We have the Woodrow Wilson/P.C. debate all backwards: Protesters are forcing a debate Princeton has whitewashed for decades

We have the Woodrow Wilson/P.C. debate all backwards: Protesters are forcing a debate Princeton has whitewashed for decades

I have three thoughts on the Woodrow Wilson/Princeton University controversy, which now seems, at least temporarily, to have come to a conclusion.

First, in discussions with various people, two of the most common responses I’ve heard to the Princeton students’ demands that Wilson’s name be removed from all campus buildings are these:

1. Woodrow Wilson may have been a racist, but he was a great president, contributing to all manner of progressive policies. Wilson’s racism was, at most, a sideline interest, a passion he pursued during his off hours, after the real business of daily governance was done. It has nothing to do with his presidency or legacy.

2. Yes, Wilson was a racist, but so are all white people in the United States. Always have been, always will be. (Whether the people making these claims are including themselves in this characterization remains unclear.) So why single him out?

As it happens, both claims are untrue. Wilson wasn’t simply a personal, after-hours racist. Nor he was he just a creature of his time, reflecting a popular racism that was already firmly in place. As president, Wilson actively worked to nationalize — some might even say internationalize — the Southern position on race, most notably by segregating, and implementing new modes of discrimination within, the federal bureaucracy, which in the years leading up to his administration had offered African Americans some possibility for advancement. Racism was central to his politics, and he made specific contributions to advancing its cause in America.

It was also a cause he had long thought about, and to which he devoted countless scholarly hours. In 1901, while he was a professor at Princeton, Wilson penned an article for “The Atlantic Monthly” titled “The Reconstruction of the Southern States.” Here’s what he said about the freed slaves after the Civil War:

An extraordinary and very perilous state of affairs had been created in the South by the sudden and absolute emancipation of the negroes, and it was not strange that the southern legislatures should deem it necessary to take extraordinary steps to guard against the manifest and pressing dangers which it entailed. Here was a vast ‘laboring, landless, homeless class,’ once slaves, now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure,—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school….They were a danger to themselves as well as those whom they had once served….

One year later, he was made president of Princeton.

If you’re a high school student checking out the university on a campus tour, here’s how the university’s tour guides might describe this former university president to you:

Woodrow Wilson’s association with Princeton began when he arrived as an undergraduate in the Class of 1879. During his college years, Wilson was secretary of the Football Association, speaker of the American Whig Society (now the Whig-Cliosophic Society), and managing editor of the Daily Princetonian. In 1890, Wilson returned to Princeton as a professor and in 1896 he pioneered the theme “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” in a speech at the University’s sesquicentennial celebration.

Renowned as a warm, high-minded scholar, Wilson was elected Princeton’s 13th president in 1902. As president, he initiated the broad distribution requirements and raised the University’s admission standards. In 1905, Wilson introduced the preceptorial system to foster a personal and intimate relationship between teacher and student. In terms of social and residential life, Wilson promoted a “Quad Plan,” inspiring the residential colleges we have today.

Wilson resigned the Princeton presidency to begin his political career in 1910, running for and winning the governorship of New Jersey, where he quickly established himself as the nation’s leading progressive politician. He was elected President of the United States in 1912 and re-elected in 1916. For his efforts at Versailles including his League of Nations proposal, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the only Princetonian to receive this honor.

And that’s why we owe these students at Princeton a debt. Universities are supposed to be educational institutions: Their first educational constituency is their students, of course, but their second is the nation. Most of us are fairly ignorant about how central race and racism were to Wilson’s politics. By forcing this question, not only on Princeton’s campus but throughout the country, Princeton’s students are actually doing the job that Princeton itself is supposed to be doing: they’re educating all of us.

Or pushing us to educate ourselves. I know they forced me to scramble back to the articles and books I once read, prodding me to get clear on questions and answers I used to have a firmer grasp on: What was Wilson’s position on self-determination in Africa again? What’s the connection between slaveholder John C. Calhoun’s theory of the concurrent majority and Wilson’s own ideas about representation again? Why did the West Indian-born activist Cyril Briggs hate Wilson so much again? click here for more MORE