes with his persuading.
I'm glad I read it but I didn't enjoy it.
One factor is that the list of offenses is exhaustive to the point of being exhausting. Perhaps it was important to document all of them in one place, or not to rank one act above or below another, but it got numbing to read of all the exhumations. Same for other historical crimes.
More importantly, Platt's just really angry. Some cause for that, and he's entitled to the emotion, but it interferes with his persuading.
I'm glad I read it but I didn't enjoy it.
September 25, 2023
Really important. If you already know about these uniquely California and UC Berkeley issues, the genocide, grave robbing, hoarding of ancestors, and eugenics, and you don’t want to slog through the details, just read the last chapter, Reckoning.
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