Remnant Review
There are lots of conservative political activists and conservative historians who despise Woodrow Wilson. They have good cause. But no conservative despises Woodrow Wilson's legacy as president of Princeton University more than I do. It has been a long obsession with me: over 40 years.
First, let's review what has just happened. The trustees of Princeton University have decided to take Wilson's name off of one of its local colleges. The reason? He was a racist. He did not think well of blacks. This is true. He didn't.
Second, to understand this, you must understand that academic liberals are a cowardly bunch. They push students around. They have the ability to flunk students who give them verbal trouble. Nobody ever calls their bluff in the classroom. Some of them are bullies. Like most bullies, they are at heart toadies.
Boards of trustees are afraid of these people. As individuals, they may be CEO's of large companies, but they do what college presidents tell them to do.
"OUT, OUT, DAMNED SPOT!"
The bureaucrats who run Princeton University have been embarrassed about the racism of Woodrow Wilson for several years. They have wanted to go public in order to placate the liberal academic community, but they did not want to disrupt rich graduates who donate lots of money to their alma mater for old times' sake. So, they had been trapped.
The Board of Trustees had a meeting in 2015 in which they discussed Wilson's racism. They went public with a document. It was a long document: 12 pages. In the world of bureaucratic academia, that's a long report.
They were trying to walk the tightrope between big donors and liberal opinion on institutional racism. They were well aware of the fact that Wilson was by far the most racist university president north of the Mason Dixon line from his ascendancy to the presidency in 1902 until he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. He was legendary in this regard. When a black student was accepted by the screening committee, Wilson intervened. He would not let the young man attend. He wrote to the young man to recommend that he enroll at Brown University. Brown University was liberal and Baptist. Princeton was still officially Presbyterian.
The 2015 report began with this embarrassed admission:
In November 2015, the Princeton University Board of Trustees appointed a special committee to consider the legacy of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. The committee was appointed in response to heartfelt concerns by students and other members of the campus community about the veneration of Wilson on campus, especially in light of increased awareness of his views about race; of particular concern are the position he took as Princeton’s president to prevent the enrollment of black students and the policies he instituted as U.S. president that resulted in the re-segregation of the federal civil service. Because the Board of Trustees has authority over decisions about the naming of University facilities and programs, the special committee was asked to consider whether changes should be made in how the University recognizes Wilson’s legacy, and specifically whether the school of public and international affairs and the residential college that bear his name should continue to do so.
But Princeton has a problem, as do all major universities. They get into the wallets of really big bucks donors by promising to name a building after them. This has been going on for centuries. It goes back to Harvard's founding in 1636. It was named after the man who gave the college his library of 400 volumes and half his estate, John Harvard. The report admitted the nature of their dilemma.
The committee acknowledges that over the course of Princeton’s 270-year history, there have been people connected to the University – influential alumni, generous benefactors, and celebrated professors – who have espoused views that are antithetical to our values today. We recognize that the continuing presence of their names on campus may be discomforting to many, and offensive to some.
What were they going to do? Were they ready to strip the names off of these buildings? They did not want to do that. That would send a message to future donors: "They may do this to me." Big donors might figure out that they could be embarrassed, or their heirs could be embarrassed, when a future Board of Trustees strips their names off the buildings. (The arrangement is based on the donors' combination of ego and naïveté. They crave ersatz fame, as if students know or care whose name is on the buildings they enter. The donors, in turn, do not care what will be taught in these buildings.)
So, the trustees really were trapped. They spent 12 pages waffling, but this was the bottom line on page 12:
We believe there is and should be a presumption that names adopted by the trustees after full and thoughtful deliberation, as happened in both of these cases and in the naming of the Woodrow Wilson Award, will remain in place, especially when the original reasons for adopting the names remain valid. There is considerable consensus that Wilson was a transformative and visionary figure in the area of public and international affairs; that he did press for the kinds of living and learning arrangements that are represented today in Princeton’s residential colleges; and that as a strong proponent of education for use, he believed Princeton should prepare its students for lives in the nation’s service. These were the reasons Wilson’s name was associated with the school, the college, and the award.Contextualization is imperative. Princeton must openly and candidly recognize that Wilson, like other historical figures, leaves behind a complex legacy with both positive and negative repercussions, and that the use of his name implies no endorsement of views and actions that conflict with the values and aspirations of our times. We have said that in this report, and the University must say it in the settings that bear his name.
That was then, this is now.
Now we are in the midst of the BLM frenzy. Now, they can no longer hide. So, they groveled. That's what academics do whenever they come under pressure from their peers. That's why they created new majors in the late 1960's: black studies and women's studies. These were academic majors for people who were emotionally unwilling or intellectually unable to compete with students in the traditional liberal arts. Most academicians knew these majors were shams, but they groveled. I was on campus in graduate school at the time. It was fun to watch. Men who had proclaimed their commitment to academic excellence crawled on their bellies. They couldn't vote for the black studies major fast enough. It was marvelous to see.
