John McCardell

John Malcolm McCardell Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is Vice-Chancellor, President, and Professor of History at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and President Emeritus of Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. He retired as president of Middlebury 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.

A respected leader in higher education and distinguished historian of the American South, McCardell served at Middlebury during a period in which about half of the school's 23,000 living alumni had graduated. A 1971 graduate of Washington and Lee University, he did his graduate work 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 awarded the 1977 Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians.

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 by the Board of Trustees to serve as its Sixteenth Vice-Chancellor and President. McCardell’s appointment was effective July 1, 2010.

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". 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.

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