ST. LOUIS – Washington University in St. Louis will remove the name of a former anatomy department leader from all university honors and features following an ethics review that cited his promotion of eugenics and nonconsensual collection of human remains.

The university announced plans Friday to remove the name of Robert J. Terry, MD, from campus branding, including the Robert J. Terry Lecture Series and the Robert J. Terry Professorship at the School of Medicine.

Terry, who died in 1966, was once the leader of the anatomy department at WashU Medicine, the university’s medical school.  

The decision to strip his name from WashU features followed a formal request submitted last fall by 12 students and later endorsed by the Washington University Native American Students Association. The submission called for the removal of Terry’s name based on his support for eugenics and involvement in collecting human remains without consent, practices that the submission claimed to disproportionately affected African Americans.

After reviewing more than 3,000 pages of archival material, the university’s Naming Review Board determined that Terry’s actions were fundamentally inconsistent with the university’s values of equity, inclusion and respect for human dignity.  

“This is about more than a name change,” said Paul Scott, a WashU senior who helped lead the submission effort. “It’s about acknowledging the real harms that were done — and that continue when we fail to confront them — and committing to do better moving forward.”   

The NRB’s final report, which is available in full online, outlined two core recommendations: First, to remove Terry’s name from all university-affiliated features without legal impediments, and second, to create educational opportunities to contextualize the decision and encourage deeper engagement with the historical and ethical issues raised by Terry’s practices.

Additionally, the university will continue with ongoing efforts to ethically manage Terry’s specimen collection, a set of human bones and tissue samples acquired primarily from local hospitals and institutional morgues in the St. Louis area. The collection was previously used for research and teaching purposes.