This set back the academic performance of blacks, who might have received decent educations. Walter Williams described it well in 2004, a generation after the fact: "What makes the catch-up even more unlikely is the soft bigotry of low expectations and affirmative-action grading by white liberal professors and the selection by black students of touchy-feely curricula such as black studies, women's studies, multicultural studies, education and other curricula of little academic content and challenge."
The big losers were the students who spent four years at a better-than average university with nothing to show for it except a B.A. degree in black studies, which marked them as racial tokens early in their careers. But that didn't bother the academic senate. They just wanted to get the self-imposed albatross of needless racial guilt off their backs.
You know the phrase, "the more things change, the more they stay the same." It does not apply to America's university faculties. Things get steadily worse.
"FREE AT LAST!"
On June 26, the Board of Trustees released this public notice. It began with a paragraph of sheer groveling.
The Princeton University Board of Trustees voted today to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the University’s School of Public and International Affairs, which will now be known as the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. We have taken this extraordinary step because we believe that Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly committed to combatting the scourge of racism in all its forms.
The times they are a-changing. Actually, they have been changing for years, but the Board of Trustees at Princeton wanted to walk the tightrope between big buck donors and liberal academia.
If the question before us were how to weigh Wilson’s achievements against his failures, members of the Princeton community might reach varying judgments. We believe, however, that these times present the University with a different question. Identifying a political leader as the namesake for a public policy school inevitably suggests that the honoree is a role model for those who study in the school. We must therefore ask whether it is acceptable for this University’s school of public affairs to bear the name of a racist who segregated the nation’s civil service after it had been integrated for decades.
Still, the board hesitated to go the full distance. It held back.
As our nation wrestles with its history in this moment, it is important, especially at institutions committed to seeking the truth, that we recognize the complexity of historical figures and that we examine the entirety of their impact on the world. Though we conclude today that Wilson’s racism makes him an inappropriate namesake for the University’s School of Public and International Affairs, we recognize that Princeton has a continuing responsibility to remember his achievements even as we honestly and publicly contend with his failures.
Why this hesitation? Money.
The University’s highest honor for an undergraduate alumnus or alumna is conferred annually on Alumni Day and also bears Wilson’s name. The Woodrow Wilson Award, unlike either the College or the School, is the result of a gift. When the University accepted the gift, it took on a legal obligation to name the prize for Wilson and honor his “conviction that education is for ‘use’ and … the high aims expressed in his memorable phrase, ‘Princeton in the Nation’s Service.’” The University will continue to recognize extraordinary public service by conferring the award as currently named. The award explicitly honors specific and positive aspects of Wilson’s career, and it, unlike the School or the College, does not require students to identify with the Wilson name in connection with their academic or residential programs.
But couldn't this be avoided by giving back the money to the donor or the family of the donor that made the donation? Of course it could. But that would involve giving back money. Groveling is one thing. Giving back millions of dollars is something very different. Groveling is cheap. Academia sticks its tenured finger in the wind, and it changes course whenever necessary. Situation ethics are what academia is all about, and has always been about. In contrast, giving back millions of dollars is expensive.
This is an old tradition at Princeton, and it began with Woodrow Wilson.
WILSON AT PRINCETON
Wilson was one of the early Ph.D.'s produced by the first American university to grant the Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University. He came to Princeton as a fair-haired boy. He soon gained a reputation as being an excellent lecturer. In fact, he was such a good lecturer that he was often away from the campus, giving lectures for large fees. The president of the university, Francis Patton, let him do it. Patton made a big mistake.
In 1888, Patton had become the president of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was called in those days. It was under Patton in 1896 that Princeton got its name.
By the end of his career, he had become known as "the grand old man of Presbyterianism." He was an Old School Presbyterian. That was the minority faction of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, meaning the northern Presbyterian Church. This faction was strongly committed to Calvinism.
Princeton was a Presbyterian college, but it was not Old School. Harvard began going Unitarian in 1805. Under Charles Elliott in the 1870's, it went modernist and then humanist. Yale soon followed. Princeton was a holdout. Patton was the representative figure of this holdout.
Wilson was a theological modernist. He was a Presbyterian elder, but he was a representative of the liberal wing of the denomination theologically. His uncle, James Woodrow, was by far the most liberal professor in the southern Presbyterian Church, and the nephew was self-consciously a follower of his uncle's liberal theology. In contrast, Wilson's father had been the stated clerk of the southern Presbyterian Church for over two decades after the Civil War. He was a representative of Old School Presbyterianism. The split between the modernist wing and the Calvinist wing of American Presbyterianism was in the Wilson family. In between, as always in institutions, was the silent majority: men who did not want to choose sides, who just wanted to hold onto their jobs until retirement.
