“I feel that money is going to the benefit of Amherst College, in any event,” Mr. MacNaughton said.

The older generation remembers Lord Amherst not as a genocidal warmonger, but as the inspiration for a beloved college fight song, written by a member of the class of 1906. The song, which Mr. Hall, 86, can still sing by heart, winks knowingly at Lord Amherst’s misdeeds with the line, “To the Frenchman and the Indians, he didn’t do a thing.”

Mr. Hall, whose grandfather, father, uncles and son went to Amherst, archly calls himself “a powerhouse of nepotism.” But he has endowed a scholarship and says he welcomes students whose backgrounds are different from his.

“I get letters every year about the recipient of my scholarship fund,” he said. “The name will always be a name that is ethnically or racially — you can tell — not like Hall. And so be it. You’ve got to go with the flow to some degree.”

But, he wonders, “where did this supercorrectness thing come from?”

In the category of supercorrectness, some alumni note that in March, a new director of the Women’s and Gender Center asked to be addressed as “they,” rather than “he” or “she.” “This is not a joke,” Paul Ruxin, who identified himself as “Old Curmudgeon class of ’65,” wrote to his classmates shortly before he died in April.

David Pennock, class of ’60, one of four generations of his family to have gone to Amherst, is so invested in the college that he bridles at incorrect pronunciations of the name. “Our Amherst is pronounced without the H,” he said.

His Amherst was tough but paternalistic, he said. When he fell behind in classes, the admissions dean, Eugene Wilson, class of ’29 and his father’s fraternity roommate, took him trout fishing on the Deerfield River and warned that he was headed for the “underachiever program,” a forced leave of absence.

As class agent, Mr. Pennock did not reduce his giving, but he is one of a group of alumni pushing for the return of a core curriculum.