What We Owe the Students at Princeton

Corey, I am interested to hear this about Woodrow Wilson. I didn’t know, and it does seem right that this should be more generally known. I had a thought that I don’t really know what to do with but I’ll throw it out there anyway: How many older universities were not built on the idea of men’s superiority over women? What should follow from that? Personally, I’m in favour of note being taken, but after that, maybe we should live with the past, eyes open, and try not to repeat it.

If we’re going to have a conversation about Wilson’s memory, we ought to consider his political appeal in its totality. His racism certainly helped him in the South and probably didn’t hurt him in the North, but he was also perceived as the champion of the common man, albeit the common white man. Racism and populism were braided together in our history, and they still are—it’s odd to think of the starchy, professorial Wilson in the same light as a coarse buffoon like Trump, but part of the attraction Trump has for working class men and especially Southerners is the way he mixes support for popular government programs with his nativism, just as part of Wilson’s success was due to his support for unionism and other “progressive’ causes.

I have a personal connection to all this because I’m Woodrow Wilson’s nephew. My grandfather on my mother’s side was so impressed with Wilson, so fervent in his support for his re-election in 1916 that he vowed that he would name his next child Woodrow Wilson. He fulfilled his promise, which is how my aunt came to be Woodrow Wilson Harrison. It makes for a great bar bet. More to the point, my grandfather’s enthusiasm for Wilson’s brand of politics got passed down along with the name to many of his descendants to the third generation. I grew up hearing their politics and social attitudes declaimed over the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

There’s more to Wilson’s legacy than the racial stain or the commitment to internationalism, which is why both left and right can find reasons to commemorate or demonize him. I was amused to notice that the usual suspects over at the National Review have mostly come to his defense. A couple of years ago, most of what I heard from that corner suggested that Wilson was an evil figure, a sort of occidental Fu Manchu planning the subversion of the country what with the Fed and the League of Nations and other nefarious doings. If college students are going to attack his memory, though, he couldn’t have been all bad.

How about not naming buildings after anyone, or erecting statues to anyone?

This is a democracy. We are supposed to be beyond the belief that “great men” are the center around which the universe turns. Those statues of George III we pulled down should not have been replaced with new idols.

If it’s too visionary to imagine that we will pull down all the public statues and pull the name plaques off all our public buildings, yes, the least we can do is not have statues and public buildings that honor “great men” who weren’t quite great enough to avoid supporting the Confederacy or Jim Crow.

We don’t have buildings named after Benedict Arnold, despite the fact that without his service to this country at Saratoga there might not be a country for him to be forever remembered as betraying. We overcame Arnold’s later treason easily. We still haven’t overcome the betrayal of the Jim Crow system that Wilson defended and extended.

Frank Wilhoit,

For one thing, even if being gay and supporting Jim Crow were on the same moral plane, no one is forced to live in or transact business in, the music of Tchaikovsky.

But of course they’re not on the same moral plane. Jim Crow was evil and destructive, being gay is not. We’re allowed to make such distinctions. Scalia can’t seem to make a distinction between being gay and child molestation, and imagines that if we have to allow one we have to allow the other. You seem to think that if we should accommodate the feelings of people still afflicted by de facto Jim Crow who are forced to endure public honor to one of the architects of de jure Jim Crow, then we should accommodate the feelings of homophobes. I don’t have any trouble at all making the distinction. What’s your problem?

Next, they will petition the car company to take the anti-semitic name “Ford” off their cars.

Given how poorly his “internationalism” turned out, what exactly makes Wilson any better than the likes of James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson?

Glen Tompkins: “How about not naming buildings after anyone, or erecting statues to anyone?”

Thirded, especially if that includes people who are corporations. Enough with “Enron Field” and “Depends University”. (OK, there’s no “Depends University”. Yet.)

The question of how to judge the moral qualities of past people is murky to me. Most clearly, we should recognize and remember the aspects we see as negative, Jefferson and Washington holding slaves (and worse), JFK and most male politicians to this day being “womanizers” treating women badly, MLK plagiarizing and cheating on his wife (if true). But even as we remember the negatives, can’t we still honor these people for the good they did? And we don’t (or shouldn’t) honor these people as singular Heros, but as symbols of larger events: MLK Day should as much about the civil rights movement as about King himself, Jefferson and Washington were a part of the progress of democratic governance, etc.

“Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson…”

This is disingenuous if not sophistic. The concern is not about being “uncivil” or “unruly”, the concern is the promotion of the suppression of the speech of others, including “zero tolerance” policies for broadly and vaguely defined categories of speech, attacks on journalists, bomb threats, false fire alarms, newspaper theft, physical intimidation, Title IX accusations, threats to jobs. It is not a defense that some right-wingers are hypocritical and opportunistic in attacking protesters on these grounds.

BBA @ 12: Given how poorly his “internationalism” turned out, what exactly makes Wilson any better than the likes of James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson?

Did his liberal internationalism turn out poorly? In what sense? That seems like a question on which scholarly, intellectual energy could be productively spent.

The moral and intellectual confusion that leads people to imagine that Great People are Good People, by some kind of saintly standard is a kind of naïveté that may be excusable in a high school sophomore or (stretching the bounds of adolescence a bit) a college freshman, but education ought to cure it.

I doubt that much of anything can be said about Wilson’s deep-seated racism that won’t be heard by the righteous radical today as excusing him or his times. It is sad, really, because it creates a blockade against understanding human nature.

Once Hirohito and his boys had hoisted the banner of liberal internationalism, there was little that Francisco Franco could do to save France and the Gold Standard. Sad, really, but that’s the way the Illuminati roll. And, so few know. So few.

I almost always assume that rather than protesters being ignorant, stupid, naive, innocent priggish, and morally offended they are actually disingenuous, pretty smart, dishonest, strategic and politically ambitious. I doubt that Republicans were all that outraged by Clinton’s sin but found the scandal useful, as did Garfield’s opponents and Suetonius.

It’s politics. They’re lying to gain power. This is by far a more entertaining and I think respectful way to view these culture wars, under a Machiavellian lens as it were, but unfortunately makes civility and conversation almost impossible, if I were inclined to play.

Trying to rewrite the past is a mistake, imho. The ‘original name’ of many places, not just many colleges, was much more often different from the name by which ‘we’ know the place today. I have no problem with providing a comprehensive and accurate history of any individual or place, but I see absolutely no need to try to eradicate ‘memories’ of the person, especially when visiting/attending Princeton, for example, is a matter of choice. Indeed, one ordinarily has to work extremely hard to be get into the space that evidently does so much damage to the sensibilities of the young.

Any change should be a reflection of the wishes of all concerned with the institution/place and should not be governed by any factors beyond the wishes of said community.

Re: the specifics. I find the overwhelming majority of people ready to spout off on slavery/segregation to be utterly ignorant of the fundamentals, not to mention the details. As far as feelings go, no man can tell a woman what it ‘feels’ like to grow up as a woman, or how she should ‘feel’ about her experiences. As far as facts go, these are the very stuff of university life and debate. I once saw Ali in his prime interviewed on British TV. The interviewer asked Ali about his reaction to Britain, given the teachings of the Nation of Islam. I was completely shocked and saddened when Ali observed that he had no problem with Britain because Britain had done so little to Africans in the Americas.

To demonstrate how poor the teaching of British slavery, even among CT readers, I’ll set a sample question which you can attempt without checking. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Simply name the first British monarch to sanction and pay for the taking, transporting, and selling of Africans as slaves. Bonus points if you can name the slave captain and the circumstances/dynamics of the actual captures.

I couldn’t, so don’t feel bad if you’re stumped. I now use the primary source documents and images as the starting point for my own teaching of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Against which I discuss the much older, but just as odious, east-African slave trade, and importation of slaves from Asia into south Africa by the Dutch at the outset of their activities in Africa.

Yes, give everyone the facts, but please don’t allow the ongoing protests to distract from our principal mission – education.

Kidneystones: “Re: the specifics. I find the overwhelming majority of people ready to spout off on slavery/segregation to be utterly ignorant of the fundamentals, not to mention the details. ”

I not surprised that you’d find that.

Hi Bruce. You know more than I did. Yes. The documentation is here. https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=d7TVAAAAMAAJ&pg=PT23&dq=hawkins+1569&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVxtvS5KLJAhVEjJQKHZHuDqcQ6AEIRjAI#v=onepage&q=hawkins%201569&f=false

Searchable via Google books date 1569, Hawkins. Re: the points. Think of a few. More to follow.

