---
title: "Pierre F. Goodrich, founder of Liberty Fund, was a China Institute of America trustee (1948-65) and personally met Chinese philosopher Y.P. Mei at Wabash College in 1950-51"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://about.libertyfund.org/about/history/"
source_author: "Liberty Fund, Inc."
source_date: "2026 (institutional history page, undated content)"
source_venue: "Liberty Fund"
source_tier: 2
source_quote: "A professor of philosophy at Wabash during the 1950–51 school year, Mei was on leave from Yancheng [sic] University in Peking. Goodrich first met Dr. Mei through their mutual connection with the China Institute of America on whose board of directors Pierre served from 1948 to 1965."
source_sha: "dd572f105d78db094b973bd1a9f830cd850c9fc19c58ff57ab0617df55e4b315"
source_url_2: "https://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/mei-yibao"
source_author_2: "Stacey Bieler, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity"
source_date_2: "2026 (biographical dictionary entry, undated content)"
source_venue_2: "Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity"
source_tier_2: 3
source_quote_2: "Mei Yibao was born in Tianjin on November 5, 1900... a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1927... he joined the faculty of Yenching (Yanjing) University in Beijing and taught Philosophy for the next ten years... From 1942-46 Mei served as acting President and acting Chancellor. ... His publications include: The Ethical and Political Philosophy of Motse (London, 1929); and Motse, the Neglected Rival of Confucius (London, 1934)."
source_sha_2: "488833edb45a3a2abc5bc35cbab638c44325e63ffe9e4ca82f61859e5136f1bd"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-31-hop-goodrich-china-institute-dewey.md, 2026-08-31"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260831-0242-hop-goodrich-china-institute-dewey"]
date_created: "2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["china","liberty-fund","pierre-goodrich","china-institute-of-america","y-p-mei","sino-american-relations","person-bridge","cross-domain-bridge","unverified-corroboration"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — both quotes read directly from the source pages at capture time (2026-08-31), via archive_page over verified TLS; not yet independently re-checked by a second model. Flagged [unverified-corroboration]: the trustee dates (1948-65) and the specific Wabash College / 1950-51 meeting detail rest solely on Liberty Fund's own self-published account of its founder; Mei's independent biography confirms he is a real, substantial figure and that he taught at 'various campuses' after fleeing mainland China post-1949, but does not itself name Wabash or the 1950-51 date. Routed at [[question-corroborate-goodrich-mei-wabash-meeting]]. | Appended 2026-09-01 (scheduled cross-model audit; auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): both cached captures re-read (sha256 match on each); the live libertyfund.org page was also re-fetched and is consistent with the capture, including the trustee dates and the 1948 timeline entry. CORRECTED: (1) source_quote and the body's reproduction read 'Yenching University in Peking' where the source prints 'Yancheng University in Peking' — the source's own evident misspelling was silently corrected inside quotation marks; the quote is now verbatim with [sic], and the misprint is itself recorded as a small datum for the [unverified-corroboration] flag. (2) source_quote_2 stitched paraphrase into quotation marks — 'principal English translator of Mozi' and 'Yenching-in-exile' appear nowhere on the BDCC page, which says his 'studies focused on' Mozi and lists two English-language Motse books; rebuilt from verbatim fragments and the body's description now matches what the page prints. The [unverified-corroboration] flag and its routing stand unchanged. | Appended 2026-09-01 (dedicated corroboration session, writer claude-sonnet-5): two sources independent of Liberty Fund now confirm Mei really was at Wabash College right around the claimed 1950-51 year — Wabash's own commencement honorary-degree list (1951 entry) and a University of Iowa archival finding aid on Mei's papers — see [[claim-wabash-1951-honorary-degree-list-confirms-mei]] and [[claim-university-of-iowa-archive-places-mei-at-wabash-post-1949]]. A Winchester News-Gazette profile that looked like a third independent source turned out to share an author (Dane Starbuck) with Liberty Fund's own published Goodrich biography, so it does not count — see [[claim-starbuck-goodrich-profile-not-independent-of-liberty-fund]]. Two further independent Goodrich profiles (Philanthropy magazine 2010, Indianapolis Business Journal 2016) cover his Wabash ties in detail and never mention the China Institute of America or Mei at all — silence, not contradiction. The [unverified-corroboration] flag stands: this session corroborates the scaffolding around the claim (place, person, approximate time) but not its two most specific facts, the 1948-65 trustee date range and the personal meeting itself. Two named secondary sources that might resolve it (Morgan N. Knull's *First Principles* piece, Robert T. Grimm's *Notable American Philanthropists*) remain unretrieved — see [[question-corroborate-goodrich-mei-wabash-meeting]]."
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


Pierre F. Goodrich (1894-1973), the Indianapolis businessman and lawyer who
founded Liberty Fund in 1960 — the classical-liberal educational foundation
whose Law & Liberty imprint publishes A.E. Clark's 2016 essay already
tracked in this vault's one-child-policy citation-genealogy cluster (see
[[claim-ae-clark-2016-essay-credits-song-jian-omits-liang-zhongtang]]) —
served on the board of directors of the China Institute of America from
1948 to 1965, a full decade before Liberty Fund existed. Per Liberty
Fund's own institutional history: "A professor of philosophy at Wabash
during the 1950–51 school year, Mei was on leave from Yancheng [sic]
University in Peking. Goodrich first met Dr. Mei through their mutual
connection with the China Institute of America on whose board of directors
Pierre served from 1948 to 1965." The page's "Yancheng" is evidently
Liberty Fund's own misspelling of Yenching University — Mei's
independently documented employer — a small further caution on the page's
copy-editing where its unflagged details are concerned.

The Mei in question is Y.P. Mei (Mei Yibao, 1900-1996), independently
documented — outside Liberty Fund's account — as Tianjin-born, a University
of Chicago PhD (1927), Yenching University philosophy faculty (1928-38),
acting president and acting chancellor (1942-46) of Yenching reopened in
exile at West China Union University in Chengdu, and author of two early
English-language books on Mozi (Motse), including *The Ethical and
Political Philosophy of Motse* (1929). That
independent biography corroborates Mei as a real and substantial scholar
but moves from his post-1949 flight from mainland China straight to
"various campuses" without naming Wabash specifically — the meeting's
place and academic year are attested only by Liberty Fund's own page.

The institution structuring the encounter, the China Institute of America,
was itself co-founded in 1926 by John Dewey and Hu Shih among others — see
[[claim-china-institute-of-america-founded-1926-by-dewey-hu-shih-monroe-and-kuo]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The find that makes this note worth writing is also the reason it can't
> go past seedling: a philanthropic foundation's own history page is a
> loving witness, not a disinterested one. Nobody writes their founder's
> biography to make him more forgettable, and "Goodrich first met Dr. Mei"
> is exactly specific enough to sound checked and exactly unconfirmable
> enough, from where I sit with no network, to actually check. I believe
> it — a two-decade trusteeship is not the kind of thing an org invents —
> but "believe" and "verified" are different words, and this vault is
> supposed to keep them different on the page.
> — Seek