Two of my recent essays (one on the
title “Master,” the other concerning Woodrow Wilson) attracted many more
readers than usual. I often get a few
emails in response to essays, but this time I had many, several suggesting that
I pursue further some matters I had raised.
I read on the Princeton University web site that “The Board of Trustees has appointed a
special committee to consider Woodrow Wilson's legacy at Princeton, and, more
specifically, whether or not changes should be made in how the University
recognizes Wilson's legacy.” The
committee seeks opinions. Here is one.
In a literal sense a legacy is that real property transferred
by legal instrument from the dead to the living, most commonly from parents to
their children. The more usual word
these days is probably inheritance. I actually found Woodrow Wilson’s will
on-line. He left everything to his wife,
so that we don’t have to worry about a literal legacy even if that were what
the Trustees meant, though of course it was not. We very frequently speak, as they do here,
of legacy in a metaphoric sense. Then it means the spiritual, intellectual, or
cultural influence metaphorically bequeathed from past to present by an
historical figure, an intellectual movement, a social institution, and so
on. Thus we speak of the “legacy” of
Aristotle, or of Cartesianism, or of chattel slavery, etc. Such is the sense of “Woodrow Wilson’s legacy
at Princeton”.
An interesting legal
fact concerning legacies is that they can be refused by the proposed heir. The rejection of material legacies is rare
but not unknown. If your uncle leaves
you a legacy of a million dollars, you might want to reject it because (a)
accepting it would complicate your taxes, or (b) you were constrained by a vow
of religious poverty, or (c) you considered it wrong to benefit from money
gained by selling heroin. By filing a
timely disclaimer, you legally
insulate yourself from any complication or contagion the money might bring.
How about metaphorical legacies? Here it really is entirely up to us, as the current
controversy suggests. We apply not
merely the voluntary principle but a principle of selectivity. This is particularly true of personal legacies, as people in history,
no less than today, tend to be complicated and contradictory. Few people who embrace “the legacy of
Aristotle” maintain his errant scientific ideas or hold to his view of slavery
as natural and beneficent. When scholars
praise the “legacy of Newton,” they do not have in mind his crackpot ideas
about the Book of Daniel. It is true
that there has to be some kind of consensus that so-and-so’s legacy was mainly or
importantly positive. The Germans do not
have an Adolph Hitler Autobahn despite his effective leadership in highway
construction. But there has been
precisely such a consensus with regard to Wilson. The New York Times, which with specific reference to the current Princeton scene
a couple of weeks ago ran a blistering editorial about his racist iniquities,
in 2008 rated him our tenth best president ever—one rank higher than that
assigned him by the Wall Street Journal.
Princeton does not
memorialize Wilson for his racial views.
In forty years of active service on the faculty I never met a single
person—student, alumnus, faculty, administrator, or staff--who espoused them, or
even covertly tolerated them, let alone who claimed them as a “legacy”. Indeed
the two Princeton institutions bearing his name—the academic School and the
residential College—have countered them in concrete ways far more impressive
than verbal disclaimer or erasure. That
many people never heard of his racial views and therefore never devoted a
thought to them is an historical failing rightly castigated. For some it is a cause for grievance and for
others an opportunity for fruitful meditation.
Presumably it was a stimulus for
the historian Eric Yellin (who has two
Princeton degrees) to write his recent Racism
in the Nation’s Service. What I do
not think it should be a stimulus for is an extreme, reckless, impractical, and
divisive act of ideological cleansing.
If
in 1930 you were founding a School of Public and International Affairs and if you thought it proper that it should
bear the name of a famous Princetonian, the name of Woodrow Wilson was close to
inevitable. At that time he must have
seemed to many the most impressive statesman of the twentieth century. One can think of a few possible candidates
later on, I suppose: Norman Thomas, ’05,
John Foster Dulles, ’08, and Adlai Stevenson, ’22, all of whom have (or have
had) their names attached to greater or lesser campus sites. But
they are all of far lesser rank.
Actually, it’s not too hard to get your name on something around
here. I myself used to have a park bench
outside of Wilcox Hall before I was purged for reasons unknown by hands unknown. The Woodrow Wilson School has now been in
existence longer than Woodrow Wilson himself was. When we talk about a metaphoric “Wilson
legacy” we necessarily mean three quarters of a century of the prestigious
entity that most clearly keeps Princeton “in the nation’s service”.
We should bank that legacy, as well
as several of Wilson’s educational ideas that proved prophetic and
visionary. His fight over the location
of the Graduate School—which at the time he lost, as he would later lose with
regard to the country’s participation in the League of Nations—was really a
fight about the intellectual integrity of a university in which the most
advanced original research in many fields is harmonized with a fundamental
commitment to the highest quality undergraduate education. Not too many places have pulled that one
off. It is impossible to imagine a
Princeton education—today or in the memory of any living alumnus—without the
distinctive feature introduced by Wilson’s “preceptor guys”. As for Wilson College, Princeton’s first and
pioneer residential college, it consciously implemented Wilson’s view that on a
residential campus the physical spaces in which students lived might have an
educational role beyond that of mere hotel rooms. That might seem a no-brainer today, but it
was more than the trustees could swallow hardly a century past.