My mom legit did not know about Wilson’s “let’s destroy the remaining scraps of reconstruction because, basically, fuck black people” policies/attitudes until this afternoon at 4 and she’s an educated, politically interested person. So, I do understand that infinite recursive un-naming of all past double plus ungood people would be bad, that is not remotely happening or ever likely. And if people want to say “Calhoun was a right bastard, let’s re-name Savannah’s sewers after him instead of one of the mumble main streets mumble (was Eugene Talmadge such a good person NO mumble)”… Wait, I wish they would say that, but they won’t, but if they were to say, “no military bases or academies ought to be named after people who committed treason,” that would be nice also. Wait, I wish the government would say that. What I mean is, if students decide they don’t want every aspect of their college campus to be named after someone widely regarded as unusually racist in his own day, I am not losing a lot of sleep over it. Except insofar as such actions make Chait happy.

In terms of memorialisation perhaps the students could ask that some of the Woodrow Wilson buildings/memorials could be changed to memorialise black people or groups that have had an impact on Princeton or the State Princeton is in etc

In the cloisters at the uni where I go there is a plaque memorialising the stone masons who built most of the cloisters – this is for them walking off the job to go to a hotel and have a banquet which won the 8 hour day for building workers in the State of Victoria in the 1850s:

“[The masons] have succeed, at least in all the building trades in enforcing [the 8 hour day] without effort. The employers have found it necessary and politic to give in, and without struggle; agreeing, we believe, to pay the same amount of wages as formerly for ten hours’ labour.” – The Herald, 1 May 1856

There was a procession to commemorate this which turned into Labor Day and our annual Moomba parade.

Sorry that is a bit off topic — but the students could research some important black people or groups or events relevant to Princeton and get some of the Woodrow Wilson memorials changed to these, and also get some sort of interpretive work about Woodrow Wilson’s racism being an issue, like some additional interpretive plaques.

@4

I was amused to notice that the usual suspects over at the National Review have mostly come to his defense.

An exception being Jonah Goldberg, who says that the awfulness of WW was all diagnosed in Liberal Fascism.

Anyway I think Princeton will be able to extricate itself from this more easily than people think. The Robertson lawsuit, which itself looked like a tangled mess at the time, and involved real money, and obliquely, the Wilson legacy, eventually got sorted out. Just put Cleveland’s name where Wilson’s was, or Bill Bradley’s, or something.

engels @ 33
http://youtu.be/P2pcFVyFN9E

Wilson, in his brittle idealism, could be cruelly authoritarian and reactionary, but he was hardly out of step with his times.

Wilson was aggressively bigoted. That doesn’t put him ‘out of step with his times’, but it differentiates his racism from the more passive kind, e.g. that of TR. He was an enthusiastic racist with administrative power. Special place in hell, IMO.

It’s funny, esp. in our politically vertiginous moment, to recall that one of Nixon’s favorite presidents was Wilson (or supposedly was).

Thanks for writing this Corey. I learned from it, and I think your political point is correct. On free speech, though, I wonder. If we treat free speech as the ability to speak and be heard, rather than the widening of the horizon of discourse, then we might think that the anti-Wilson protest has been a successful act of speech and has widened discourse, but isn’t itself about free speech per se.

Wilson was also a consistent and longtime supporter of female suffrage.

I seem to remember something about imprisonment of protesters and hunger strikes being needed to help his consistency along. He was also pro-labor when he wasn’t being violently anti-labor.

Wanting to purge society of any history that offends you is the just a new dominant class flexing their muscles. No tolerance anymore . Just the jumped up tyrants of the new ruling class

Agreed. And after the school is named after Du Bois, students whose ancestors had suffered under communism can then protest and demand that Du Bois’s name be removed as well, as he had written an eulogy for Stalin, and had visited China during the Great Famine of 1959-1962 praising Chairman Mao as the savoir of the human race. (Don’t take me wrong. This is not a reductio ad absurdum. I think both protests are good things.)

Having spent too much time on a couple of threads here recently, I’ll limit myself to the observation that one reason (among others) that Princeton might balk at renaming the Woodrow Wilson School for DuBois is that DuBois got his PhD from Harvard and there is a research institute there named for him. Not to make too much of these somewhat notional rivalries, but I can’t imagine the DuBois-Harvard connection would thrill Princeton administrators. But I could be wrong.

(P.s. I wonder what, if anything, at Princeton is named for Princeton alum George F. Kennan, whose views on race issues, esp. when he was a young man, were not, um, very good.)

Glen @ 49: You’re right, of course. Yet I’m glad, I confess, that at Harvard the Philosophy Department is in Emerson Hall and the Psychology Department is in William James Hall. (Less happy, it’s true, that the Center for Latin American Studies is named for David Rockefeller.)

I agree with the students that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs ought to be renamed, though I think there’s another, even more apposite reason: that “Wilsonian idealism” is a crock.