Patton had done nothing as president to stop the growth of modernism and humanism on the Princeton campus, let alone reverse it. He taught theology and ethics. Under his leadership, Princeton's academic reputation had lagged far behind Harvard, Yale, and other major universities, at least in the opinion of the Princeton faculty. Any remaining traces of Calvinism were understood by the academic community in general and on campus as inhibiting the academic reputation of the campus.
Patton did not go fast enough. So, the liberals on the Board of Trustees engineered a revolt against him in 1902. The faculty wanted a graduate school. He wanted a Christian college; the vocal members of the faculty wanted nonsectarianism, i.e., secular education.
He was forced out by a faction of trustees. They had persuaded -- it had not taken much persuading -- Wilson to draw up plans for a new system of rule by executive committee. Wilson had referred in a private meeting with two trustees to discuss what he had called "the sinister influence" at Princeton. Against Wilson's advice, Patton was then named by the Trustees as a member of the new Executive Committee, with former U.S. President Grover Cleveland (who lived in the town of Princeton) named as chairman. This did not slow down the coup.
The assumption in 1902 was that there had been three rivals to Wilson for the presidency, but one, the best-selling literary figure and liberal Presbyterian clergyman Henry van Dyke, always insisted that he had no desire for the position. Patton's support of Wilson made the difference.
Patton not only refused to fight this coup, he actually named his successor as president of the university: Wilson. Two positive factors motivated him to leave: first, $31,500 in severance pay, a huge sum in 1902; second, he was completely deceived by Wilson regarding Wilson's supposed commitment to conservative theology. He did not know of Wilson's commitment to his uncle's liberal theology.
As the new president, Wilson suspended Bible instruction from 1902 to 1905. This was a direct assault on Patton, who had used the money from a legacy to the college to endow a chair in English Bible for his own son.
In 1910, Wilson was elected Governor of New Jersey. In 1912, he was elected President of the United States. In 1919, he went to the Versailles peace conference as its supposed conscience. The terms of the Versailles Treaty led to World War II two decades later. Wilson had also been instrumental in the creation of the League of Nations, which became the model for the United Nations. If Patton had fought Wilson's nomination, throwing his support to one of Wilson's rivals, Wilson would probably have lost. The world would be a very different place. As Old School minister Clarence Macartney put it over five decades later, "Thus do great issues turn on the hinges of apparently small events."
Wilson was self-conscious in his humanism. The only trace of conservatism was his racism. He was a friend of Thomas Dixon, author of the trilogy of novels defending the original Ku Klux Klan. Dixon called on him in 1915 to elicit his support in promoting Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith movie based on The Clansman, the first book of Dixon's trilogy. Wilson gave him the support he needed. He actually had a showing of the movie at the White House.
THE PATTERN
There was a pattern here. It was a pattern that governed the spread of theological liberalism in the 19th century, the 20th century, and today. These men were political Progressives. They were also promoters of a religion deeply opposed to Christianity. Their goal was simple: to capture an institution that belonged to their enemies.
It is not difficult to understand their motives. They were men who coveted the ecclesiastical robes of authority, but who did not have the capital to construct their own ecclesiastical empire. Their goal was to steal the institutional Church without suffering a revolt by the donors. They wanted the robes of ecclesiastical authority, just as they wanted the robes of academic authority (tenured professorships) and the robes of judicial authority. They wanted access to other people's money -- people who did not believe what they believed. This has been the goal of liberalism, political and theological: to build a new world order with old world money. The implementation of this plan at Princeton was pioneered by Wilson, who did it first with Princeton's capital, then with the U.S. government's, and suffered a stroke while he was campaigning to do it with the world's.
Patton was the visible representative of the losers in this process. In 1902, he walked across the street and became president of Princeton Theological Seminary, which was not connected to the college. There he presided in an undistinguished way until 1913. His replacement, J. Ross Stevenson, whom he did not fight, was a theological moderate who was ready to accept the leadership of liberals in the denomination if they ever got a majority. He helped them get it. They gained control in 1926. Princeton Seminary fell to theological liberals in 1929.
Here is the pattern: theological conservatives surrender to bureaucratic academic compromisers, and the compromisers then sell them out.
I wrote about all this a quarter of a century ago in my book, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. You can download it here. The book provides the footnotes for the summary you have just read.
CONCLUSION
It was under Wilson's administration that Princeton moved in the leftward direction that its trustees now display. He delivered the educational and economic capital of Princeton to the liberals from 1902 until 1910. In good liberal fashion, the trustees have publicly turned on him. This could not have happened to a more deserving man.
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