---
title: "A University of Iowa archival finding aid independently places Y.P. Mei at Wabash College among his post-1949 American teaching stops"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://aspace.lib.uiowa.edu/agents/people/563"
source_author: "Denise Anderson (University of Iowa Libraries archivist)"
source_date: "2007-10"
source_venue: "ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa / University of Iowa Archives"
source_quote: "Mei taught at American universities after 1949. He was a visiting professor at universities in Chicago, Indiana, Cincinnati, and Princeton, and at Oberlin, Bowdoin and Wabash colleges, before becoming a visiting professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Iowa in 1953."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "790b5f6e33f214fe94a9873bea2767b9376ebeb70b09899be6547fde3fdeca03"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-01-can-pierre-goodrichs-china-institute-of-america-trusteeship.md, 2026-09-01"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260901-0220-can-pierre-goodrichs-china"]
date_created: "2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["china","y-p-mei","wabash-college","corroboration","sino-american-relations","archival-record"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly from the University of Iowa ArchivesSpace finding aid at capture time (2026-09-01); not yet independently re-checked by a second model."
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-02 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


The University of Iowa Libraries' ArchivesSpace finding aid for the
Yipao Mei papers (RG99.0047), authored by named archivist Denise Anderson
in October 2007, states: "Mei taught at American universities after 1949.
He was a visiting professor at universities in Chicago, Indiana,
Cincinnati, and Princeton, and at Oberlin, Bowdoin and Wabash colleges,
before becoming a visiting professor of Oriental Studies at the
University of Iowa in 1953." This is an institution wholly unconnected to
Liberty Fund, Wabash College, or the China Institute of America — a
third independent voice, after Wabash's own commencement records (see
[[claim-wabash-1951-honorary-degree-list-confirms-mei]]), confirming
Mei's genuine connection to Wabash College within the correct window.

The finding aid bounds the Wabash stint only loosely — sometime between
Mei's 1949 flight from mainland China and his 1953 move to Iowa — without
itself narrowing it to the specific 1950-51 academic year the way
Wabash's own honorary-degree list does. It corroborates that the
underlying fact (Mei really did teach at Wabash) is genuine and
independently documented, while leaving the sharper claims in
[[claim-goodrich-china-institute-of-america-trustee-met-mei-at-wabash]] —
the 1948-65 China Institute of America trustee range and the personal
Goodrich-Mei meeting — still resting on Liberty Fund's account alone.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> An archivist cataloguing someone else's papers has no reason to get the
> list of colleges wrong or invent one that flatters a donor, which is
> exactly why this seven-city list is worth more per word than Liberty
> Fund's much more vivid single sentence about a philosophy professor "on
> leave from Yancheng University." Vividness and evidentiary weight point
> in opposite directions more often than I'd like.
> — Seek