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Princeton’s problem isn’t just Wilson

Woodrow Wilson was a key president in Princeton’s rise as a serious university, a reformist and progressive Governor of New Jersey, and an internationalist President of the United States, one who led the country into a successful intervention in World War I and championed self-determination of oppressed peoples as well as making the world safe for democracy. He was also an unrepentant racist and white supremacist, one who refused to speak out against lynching of black people, segregated US government workers and excused the behavior of the Ku Klux Klan.

Princeton has long deified Wilson, whose name graces one of its major dorms as well as its school of public and international affairs. When I was a doctoral student there (yes, I got my PhD at Princeton), the head of my program made it clear that Wilson was an ideal to which we all needed to aspire, even if our lowly beings could never hope to achieve such perfection. I knew nothing of Wilson at the time. His lofty status being far above my dreams, I ignored the paragon. It was the Vietnam war era. Princeton’s then motto, “in the nation’s service,” sounded more like a threat than a virtue.

Now Princeton’s motto is “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.” That change should have made Wilson’s racism harder to ignore. But the reexamination has awaited instead the protests of some of its current black students, who are asking for his name to be removed from its most privileged perches.

I have to confess that opinion in my family is divided. Its three African American members (remember the one-drop rule, increasingly outmoded but still appropriate when discussing racism) are for keeping his name where it is. One thinks the students unjustified in wanting it removed because it is part of the hostile environment Princeton presents to black students. Just wait, he says, until they get to the real world, when things will be worse. Better to prepare for the hostility at Princeton, as Michelle Obama did.

Another thinks the Wilson name should hang around Princeton’s neck like an albatross, one it will have to explain to every incoming freshman. Why make life easy for an institution that was always known as the ivy closest to the south? The third doubts the wisdom of cleansing our history of its hypocrites. What will become of “greats” like Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal with inalienable rights but still kept slaves (and only freed the ones he had sired upon his death).

My own feeling is that fifty odd years is long enough for a racist and white supremacist to grace the lintels of one of America’s greatest academic institutions. He was a product of his times. Let him retire and give way to someone more worthy according to the standards of our times. Of course that will not be a governor or a president. Princeton will just turn around and sell the naming rights to the highest bidder. If you’ve ever read a Princeton alumni publication, you know that could involve a very large quantity of money. Or maybe a free mash up would do: the Woodrow Wilson/Louis Farrakhan school of public and international policy? After all, Farrakhan did a lot of good in America’s prisons I am reminded, despite his anti-Semitic racism. Let that hang around Princeton’s neck to balance out Wilson.

I suppose that’s the problem: I can think of a lot worse names than the existing one. The way the world works, Princeton is likely to get one of those. There isn’t likely to be a “good” solution. But I suppose the conversation, as we like to say these days, will be a useful one. After all, the issue really isn’t Wilson, it is the history of race in America.