Renaming Porteus Hall
By Betty Porteus
would insult a great scientistEditor's note: The Associated Students of the University of Hawaii is supporting a proposal to change the name of the campus' Porteus Hall, named for Stanley D. Porteus, a noted UH psychologist. ASUH, along with the Graduate Student Organization and other groups, believes Porteus' academic work was racist and sexist. THOSE who want to rename Porteus Hall have dug out quotes from Stanley D. Porteus' first book, "Temperament and Race," to prove that he was racist and sexist.
Admittedly, the quotes seem awful, even shocking. But it doesn't make someone racist or sexist if he is reporting facts that turn up in his research.
Remember, too, that the book was published in 1926. There has been a lot of change in our thinking in those 71 years.
I wonder if those so critical of him -- those so full of righteous indignation, who wave banners and hang life-size dummies at protests -- have read any of his books. Doing so or knowing about the rest of his life might change their attitudes.
Stanley Porteus did a lot for Hawaii.
One of the world's pioneer psychologists, Stanley David Porteus was born in 1883 in Box Hill, a little town in Victoria, Australia. He died in 1972 in Honolulu at the age of 89.
Stanley's father was a Presbyterian minister, whose family lived in different little towns where the church sent him in the Australian outback. Stanley went to one-room country schools.
In 1913, he was chosen to be headmaster of a new school being started for learning-disabled children in Fitzroy outside of Melbourne. He immediately started learning all there was to know about psychology.
Since there were so many applicants for the new school, Stanley tried to choose children who would get the most out of the training. To help him do so, he gave applicants the psychological tests of the time.
Not satisfied with any of them, he developed his own -- the Porteus Maze Test -- which he gave not only to the applicants but also, in order to standardize it, to hundreds of other children.
Stanley's reputation, which spread as his test began to achieve acclaim, soon reached Hawaii.
In 1922, he accepted an invitation to set up a Psychological and Psychopathic Clinic at the UH. To do so, he took a year off from his job as head of research at Vineland Training School in New Jersey.
After setting up the Honolulu clinic, he was asked to stay on. For a few years, he worked part of the year in New Jersey and part in Hawaii.
It was hard on his two sons to keep changing schools, though, usually in the middle of the year, and Stanley loved the islands. So in 1926, he gave up his Vineland position to live full-time in Hawaii.
He ran his psychological clinic and treated patients, but continued to do extensive research and to write, both articles and books. Before he was through, Stanley had published some 14 full-length books and at least 29 articles.
In his testing, he found that children whose parents had come to Hawaii to work in sugar plantations tested as high and sometimes higher than the children of Anglo-Saxon descent, something few at the time would have imagined could be true.
At the clinic, he treated thousands of island people with psychological problems. He did a lot of outside work for which he expected no extra pay. He sometimes testified in court.
He spent a lot of time with territorial institutions which sought his advice, such as the schools and the prisons, the Territorial Mental Hospital and the Waimano Training School for Boys. His reputation put Hawaii and the University of Hawaii on the map internationally.
At UH, he had many friends of both sexes and of many different races and walks of life. I don't think any of his colleagues or acquaintances would have ever considered him to be racist or sexist.
He hardly acted as a racist in the concerned and compassionate way he treated his patients of all races.
As for being a sexist, he was happily married for over 63 years, and I doubt that he ever failed to treat any woman with friendliness and respect.
As for being a questionable scientist, remember that his work represented significant first steps in the field.
In light of the above and more, to change the name of Porteus Hall would be a cruel insult to his memory.
How many people, after teaching for 13 years in little country schools, could end up with world-wide honor and respect in a new field?
How many have the intellectual curiosity and creative energy to keep attacking new challenges all their lives?
Although he made mistakes and wasn't perfect, one would have to go far to find a better role model for university students.
Renaming Porteus Hall also would be an insult to those who chose to give his name to the building. They did so because they thought highly of Stanley Porteus, and knew how much he had done for Hawaii and the world.
They treasured him and wanted his name remembered.
Betty Porteus is the daughter-in-law of Stanley D. Porteus.
The opinions in Other Views columns are the authors and are
not necessarily shared by the Star-Bulletin.
