---
title: "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?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-08-31T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["china","liberty-fund","pierre-goodrich","china-institute-of-america","y-p-mei","corroboration"]
---


[[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.