BRUNSWICK, Maine — Bowdoin College will no longer bestow the Jefferson Davis Award, after the college’s board of trustees voted to approve President Clayton Rose’s proposal to end the practice.
The annual cash award to a student of government and legal studies who excels in constitutional law was named for the Confederate president. It was established in 1972 with an endowed gift from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, according to a news release from the college. In 1858, Davis received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy is an organization of descendants of Confederate soldiers devoted to, among other goals, honoring the memory of those who served the Confederate states, to collect and preserve the material necessary for “a truthful history of the war … and to protect, preserve and mark the places made historic by Confederate valor.”
“It is inappropriate for Bowdoin College to bestow an annual award that continues to honor a man whose mission was to preserve and institutionalize slavery,” Rose said in the release.
The entire current value of the endowed fund will be returned to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The college also will place an “interpretive panel” in Memorial Hall to “more generally” explain Bowdoin’s connections to the Civil War, which include alumni such as Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. It also will provide information about Davis, 16 Bowdoin graduates and two graduates of the Medical School of Maine who served in the Confederacy.
In place of the former Jefferson Davis Award, a new award honoring late Bowdoin College professor Richard E. Morgan, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Constitutional Law, will recognize the same accomplishment in constitutional law. Morgan died in November 2014.
“While I did not have the privilege of knowing Professor Morgan, his national reputation as a scholar of the institutions and principles central to American government and society make it wholly appropriate that we honor him and his lifelong accomplishments with this annual award,” Rose wrote in a separate news release.