“If the history of World War I taught any lesson at all, it was that American policy had failed, not because Americans had made moral judgments, but because the moral judgments they made were so shallow. The trouble with Woodrow Wilson was that his ideals were so superficial, so crude, so circumscribed by his complacent assumption that his kind of democracy — the democracy of Walter Bagehot — represented the pinnacle of political virtue. The trouble with Wilson was not that he went off crusading for high ideals and ignored American self-interest. The trouble was that, like most statesmen, he found it so easy unconsciously to translate the self-interest of his own community into the language of high idealism. The most striking fact about the twentieth-century dream of peace and order, of which Wilson was to become the prophet, was not that it was utopian but that it was a one-sided Utopia, a world made safe not for democracy but for ourselves.

“From the point of view of three-fourths of the world, Wilson’s famous quarrel with Clemenceau, which appeared so momentous to the new realists (as to all Western scholars), was less important than their shared determination to keep that same three -fourths in its place. From this perspective, the new liberal internationalism was itself a kind of imperialism, almost indistinguishable from the old.”

Christopher Lasch, The World of Nations, pp. 213-4

Why do whoever want to change the building names?

To see if they can, because they can, to show that they can, because the exercise of power and the submission of weaker opponents feels good and is fun.

Wow, I mean what the 3rd century BCE was about how bad the Carthaginians were, or the French Revolution lets us look at the weakness and incompetence of the ancien regime? Not what was interesting there.

Wilson is not what is interesting here. New power bloc of identitarians rising and flexing muscle, doing stretching exercises in preparation of the real work to come. Those would think it might be profitable to support the ascending hegemony will call it pretty and oh so newly morally superior. And so it goes.

John Kane, Between Virtue and Power, ch.9, has a pretty good brief discussion of Wilson, Lansing, and the League. Wilson had lots of faults, but he did not cause WW2. To quote F. Foundling from the other thread, “done here.”

Wilson, who did his best to reduce the punitive aspects of the Treaty Of Versailles, cause WWII? It must be opposite day.

And, honestly, I had no idea Trotsky was such a snob.

This link: http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/hawkinsfirstvoyage gives nice concise summary of Hawkins first slave taking trip in 1562, the success of which attracted the participation and support of Elizabeth I. The link above is Hawkins own account of his final voyage. The report Hawkins makes describes the realities and priorities of the slave trade as well as colonial commerce and runs 50 short pages.

I consider Hawkins report to be a must-read, along with the Massachusetts slave laws. But I’m certain the already brilliant feel no similar obligation to apprise themselves, or their students, of core facts.

So, given that one state, Virginia, is named after the monarch who sanctioned and provided the essential first financing for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and that two others are named after a king who was every bit as keen to ship Africans to the Americas, and that another state is named after another female ruler every bit as willing to build palaces from the labor of slaves, what is to be done? Surely even seeing these names on a map must be injurious to the sensitive, not to mention living in state named after the authors of so much evil. Surely the discovery of Elizabeth’s crimes will win her the opprobrium of all, and if not, why not? Does anyone believe for a moment that if Cromwell had founded the slave trade this fact would be omitted from official history. Cromwell’s savaging of the Irish is invariably one of the first facts one learns of this Christian dictator.

What gets ERI her free pass?

And what of the native Americans? Surely there is some name in an Amerindian language that renders into: All this was once fucking ours, and we’re still being screwed by just about everyone!!!

I’m only being slightly facetious. I actually see no reason not to render the Carolinas particularly into some African words meaning the ‘lands of great suffering’ because surely that’s what these places were for the overwhelming majority of people living there from the 17th century on. Change the state names to reflect the historical reality. Might actually do some good.

What about things named after Jefferson? What about various scientific and mathematical theorems named after people who were personally vicious? I read somewhere that Felix Klein (great 19th-century mathematician) was anti-Semitic, and he’s got amazing things named after him that will be known long after all of us are dust, known into eternity if the world makes it that far… It seems to me to be truer to say that, before the 1950’s approximately, most people (in the western world) held views that could be characterized as racist, anti-Semitic, etc., and most men considered women to be second-class. Another example, there were various blogflaps in the last few years about Keynes and Mencken. Of course, Wilson actually enacted policy: is that where to make the distinction? Should we make a standard placard to nail onto these building facades after the name, with the initials AWOA? (Also wuz an Asshole…) Being a psychedelic relic, I figure that forgiveness and consciousness is better, and I think I would prefer the AOA approach, though I understand that younger people in particular need purity. Therefore: IF that’s what it takes to make them proceed further, to work on the evils in the current world, –(instead of resting on their fat laurels after expressing their outrage, in order to get a cushy job on Wall Street! — do you want to make a bet!?)– I would THEN say: rename the goddamned building!

