Woodrow Wilson

BA, Princeton University Princeton University Faculty Princeton University President

Woodrow Wilson! President of the United States! Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the post–WWI peace process and the League of Nations! Big baseball fan, first president to go to a World Series game! Loved cars, went for a daily drive in a Pierce-Arrow while he was president! A progressive Democrat and champion of liberal reforms! Even halfheartedly backed women’s suffrage! But wait! Before Wilson was president of the United States he was president of Princeton! A formidable fundraiser! Appointed one (1) Jew and one (1) Catholic to the faculty, where before there had been zero (0)! Raised admissions standards, instituted the novel concept of academic rigor, and started dismantling Princeton’s image as a cushy playpen for lazy rich boys! What a guy!

Oh, yes, one more thing. He was a racist. A vicious, ugly, undisguised, unrepentant racist. At Princeton—the southernmost of the Ivies—Wilson promoted a “no blacks need apply” policy.^* But that’s the least of it: there were other colleges for black men to attend, most of them free of Princeton’s ridiculous “eating club” culture. When Wilson became president of the entire country, he had the power to do damage on a vast scale.

In the decades after the Civil War, many thousands of qualified black men and women were employed by the government in good, secure, middle-class jobs. Some of them even had white people reporting to them. This was too much for the racists of America, who couldn’t bear to think of former slaves and their descendants as human beings, much less as citizens, white-collar workers, or—heavens!—bosses.

Wilson, who screened the KKK extravaganza Birth of a Nation in the White House, fully subscribed to this point of view. In fact he had promised in his 1912 campaign that he would do his darndest to flush Negroes out of the government, or at least demote them to the lowest-paying, most menial jobs and enforce segregation (which he said was “not a humiliation but a benefit”) throughout the government. It was a devastating blow, not only to those who lost their good jobs* and their place in the thriving black middle class—and who were forced to sell their houses, land, and possessions—but to their descendants. For generations. Discriminating against black people and providing affirmative action for white people: it was the official stance of the Wilson administration.

One finds oneself pondering various questions, e.g., why was Woodrow Wilson such a scumbag? Could it be that he was born in Virginia? That he lacked the imagination to rebel against his slave-owning, Confederacy-supporting parents? That he was the first southerner elected president since the Civil War and couldn’t resist the urge to push the country back to the good old days, southern style? Don’t ask us; we’ll just ask more questions.

So, okay, there’s this division or subset or interdisciplinary undergraduate-and-graduate program at Princeton called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Big prestige, best public-policy school in the world, if it does say so itself, hot-shit faculty, many accomplished alumni, and such as.* You can see where this is going, can’t you? In November 2015, students occupied the office of Princeton’s president^* to demand that the racist’s name be removed from the program as well as from a campus dorm complex.

In early 2016 the university announced that neither the school nor the complex would be renamed; rather, they would continue to be identified with the oozing pestilence known as Woodrow Wilson.^* However, the administration swore that it would henceforth be extra honest about its history—and especially about that toxic slimebucket Woodrow Wilson. More important, steps would be taken to make the campus more welcoming to minorities; the school would actively recruit members of underrepresented groups to pursue PhDs; and Princeton would not only name various entities after people who contributed to the school’s diversity but would hang pictures and, presumably, mount statues of them all over the campus.