John McCardell, Jr.

Who is John McCardell, Jr.?

John Malcolm McCardell, Jr. 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.

Following his retirement from the presidency, McCardell returned to the faculty at Middlebury where he continued to teach history.