For decades George J. Mitchell could do nothing wrong in Maine. Peace envoy, Senate leader, the man every university in the state wanted its buildings to carry his name. Now the University of Maine System trustees have voted to strip it away — from the sustainability center, the fund, and the George J. Mitchell Peace Scholarship. Nine to five, with one abstention. Better late than never, even if it never comes with a press release.

What it took was the Department of Justice releasing millions of Jeffrey Epstein files in January. Mitchell’s name appears in them more than 300 times. Three hundred. One of the financier’s victims had already named him as an associate in 2019 testimony. He was never charged with abusing a child, and the loyalists are crying persecution on his behalf. Fine. But there is a difference between being accused of a crime and being found, three hundred times over, inside the private world of a convicted sex offender. A man does not appear in those files by accident. That is not bad luck. That is a social circle.

Here is what interests me: the hurry of the institutions. Where were the trustees in 2019? The university canonized this man — center, scholarship, fund, all his name — and now the same institution has discovered process, and task forces, and propriety. An entity that acts only when a Justice Department dump makes keeping you more expensive than cutting you loose has not made a moral judgment. It has made an accounting.

Maine should recognize itself in this. The Mitchell brand was the Maine brand: the moderate mask, the bipartisan smile, the electable essential man. It survived everything except a numbered file. The Board of Trustees accepted a task force recommendation Monday and moved with the speed of the recently convicted — the institution, not the man.

The Church has one advantage the university lacks. She already knows that men are sinners, so She does not need a DOJ file release to teach Her anything about the man in the rectory. The question every Catholic in Maine ought to ask is not whether Mitchell was innocent of this or that. It is whether we ever learned to keep our heroes in the nave with everyone else, where the dust settles honestly.

Renaming a building changes nothing. The 300 mentions stay printed.