For all the people pulling reductios about how if they take Wilson’s name off a building next they’ll be stripping X’s name off of the Theorem of X or whatever, you’re kind of missing the point.

I don’t think the protests here are because Wilson had racist feelings in his heart. Abraham Lincoln had racist feelings in his heart and no one wants his name off of anything.

Wilson, using the powers of the presidency, perpetrated extremely racist deeds. As has been observed above, he put an end to Reconstruction, kicking off a period of state-approved terrorism that black Americans would suffer under for several decades.

So I think all the Wilson defenders should be a little more clear in their language when laying out his achievements. He didn’t just implement progressive policies. He implemented progressive policies for the benefit of the white race.

Aw, dammit, “resegregated” in the above, not “desegregated.”

I’m surprised anyone could choose a title like “What We Owe the Students at Princeton” with a straight face. Seriously, repeat that out loud a few times.

Who is this “we”? It surely doesn’t include my students, half of whom are people of color, working full-time to afford tuition at a no-prestige college that they will leave with crippling student debt. They don’t owe the students of Princeton anything.

And if you say that the students of Princeton are acting for the sake of my students, then why are these protest predominantly at prestigious colleges? Why are their loudest supporters predominantly affluent white academics? Why, as my students continue to get shot in the streets by police and thrown into jail for minor crimes, are “we” supposed to care more about whether Yale makes their students feel at home or leaves the names of racists on its buildings?

Why are these lists of demands (http://www.thedemands.org/) dominated by symbolic actions rather than demands for action? Some of these lists make substantive demands, but the overwhelming majority start with: “apologize” and “issue a statement.”

This is not about ending racism but ideology, and that’s why it’s no accident that it comes from the nursery and nurses of a new economic ruling class that is increasingly diverse in race, religion, sexuality and gender.

It’s about how capital, which “has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” is indifferent to identity, and so has absorbed the left into its own goals under the guise of identity politics.

Sure, change the name. My students will continue collapsing under debt, rotting in jails, and dying in the streets.

Brett Bellmore @66,

And if the slippery slope warned of in your “Yet” should come to pass, and we pull down all the statues to all our heroes, and rip all the name plates of “great men” off our public buildings, what harm, great or small, would come to pass?

Just to limit consideration to Lincoln, I think that tearing down all his statues and taking his name and image off of all our buildings and currency, would do nothing but good. If his only memorial were his words and deeds, it would be that much harder for the current Republican Party to expropriate his reputation. As a mute idol, he is devoid of content.

What do we owe students? The opportunity to receive a well-rounded education which includes a working knowledge of History. Erasing History is not learning History. Removing a name changes nothing historically; it only hides what that person stood for. Recognizing the good and bad things that people have stood for (and still do) is important as we try to move our world forward to a more just one (using MLK’s definition of justice). Was Wilson a racist – ‘yes;’ it was a dominant norm of the day that many white people shared. This does not excuse his racism, but it does put it in historical cultural context. Did Wilson accomplish some good even though he was a racist? Again, ‘yes.’ So it is important to know what he did that was bad/wrong and blameworthy along with what he did that was good and praiseworthy. This is knowing History. I think it is important to remember that all of us are a mixture of good, bad, and indifference, and a good knowledge of History can help us understand ourselves by knowing from where we came. When I point out the shortcomings of another person, I try to remember that there are three fingers pointing back at me reminding me of my own shortcomings.

This should concern students at Princeton (and all of us) more than whose name is on a building.

http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/politics/mo-town-elects-first-black-mayor-80-percent-of-police-force-immediately-resigns-video/

John Alexander,

Do we have statues to Benedict Arnold in public places of honor in this country? Is the absence of such public honor due to the fact that he did nothing good? Do you know how we won the War of Independence? Have you heard of Saratoga?

We don’t put up statues of people, or name public buildings after them, to teach history. If we did, we would have a lot of statues of Benedict Arnold, who is a big part of our history. We put up statues of people and name buildings after them to give them public honor, to set them up as above the common crowd, as worthy of emulation. And it’s uncritical, unthinking emulation and admiration you’re aiming for if you let anything but a person’s words and deeds be their memorial.

We don’t pull down statues of “great men” to erase history. We pull down their idols because we have stopped being unthinking about them, because we have adopted the nuanced view you espouse that all of us are human, there are no heroes who deserve to be put on pedestals and memorialized with mute idols in places of public honor.

