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Ellwood Cubberley

Ellwood Cubberley (1868 - 1941) was a professor and dean at Stanford’s School of Education. Along with his colleague Lewis Terman, Cubberley promoted a eugenic approach to education: finding the most eugenically gifted children and allocating the most resources to their education. 

 

Cubberley worked closely with David Starr Jordan and shared many of his anti-immigration views. Like Jordan, Cubberley feared the eugenic impact of immigration, portraying non-white and Eastern European immigrants as inherently inferior to the Anglo-American population. 

 

In his 1919 Public Education in the United States, Cubberley portrayed Eastern Europeans immigrants (mostly Jewish and working class) as a eugenic threat to the nation, describing them as “largely illiterate, docile, lacking in initiative, and almost wholly without the Anglo-Saxon conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law, order, public decency, and government, their coming has served to dilute our national stock and to weaken and corrupt our political life.”

 

Cubberley Education Library and Cubberley Auditorium are named after Ellwood Cubberley.

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