Matthew Franck at Bench Memos shed some additional light on the Middlebury Rehnquist Professorship. It seems that Rehnquist often summered in Vermont, and that one of his daughters is married to a Middlebury dean.
Naming professorships after Chief Justices is clearly a tendentious process, involving all sorts of metaphorical cudgeling. Consider the “symbolic violence” of the following posts:
Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at Berkeley School of Law
Warren Burger Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU