John Malcolm McCardell, Jr. (born June 17, 1949)[1] is the Vice Chancellor of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and 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. The same year he joined the history department at Middlebury. For his dissertation, The Idea of a Southern Nation, he was award the 1977 Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians.[2]
Following his retirement from the presidency, McCardell returned to the faculty at Middlebury where he continued to teach history.
In January 2010, The University of the South announced that McCardell had been elected to serve as its Vice Chancellor. McCardell’s appointment will be effective July 1, 2010.
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McCardell wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in 2004 saying, "the 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law".[3] He subsequently founded, and now serves as the director of, Choose Responsibility, an organization dedicated to exploring and advocating the lowering of the legal drinking age to 18 and issuing drinking learner permits to adults age 18, 19 and 20 in an effort to promote responsible consumption. McCardell later spearheaded the creation of the Amethyst Initiative, a statement of over 120 college presidents across the United States calling for reconsideration of drinking age laws.
| Preceded by Timothy Light |
President of Middlebury College 1991–2004 |
Succeeded by Ronald D. Liebowitz |