Cancelling History
31st May 2023
Middlebury College, the highly-ranked Vermont school which made national news when students blocked social scientist Charles Murray from speaking because of his heterodox views on racial issues, and physically assaulted the professor who had invited him, is now being sued by representatives of the estate of John Mead, a deceased former governor of the Green Mountain State. The estate claims that that the college breached its contract with Mead’s estate in 2021 when it removed his family name from the campus chapel, which was a precondition of the money originally being donated to build the chapel.
Mead (1841-1920) was a physician and businessman who served as governor from 1910 to 1912, having interrupted his studies at Middlebury in 1862-63 to serve in the Union Army. He made substantial donations to Middlebury, including the financing of its eponymous chapel, constructed in 1916. The reason given for removing his name from the chapel is the discovery that he had advocated the sterilization of “degenerates and defectives” over a century ago.
Responding to the suit, Middlebury’s lawyers not only deny that the gift of the chapel was predicated on preserving the original name, but also assert that the College has a duty to “grow” with the times, including in its choice of honorees. Elsewhere, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, in 2022 descendants of benefactors of at least two other schools made complaints similar to those of the Mead heirs—one against the state of California for changing the name of the Hastings College of Law (because Hastings had been “involved in the slayings of hundreds of Native Americans” in the nineteenth century, presumably in territorial battles) and another against the University of Richmond for renaming the T.C. Williams Law School (because Williams had owned slaves).