The college stripped former Vermont Governor John Mead’s name from the chapel he donated on account of a single speech.
In September 2021, Middlebury College unilaterally stripped the name of former Vermont Governor John Mead from its iconic Mead Memorial Chapel.
Four years later, Mead’s estate is still fighting to reinstate Mead’s name.
Mead graduated from Middlebury in 1864 and went on to become a physician, industrialist, governor, and a college trustee. In 1914, he donated $74,000 to his alma mater to create a marble and wood chapel on the highest point on campus with his family’s name.
But in the post-2020 rush to tear down monuments to historical figures who failed to live up to contemporary moral standards, the school announced it would strip the Mead name from the chapel. The school said in a statement that the former governor played a “central role in advancing eugenics policies that resulted in harm to hundreds of Vermonters.”
Yet the school has failed to acknowledge its own dark history of promoting eugenics. Mead’s estate argues he is being made a “scapegoat” for Middlebury College.
Mead’s only connection to the eugenics movement is a speech he made at the end of his term as governor in 1912, in which he called on the state legislature to adopt policies premised on eugenics theory. He supported the denial of marriage licenses to syphilitics, rapists, and “habitual” alcoholics. He also advocated vasectomies for individuals with hereditary diseases.
The college argues, “His call to action resulted in a movement, legislation, public policy, and the founding of a Vermont state institution that sterilized people—based on their race, sex, ethnicity, economic status, and their perceived physical conditions and cognitive disabilities.”
But Vermont didn’t pass its sterilization law until 19 years later, after Mead had died.
Nonetheless, the college says, “John Mead’s documented actions in this regard are counter in every way to our values as an institution, and counter to the spiritual purpose of a chapel, a place to nurture human dignity and possibility, and to inspire, embrace, and comfort all people.”
Through its legal efforts to have the name reinstated, Mead’s estate has uncovered Middlebury College’s own extensive relationship with eugenics.
James Douglas, former Vermont governor and the special administrator of the estate of John Mead, is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to restore the Mead name to the chapel.
“It’s a classic case of presentism, as [Mead’s] eugenics-related suggestions were not only in the mainstream of public opinion at the time, but fully embraced by his alma mater,” Douglas told NR. “Further, nothing came of his proposals; Vermont adopted a sterilization law decades later, after he had died and after most other states had already enacted similar statutes.”
“It’s also an example of the cancel culture that pervades higher education across the nation,” he added. “Ironically, it’s contrary to the very purpose of a university: the pursuit of truth; students can’t pursue the truth if history is erased.”
Eugenics was on the Middlebury College curriculum as recently as 1946 — at which point eugenics had been widely discredited.
At one time, a mandatory course for entering freshmen included a lecture on “What Has Civilization to Expect From Eugenics.”
And Paul Moody, who served as the college’s president from 1921 to 1945, was a major supporter of eugenics. In 1931, he said “the whole French Canadian population could be wiped out of Middlebury and no one would miss it.”
The Middlebury Campus, the student paper, found the college “also hosted various speeches on eugenics, employed members of the National Congress of Eugenics and is noted as one of 44 colleges in the United States confirmed to have taught eugenics into the 1910s.”
“Understanding that this history is larger than John Mead and Middlebury’s Chapel is vital to truly understanding this dark chapter of Middlebury’s history,” the paper reported.
In the lawsuit against the college, Mead’s estate argues that the chapel was not named for John Mead, but was named “in memory of the Mead family ancestors who embodied the values that were symbolized by the Chapel itself.”
Douglas argued that the removal of the Mead name is a clear breach of contract.
But last year, Vermont Superior Court Judge Robert A. Mello ruled against the Mead estate, saying it would not be entitled to restore the original name of the chapel, nor to receive monetary compensation for the name’s removal.
However, the court allowed the litigation to continue to decide whether the original agreement was a gift or a contract. If the court were to determine it was a contract, then it would have allowed proceedings to determine if “covenant of good faith and fair dealing” had been violated.
But in an April ruling, Mello granted Middlebury College summary judgment, resolving the case without a trial and dismissing Douglas’s remaining claims.
The judge ruled that there was no evidence of a “perpetual naming condition, any sort of non-disparagement agreement, or any contract at all that possibly could have remained in force in 2021 such that its implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing could then have been breached.”
Mello found that Douglas’s claim of an implied covenant between Mead and Middlebury College lacked merit.
At the time, the college celebrated the ruling in a statement to VTDigger.
“The decision affirms that there were no viable legal claims against Middlebury in this lawsuit, further affirming the Court’s decision in October 2024 that Middlebury does not need to return to the original name of the Chapel or return the gift made by Governor Mead,” the statement read.
Just last month, the estate filed an appeal in the Vermont Supreme Court. The estate is now suing for breach of contract and/or promissory estoppel; it has dropped the claim of breach of condition of conditional gift.
“We are now appealing an adverse ruling because we disagree with the trial court’s decision that 100 years was a sufficient time for the name to remain on the Chapel,” Douglas said. “The structure that John Mead built was both a Memorial and a Chapel, and memorials have no end-date; they are always meant to be for as long as the memorial stands.”
“The Court noted that there was no explicit reference to perpetuality in Governor Mead’s gift, but that would’ve been insulting to all parties,” he added. “Why would anyone have foreseen the need to have a ‘perpetual clause’ dictating the behavior of a college whose leaders were his dear friends? Even the judge allowed for the fact that there could have been a contract — he just decided that if there was one, it had expired. We believe that a jury should make that determination.”
Despite the estate suing over contract law, ten progressive colleges have submitted a motion to file an amicus brief with the state supreme court supporting Middlebury College, arguing that the suit would upend charitable gift law and that gift law should only be decided by the state’s attorney general.
The ten colleges — Amherst College, Franklin & Marshall College, Ithaca College, Sarah Lawrence College, Smith College, Swarthmore College, Trinity College (CT), Tufts University, Wellesley College, and Williams College — are all left-wing progressive colleges with a combined endowment of $22 billion.
And among those colleges, at least six of the schools have extensive records of teaching eugenics in the early 20th century: Amherst, Smith, Swarthmore, Tufts, Wellesley and Williams.
“But here’s the most important difference: they have all acknowledged their involvement in the eugenics movement, usually as the result of extensive and well-publicized reviews within the past decade,” Douglas said. “Middlebury stands alone in refusing to admit its heavy and sustained commitment to teaching eugenics, despite the overwhelming evidence of its complicity.”
Middlebury has “engaged in a massive cover-up of this history and instead thrown Governor Mead under the bus,” he said.
“Think of it: Governor Mead mentioned the topic only once, in a few paragraphs of a lengthy speech in 1912, while Middlebury served as a eugenics factory, training generations of eugenicists for many years,” he added. “It’s shameful.”