The facts
On Sept. 28, the University of Maine System's Board of Trustees voted 9-5, with one abstention, to accept a task force recommendation and strip former Sen. George Mitchell's name from the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions in Orono and the George J. Mitchell Peace Scholarship.
The center will operate under the name University of Maine Center for Sustainability Solutions, while the scholarship will be renamed the University of Maine Peace Scholarship. The scholarship supports student exchanges between Maine's public universities and institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland, including a year of postgraduate study at universities in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The university's task force did not find Mitchell guilty of wrongdoing. It was asked to consider whether keeping his name on university programs and facilities could harm the school's reputation and public trust. "While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made, in light of the material that has recently been made public by the U.S. 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."
The review began in February, included faculty, staff, and students plus public and stakeholder comments, and the university said nearly three-quarters of people who responded to its comment request supported removing Mitchell's name. The renaming took effect immediately, though signs, websites, and other materials will take several months to update.
Mitchell's name appears more than 300 times in documents related to Epstein that were released by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to reporting on the decision. The appearance of a person's name in such records does not by itself establish criminal conduct. Mitchell's spokesperson said he has denied knowing about any illegal or improper behavior by Epstein involving underage girls, and WMTW reported that Mitchell was not directly linked to child sexual abuse.
Some trustees raised concerns about removing the name when there had been no finding that Mitchell committed wrongdoing. The university said its decision was not intended to erase Mitchell's history but to address the effect that continued use of his name could have on the institution.
The Maine decision follows a wider scrubbing. Earlier in 2026, the Waterville Board of Education voted to remove Mitchell's name from a local elementary school, which returned to its earlier name, Brookside Elementary. His portrait was removed from the Maine State House, and Queen's University Belfast removed his name from an institute in Ireland. Mitchell also stepped down as honorary chair of the Mitchell Institute, a Maine scholarship organization.
Mitchell was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1980, won two full terms, and left the Senate in 1995. He served as a special envoy for Northern Ireland under President Bill Clinton and chaired the peace negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He also led the 2007 investigation into performance-enhancing drug use in Major League Baseball known as the Mitchell Report. The task force was created in February by University of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy and University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy.
Our take
Let’s get this straight, you bureaucratic cowards: your own fucking task force said George Mitchell didn’t do anything wrong. But you’re still taking his name off the building because it smells bad now. That’s not justice, you assholes. That’s laundering your own reputation by throwing a 92-year-old man’s legacy into the fucking incinerator because you got the ick. What a pathetic, spineless way to run a university. You didn’t need a judge, you needed a fucking focus group, and three-quarters of the commenters said ‘ew, take it down.’ That’s your standard? The court of public fucking queasiness? You useless pricks. His name showed up 300 times in the Epstein docs, and that’s all it takes. Not proof, not a charge, not a conviction. Just mentions. That’s the new threshold: if a pedophile’s assistant might have typed your name while scheduling a fucking coffee, you’re officially a liability. Your bronze plaque is now a biohazard. So the ‘George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions’ is now the ‘University of Maine Center for Sustainability Solutions.’ Wow. What a bold, principled stand for… generic, soulless branding. And the ‘George J. Mitchell Peace Scholarship’ for students going to Ireland is now just the ‘University of Maine Peace Scholarship.’ Because nothing says ‘peace’ like a committee hastily deleting a peacemaker’s name to avoid bad press. The absolute fucking irony is breathtaking. This is the guy who helped stop people in Northern Ireland from killing each other, and his reward thirty years later is to have a bunch of nervous administrators in Orono treat his legacy like a used condom they found on the quad. He’s already been scrubbed from an elementary school, his portrait is gone from the statehouse, and even Queen’s University Belfast - in the country he helped save - cut him loose. He stepped down from his own institute’s honorary chair because the stench of your cowardice is that contagious. You self-important fucks get to pretend you’re ‘mindful of victims’ while your official statement is a masterclass in weasel-worded bullshit: ‘not intended to erase Mitchell’s history,’ just to erase his name from every public surface in the state. What’s next, airbrushing him out of the yearbook? You’re not protecting survivors; you’re performing a public sanitization ritual so no one can ever accuse you of having a named building that once touched the Epstein news cycle. You’re not leaders. You’re janitors for reputations, and you’re using a former U.S. Senator as a fucking mop.
