A Vermont judge has ruled a lawsuit will move forward against Middlebury College for removing the name of a prominent donor from the campus chapel because of his views on eugenics.
The 223-year-old college had filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. But Judge Robert A. Mello ruled in the first week of August to reject that request and let the lawsuit proceed.
In the lawsuit, the donor’s family states that without warning or public discussion the college removed the name of Dr. John Abner Mead—an alumnus and a former Vermont governor—from the chapel named for him.
The lawsuit contends that having the chapel bear the Mead name was a condition of the donation that funded it. If the name isn’t restored to the building, the plaintiffs want “its full monetary value,” plus interest—about $2.23 million in today’s dollars.
In September, it will be two years since the Mead name occupied a place of honor over the chapel door. The college did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
On its website, the college posted a statement addressed to the Middlebury community about the controversy.
The statement indicates that the decision to remove the Mead name was triggered by a public apology issued by the Vermont Legislature in 2021.
Lawmakers said they were sorry about former bipartisan legislation “authorizing the forced sterilization of at least 250 Vermonters as part of the implementation of a eugenics policy in the first decades of the 20th century.”
The lengthy statement said Dr. Mead had promoted the eugenics policy, citing a transcript of a speech he made in 1912 as he left his role as governor.
In the speech, he said “degenerates” should be prevented from having children.
But this doesn’t accurately represent the whole of Dr. Mead’s character or take into account the good he did for the state, the community, or the college, according to another former Vermont governor, James Douglas.
The college wants to hold someone from the past to the standards of the present, Mr. Douglas told The Epoch Times.
Two Governors, One Battle
Middlebury College is a private school with about 2,800 undergraduates and an endowment of $1.5 billion. The total cost of attendance per student is about $84,000 a year, according to the college website.“They want justice, which means a restoration of their ancestor’s name,” Mr. Douglas said.
Dr. Mead’s story at Middlebury College started when he was working his way through college. He paused his education in 1864 to join the Union Army. During the American Civil War, he fought in the battle of Gettysburg, according to the lawsuit.
He eventually graduated from Middlebury in 1864 and went on to be a businessman, physician, politician, and philanthropist. He served as Vermont’s 47th lieutenant governor from 1908 to 1910. From 1910 to 1912, he served as Vermont’s 53rd governor.
He funded the chapel construction in 1914 and died in 1920.
Now, the family is suing the college for “breach of contract,” because the chapel no longer bears his name.
‘Under Cover of Darkness’
In September 2021, Mr. Douglas heard rumors that something was afoot concerning the iconic chapel. So one morning, he walked to the site.There, he saw a ladder.
“And sure enough, the space for the nameplate was empty, and the brick behind it was showing through,” Mr. Douglas recalled.
The Mead name was gone.
The administration seemed to have made “this decision under cover of darkness,” Mr. Douglas said.
Efforts to talk to campus administrators or get answers from board members were unsuccessful, he said.
After researching, the college wrote, a decision was made that “the name of former Governor Mead on an iconic building in the center of campus is not consistent with what Middlebury stands for in the 21st century.”
In his speech, the college pointed out, Dr. Mead had said those with “cursed defects” were marrying others with “defects,” thus increasing their population.
Dr. Mead said the “insane, the epileptics, the imbeciles, the idiots, the sexual perverts, together with many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals that fill our penitentiaries, jails, asylums, and poor farms are the results of these intermarriages or the natural offspring of defective parents.”
Mr. Douglas said he wasn’t aware of protests on campus from students or faculty about the chapel’s name. He questions the wisdom of wiping away mention of historical figures based on parts of their past now deemed unacceptable.
Apologizing for Eugenics
The Mead family’s lawsuit argues the college made “grossly distorted” accusations that their ancestor made an “urgent call” for the Vermont Legislature to adopt policies and make laws based on eugenics theory.It points out that Dr. Mead died more than a decade before the Vermont Legislature enacted eugenics-based legislation.
The result of that 1931 legislation was a state-sanctioned eugenics movement targeting indigenous people and other groups. Eugenics calls for sterilizing people based on race, sex, ethnicity, economic status, or disabilities.
The Vermont Legislature’s formal apology came 90 years later. It triggered the college’s review of Dr. Mead.
According to the lawsuit, Dr. Mead had said lawmakers should “safeguard and restrict the issuing of marriage licenses to persons convicted of rape, incest, open or gross lewdness, and cases where either of the parties are known to be suffering tuberculosis, syphilis, or epilepsy, and in cases where either party has been in confinement for habitual drunkenness, feeble-mindedness, or insanity.”
The college wronged Dr. Mead by suggesting he was motivated by racism and by failing to look at his overall history, which included “selfless acts and the altruistic contributions” made to “his nation, state, county, town, church, and to Middlebury College itself,” the family’s lawsuit states.
A solution better than removing his name from the chapel would have been to install a plaque outlining how eugenics was wrong and has since been condemned by society, Mr. Douglas said.
“Whether it’s [George] Washington or [Thomas] Jefferson or [Abraham] Lincoln or Governor Mead, you can pick out something you don’t like” about the flaws of any historical figure, Mr. Douglas said.
In an effort to show his displeasure with the college, Mr. Douglas didn’t participate in his 50th class reunion. The former governor graduated in 1972 and is among the school’s most famous alumni.
Cost of Erasing History
The Vermont case and others have garnered national attention as a symbol of the ongoing culture war over U.S. history.Many universities have renamed or removed statues of historical figures in the name of anti-racism since the death of George Floyd in 2020.
Left-wing groups nationwide have demanded racial justice and called for the removal of statues of Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, and others.
And that’s propelled descendants of other university benefactors to make legal complaints similar to the Mead family’s action.
Now, the Williams family wants the Virginia school to give back donations they’ve made throughout the years, with interest. The amount tops $3.6 billion.
Family member Robert Smith, who graduated from the law school that formerly bore his great-great-grandfather’s name, told The Epoch Times that if the family name is no longer good enough for the university, neither is the family’s money.
