Can Pierre Goodrich's China Institute of America trusteeship (1948-65) and his 1950-51 meeting with Y.P. Mei at Wabash College be corroborated independently of Liberty Fund's own history page?
claim-goodrich-china-institute-of-america-trustee-met-mei-at-wabash rests entirely on Liberty Fund's own self-published institutional history page (about.libertyfund.org/about/history/) for its two most specific facts: that Pierre Goodrich served on the China Institute of America's board from 1948 to 1965, and that he met Y.P. Mei specifically at Wabash College during the 1950-51 academic year. Y.P. Mei's own independent biography (Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity) confirms he is a real, documented scholar who taught at "various campuses" in the US after fleeing mainland China post-1949, but does not itself name Wabash or give a specific year for that teaching stint — so it corroborates Mei as a person without corroborating the meeting as an event.
What would resolve this: a source independent of Liberty Fund attesting to Goodrich's China Institute of America trusteeship (the Institute's own archival board-member lists or annual reports, if extant; a contemporaneous Wabash College record of a visiting-scholar arrangement with Mei in 1950-51; or a biography of Goodrich written by someone other than his own foundation). Wabash College's own institutional archives or yearbook records for 1950-51 are the most promising specific lead — they would settle the meeting's place and date independent of both Liberty Fund's and Mei's accounts.
Not urgent — the underlying fact (Goodrich had a real, sustained China connection) is plausible and low-stakes, resting on an institution's account of its own founder rather than a claim likely to be fabricated. But the specific date and place are load-bearing for the claim-note as written, and no second source in this vault yet confirms them.
Progress, 2026-09-01 (partially answered — left open). A dedicated search session found independent, non-Liberty-Fund corroboration for the scaffolding of the story but not for its two most specific claims. Wabash College's own commencement honorary-degree list places "Yi Pao Mei" as a 1951 recipient, and a University of Iowa archival finding aid independently places Mei at Wabash among his post-1949 American teaching stops — both confirm Mei was genuinely at Wabash around the claimed year (claim-wabash-1951-honorary-degree-list-confirms-mei, claim-university-of-iowa-archive-places-mei-at-wabash-post-1949). A Winchester News-Gazette profile that initially looked like a third independent source turned out to share an author with Liberty Fund's own Goodrich biography and so doesn't count (claim-starbuck-goodrich-profile-not-independent-of-liberty-fund). Two further independent Goodrich profiles (Philanthropy magazine 2010, Indianapolis Business Journal 2016) cover his Wabash relationship in detail and never mention the China Institute of America or Mei at all — silence, not contradiction, but not corroboration either. The 1948-65 China Institute of America trustee date range and the personal Goodrich-Mei meeting remain sourced only to Liberty Fund. Two named secondary sources cited by Wikipedia's own footnotes — Morgan N. Knull, "Goodrich, Pierre," First Principles (ISI, 09/23/11, archived at the Wayback Machine per Wikipedia's citation) and Robert T. Grimm (ed.), Notable American Philanthropists (Greenwood, 2002), pp. 125-28 — would likely resolve this if recovered, but neither was retrievable this session: firstprinciplesjournal.com no longer resolves and the specific Wayback snapshot could not be located; Grimm's book was found only via an unlicensed PDF-scraper mirror, unusable per this vault's sourcing rules. Also unread: the China Institute of America's own board-of-trustees page (403'd), The Goodrich Seminar Room at Wabash College (a Liberty Fund publication, not independent even if read), the Philadelphia Society's "Legacy of Pierre F. Goodrich" conference page, and Wabash's student newspaper/yearbook archives for 1950-51 — the most promising still-untried lead for a contemporaneous, independent account of the ceremony itself.