John McCardell, Jr.

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John Malcolm McCardell, Jr. is the president emeritus and a professor of history at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. He retired as president in June, 2004, after serving thirteen years as the fifteenth president of the college. An anonymous donor of $50 million in the spring of 2004 asked that Middlebury's science center, Bicentennial Hall, be renamed John M. McCardell, Jr. Bicentennial Hall.

McCardell served at Middlebury during a period in which about half of the school's 23,000 living alumni have graduated. A 1971 graduate of Washington and Lee University, he did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins and then at Harvard where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1976. That same year he joined the history department at the distinguished Vermont liberal arts college.
Following his retirement from the presidency, McCardell returned to the faculty at Middlebury where he continues to teach history.

[edit] On Underage Drinking

McCardell wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in 2005 saying, "the 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law" that has made the college drinking problem far worse. [1]

For more background information, see Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the United States Supreme Court case South Dakota v. Dole.