Campus Politics: A Cheat Sheet
Princeton University announced on Monday that its board of trustees has voted to retain Woodrow Wilson’s name on its public-policy school and a residential college, despite high-profile efforts to scrap it. Last November, student activists led by the Black Justice League staged a 32-hour protest and sit-in at Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber’s office urging him to do away with Wilson’s name because of his racist legacy; the former U.S. president, who also served as a Princeton faculty member and then president in 1902, was a segregationist who opposed the idea of admitting black students and glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
In a report, the 10-member special committee appointed to consider Wilson’s legacy on campus concludes that while the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Woodrow Wilson College—one of the university’s six dorm clusters—should retain their current names, “the University needs to be honest and forthcoming about its history.” “This requires transparency in recognizing Wilson’s failings and shortcomings as well as his visions and achievements that led to the naming of the school and the college in the first place,” the report continues. (Half of the members on the special committee are people of color.)
The special committee’s recommendation was based on extensive feedback from the Princeton community and general public, including hundreds of opinions submitted online (a minority of which advocated for the renaming of the school and/or college) and input from scholars and biographers. It notes how Wilson reshaped academics at Princeton, introducing its famed preceptorial system and hiring the first Jewish and first Catholic faculty members. But it also laments his positions as a U.S. president on segregation and suggests that he brought “his racial views to issues of foreign policy.”
Ultimately, the report acknowledges that Princeton has a lot of work to do on making its campus more diverse and inclusive and outlines a number of suggestions in how it can achieve that goal. Most of them seem more symbolic than substantive: proposals to establish a subcommittee designated
