As a 1973 graduate of Princeton University and its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I have followed closely the recent efforts by some Princeton students to eradicate all public traces of Woodrow Wilson from the university.
The allegation is that Wilson displayed racial insensitivity and outright prejudice at various times in his career. These student activists, part of the Black Justice League, occupied the Princeton president's office and want to rename the Wilson School and the residential Wilson College. They also seek removal of a mural depicting Wilson from the Wilson College dining room. Some of them also want to mandate courses on "the history of marginalized peoples" and require "cultural competency training" for university staff and faculty.
My years at Princeton, 1969 - 1973, were special years. My freshman class included the first group of undergraduate women in the university's history, and that period saw frequent campus protests about the Vietnam War and various Nixon Administration policies. In retrospect, many of those protests turned out to be prescient.
We studied the past; we did not try to rewrite it. And, upon occasion, there were understandable protests about the present and future direction of the nation. Some history students also learned that it was Stalin, after all, who was famous for air-brushing the past to eliminate both inconvenient history and his enemies. One couldn't even get at Soviet history until after 1991; it was locked up, hidden from scrutiny.
We should neither ignore nor condone Woodrow Wilson's racial prejudices. At the same time, Wilson scholar and biographer John Milton Cooper, Jr., said in a letter to Princeton President Eisgruber that "[t]he heart of the matter is that [Wilson's] record on matters of race should never be excused but neither should it be overblown or exaggerated. As president of both Princeton and the United States, his actions did sometimes appear to reflect racial prejudices prevalent at the time."
There's an old saying that "no man is a hero to his valet." In some sense, historians, who dig through the past in order to explain and help us understand what came before us, serve us all as valets. As we consider their findings, it is also important to take the full measure of each human being - to weigh the good with the bad, the accomplishments with the inevitable shortcomings and failures.
In contrast to his racial failings, Woodrow Wilson was a reform-oriented governor of New Jersey, introduced important education reforms at Princeton, embraced a "fervent Jeffersonian progressivism" according to the late Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman, appointed the first Jew (Louis Brandeis) to the United States Supreme Court, championed the League of Nations, and supported passage of legislation that resulted in creation of the Federal Reserve Board, and the Internal Revenue Service. W.E.B. Du Bois campaigned for Wilson to be elected president in 1912.
Thomas Jefferson, who authored the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves. So did George Washington. All of our Founding Fathers who helped draft the United States Constitution endorsed or acquiesced in a provision that recognized slaves as only three-fifths of a person. The longest-serving United States Senator in American history, Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was once a member of the racist Ku Klux Klan. Should we now "air brush" all of these individuals from American history? Should we remove their names from public buildings across the land?
Similar issues arise from time-to-time in assessing famous writers. William Faulkner and Kingsley Amis spent a considerable amount of time influenced by alcohol. The British poet Philip Larkin reportedly was fond of pornographic magazines. While these facts may be relevant to understanding these writers' creative faculties, do these personal characteristics mean that their accomplishments are any less important? I don't think so. There may well be an interplay between their personal histories and their works, but the works must stand or fall on their merits.
Princeton's motto has long been "Princeton In the Nation's Service." The university has a rich history of men and women who have led distinguished private-sector and public-sector lives. Woodrow Wilson remains a part of that tradition, and his accomplishments - and his shortcomings - must be recognized for what they are. On balance, the weight of history thus far has concluded that Woodrow Wilson's many accomplishments far outweigh his shortcomings. We certainly should not ignore the shortcomings, nor should we fail to recognize the good.
Craig Shirley's excellent new book about Ronald Reagan's final years, "Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan," concludes with a quotation from Ronald Reagan that is worth remembering in these turbulent times on university campuses: "As you look to the future, always remember the treasures of our past."
Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House. He was president of the Committee for Economic Development from 1997-2012 and now serves as president of Partners 4 Affordable Excellence @ EDU.