Yesterday over at Phi Beta Cons, Anthony Paletta blogged about a contretemps up at Middlebury College in Vermont, regarding the creation of a William H. Rehnquist chair on the faculty. Very interesting, and very revealing of the small-mindedness of a lot of folks in those broadening disciplines called the liberal arts. Just one error by Anthony, however: Rehnquist was not an alumnus of Middlebury, as he indicated (and his source doesn’t say the late chief was). Rehnquist had a bachelor’s, master’s, and law degree from Stanford, and a second master’s from Harvard—both master’s degrees in political science, incidentally.
Which makes it curiouser—why is there a Rehnquist chair at Middlebury? I suppose a donor admired him, but all we know from the campus paper at the college is that the chief justice visited there once.