A new generation of students has criticized his attitude toward Native Americans; he endorsed the idea of spreading smallpox among enemy tribes by giving them infected blankets.

“He hated the Indians, because any general in his position would have,” said Gordon Hall III, class of ’52, a commercial real estate investor. He and Don MacNaughton, class of ’65, a retired lawyer and a history buff, wrote a booklet concluding that Lord Jeff had been unfairly maligned. Mr. MacNaughton paid for his share of its publication and promotion online with thousands of dollars he would have otherwise given to the college.

“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.