Maine’s university system voted to remove George Mitchell’s name from a building and scholarship over Jeffrey Epstein ties, despite no finding of wrongdoing.
The University of Maine System’s Board of Trustees voted 9-5 on Monday, with one abstention, to strip the former Senate majority leader’s name from the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions on the flagship campus in Orono and from the George J. Mitchell Peace Scholarship.
The New York Post reported the move followed a campus task force review of Mitchell’s associations with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, after the Justice Department released voluminous Epstein case files earlier this year.
Mitchell, now 93, has repeatedly denied any personal wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse of young girls. The university’s own review reached no finding that he committed misconduct. The board acted anyway.
UMaine officials set up the task force in February to decide whether Mitchell’s name should stay on university assets. The panel’s conclusion was blunt about optics, not guilt.
The task force stated:
“While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, in light of the material that has recently been made public by the US Department of Justice, and mindful of the experiences of victims and survivors, the task force concludes that continued use of Senator Mitchell’s name would compromise the public trust and reflect adversely upon the university and its reputation.”
That language did the work. No proven offense. A reputation judgment. A 9-5 board vote to rename the center and the scholarship that funds a year of postgraduate study at universities in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The same February stretch brought other erasures. Mitchell resigned as honorary chairman of the Mitchell Institute, which awards college scholarships to Maine public high school students. His portrait came down from the walls of the State House in Augusta, where it had hung with other notable Maine politicians.
The Justice Department’s Epstein file dump earlier this year mentioned Mitchell more than 300 times. Reporting on those records described scheduled meetings with Epstein as late as 2013, years after Epstein’s Florida plea deal on two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one involving a minor.
In a December 2018 text exchange with former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, Epstein called Mitchell “a very close friend when senate majority leader.” That description is now part of the public record the university cited.
Friendship claims and meeting schedules are not criminal findings. The university said as much. It still treated association itself as enough to scrub a living former senator’s name from a sustainability center and a peace scholarship.
Mitchell’s résumé is the kind Maine institutions once celebrated without hesitation. Appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1980, he won two full terms and rose to majority leader before retiring from electoral politics in 1995.
President Bill Clinton then named him special envoy for Northern Ireland. Mitchell is widely credited with helping negotiate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that helped end decades of violence.
In 2006, then-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig tapped him to investigate steroid and performance-enhancing drug use in baseball. The Mitchell Report, released in December 2007, identified 89 current and former players as confirmed or suspected drug cheats. Yankees ace Roger Clemens was the biggest name on the list. Major League Baseball later toughened testing and penalties, 80 games for a first positive, a full 162-game season for a second, and a lifetime ban for a third.
None of that history was the issue before the trustees. The issue was Epstein’s files, the text-message friendship label, the post-plea meetings, and the university’s fear of what keeping the name would “reflect.”
The board’s decision lands in a familiar pattern: institutions race to protect their brand when famous names appear near scandal, even when their own investigators find no wrongdoing by the person whose name is on the building.
Mitchell denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes against girls. The task force did not contradict that denial with a misconduct finding. It still recommended erasure. The trustees agreed by a clear majority.
Taxpayers and students in Maine now get a renamed sustainability center and a renamed peace scholarship because a deceased predator once claimed a Senate-era friendship and kept Mitchell on a meeting calendar years later. The university called that a public-trust problem. It did not call it proof of crime.
Open questions remain about the full content of those 300-plus file mentions and about how individual trustees explained their votes. The public record supplied to date is thinner on specifics than on the final result: the name comes off.
When a university admits it found no wrongdoing and still strips a 93-year-old statesman’s name for association alone, it is not enforcing justice. It is managing fear, and teaching everyone watching that reputation panic now outruns evidence.
