A lawsuit over Middlebury College’s decision to remove the family name of a former Vermont governor was dismissed in April, but the governor’s estate is seeking to have that lawsuit revived in an appeal currently being heard by the Vermont Supreme Court.
The attorney for the estate of Governor John Mead says the trial court made a series of erroneous rulings in 2024 that led to the dismissal, by restricting the estate’s ability to present evidence and foreclosing valid legal arguments.
Middlebury College is the place where left-wing students violently attacked a think-tank scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
As The College Fix notes,
The court sided with the college’s argument that there was no explicit contract guaranteeing the Mead name in perpetuity.
The court also accepted Middlebury’s position that its evolving understanding of Governor Mead’s (pictured, right) historical record includes a 1912 reference to eugenics, justified the name removal.
The university argues it has fulfilled its promise to Governor Mead by allowing the chapel to be named after his family for more than 100 years. The former governor’s estate argues the agreement had no end date.
Douglas the administrator of Mead’s estate, counters that “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 trial judge simply picked an arbitrary duration and declared that sufficient. No Vermont statute exists that applied to our case.”
The appeal pending before the state supreme court focuses on breach of contract, breach of good faith and fair dealing, and promissory estoppel.
The estate’s lawsuit follows the college’s decision to remove Mead’s name from the campus chapel and rename it “Middlebury Chapel.”
As The College Fix notes,
The original lawsuit accused the college of engaging in cancel culture by mischaracterizing Mead as a eugenicist based on a 1912 speech. Douglas argued the decision violated the donor’s original intent and erased an important part of the college’s history.
Mead, in his Farewell Address of 1912, expressed support for studying “the use of a new operation called a vasectomy.”
Ten other colleges back Middlebury in an amicus brief, claiming the governor’s estate lacks standing, and that only the state attorney general, a woke progressive, can challenge colleges’ failures to live up to gift agreements with a dead person.
But that misses the point, Douglas says. “Gov. Mead did not ‘donate’ the money – he actually built the Chapel. We are not arguing Gift Law.”
Douglas has dropped from the appeal the conditional-gift claim that was included in the original lawsuit, leaving only other, seemingly viable legal claims.
Douglas also noted that six of the colleges moving for dismissal have their own history of supporting eugenics, such as Amherst College, Swarthmore, and Tufts.
“Middlebury stands alone in refusing to admit its heavy & sustained commitment to teaching eugenics, despite the overwhelming evidence of its complicity,” Douglas said. “Gov. 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. It’s shameful.”
the claim that Mead’s 1912 comments caused sterilizations to happen two or three decades later is factually baseless and legally unjust..Legal Insurrection compiled various documents that show the [Middlebury College’s own] support [for eugenics], including regular courses on the topic of eugenics. Former university president Paul Moody also chaired a committee on the “racial stock of Vermont,” as reported by the legal blog. “Meanwhile, as the litigation grinds on through the summer, one thing is clear: Middlebury College taught more about eugenics than Mead would ever know,” Jane Coleman wrote on June 15.
Historian Mary Grabar says that letting colleges like Middlebury violate gift agreements will backfire on them, harming colleges’ future fundraising efforts.
“Why give your money to an institution that may implement a smear campaign against you in the future, as is the case with John Mead and his family?” she asks.
Many historical figures have been canceled since 2020 and the tumult that followed the death of George Floyd.
BLM protesters tore down the statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco on Juneteenth in 2021. Grant is the general who did the most to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. Later, as president of the United States, he appointed black people and Native Americans to office and tried to protect blacks against racist violence in the South, even though keeping federal troops in the South to protect blacks was costly and unpopular in the North. Grant’s contributions to black freedom were so great that he was celebrated by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
The reason for tearing down his statue was that he once briefly owned a slave that he had been given. But he voluntarily freed that slave in 1859, before the Civil War, and long before slavery was abolished.
Grant’s statue was not alone in being torn down. As Newsweek noted, “The statues of St. Junipero Serra, the first saint of the Roman Catholic Church to be canonized in the U.S., and Francis Scott Key, the author of the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ were also torn down at the park on the same day.”
Police in that progressive city allowed it to happen: “Nearly 400 protesters were reported at the scene around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to police, who did not engage with the demonstrators. No arrests were made, NBC Bay Area reported.”
Earlier, a George Washington statue in progressive Portland was toppled, and covered with a burning U.S. flag. George Washington held slaves, but freed them in his will. Months later, authorities in Portland declined to reinstall the statute, saying it caused “harm” to those offended by it.
By contrast, BLM protesters have left alone the Seattle statue of Soviet Communist dictator Lenin, who relied on slave labor and forced labor on a vast scale.