John Alexander @76,

This is another common theory about this dispute at Princeton, that we need to prioritize our concerns, and not get all worked up about the name of a building at Princeton, when black people in Missouri are being denied self-governance.

I’ve never understood why anyone would think that you can only be concerned about one thing, that agitating for something symbolic like a building name change at Princeton, means that you are in any way hampering the practical struggle in Missouri. To me, it seems that this is the same struggle, and that what the Princeton students are doing is the logical practical thing that they can do in their own situation to fight the same fight as the residents of Parma, Missouri are fighting in their practical situation.

Princeton isn’t a govt of any sort. It doesn’t have a power structure that keeps blacks from political power in local govt. What Princeton does have in spades is symbols that help perpetuate the ideological inertia that lets a lot of comfortable white people think of Woodrow Wilson as a great man. People who imagine they are defending him will tell you that he was just a product of his times, that of course a white politician of a time when only whites were allowed to hold power was in favor of Jim Crow. Everyone was racist and pro-Jim Crow back then, so it’s all cool. Except of course that normalizing the standards of that era is what allows Jim Crow to continue de facto long after it has been overthrown de jure. Princeton students have clearly been able to make a lot of privileged, thought-leader type white people uncomfortable — you need look no further than this string for evidence of that. That accomplishment may not be the Second Coming, it may not bring on the Millennium of Racial Justice if it succeeds, but it isn’t nothing, either. It’s more than I’ve done lately.

Would it be better if privileged white students at Princeton were able to end de facto Jim Crow in Missouri, and chose to do that rather than take on a purely symbolic fight at Princeton? No doubt. But what levers do privileged white students at Princeton have now, in the student stage of their lives, to effect the terms of governance in Missouri, other than changing what symbols they can in their practical circumstances at Princeton? If these symbols are not important, why defend the purely symbolic naming of buildings after Wilson?

I will take the point of your link as being that we have a problem with Jim Crow continuing de facto in Missouri. But the item you link to is one, admittedly small, testimony to the success that people in at least this one corner of Missouri are having fighting their own fight in their own practical situation. This small town, which is not majority minority, elected a black woman as mayor. The 37-year incumbent was apparently a good ol’ boy who ran a corrupt and racist machine, to judge by the report that 5 of the 6 city police officers resigned when he was ousted. This is a town with population 713 in the 2010 census. It doesn’t need 6 police officers for any purpose other than good ol’ boy welfare and keeping down the blacks and browns, so good riddance to the 5 who left, probably one step ahead of being fired.

Corey Robin @81,

Your point too, as well as my own response @82.

You’re right, there is a question of whether Wilson himself, or “great men” in general, would even want buildings named after them, or statues erected to them.

Washington was quite adamantly opposed to any such nonsense in his “honor”. I tend to agree with Washington, and to think that one quality that any truly great person would have, is that they would not be so small as to want statues or buildings raised in any sort of personality cult.

In the unlikely event that anyone should ever suggest a monument in honor of gtomkins, or to name a building in my honor, please don’t. Even a small person can see that big monuments to personal greatness are an even smaller idea than he deserves.

Corey@81 and Glen@83: OK, I take your point. And I agree, substantively. I misunderstood because Glen used the wrong adjective @69. The correct descriptive phrase for “white-washing — idealizing — the past, constructing falsified notions of the past” is “idealizing nonsense,” not “idealistic nonsense.” There is nothing idealistic about idealizing the past; on the contrary.

@42: Yes, and also with a little help from his suffragist daughter. Wilson did tend to get along better with the moderate suffragists than the flamethrowers, but he was appalled by the treatment of the hunger strikers.

“… well, if they don’t like it they can rise out of their graves and stop us, can’t they? The dead do nothing, say nothing, and thus cannot currently be regarded as objecting.”

@64: Good point. The hell with those dead people and what they thought. However, there are those who may choose to speak up for those who can no longer speak for themselves.

Upthread I was kvetching that the renominalizers have created the names of buildings as objects, but changing the name doesn’t do any real work in the sense of feeding the sheep or setting the captives free. Thinking further, the real problem is that this is erasing history: surely we don’t want to forget John C. Calhoun (a better/worse/less complicated exemplar than WW) and all he stands for, lest we find ourselves repeating it. So best to take the given name as an architectural detail: Calhoun College is a grand old stonepile that has served generations.

Every reason in the world to take it as an occasion to comment, to understand how and in what way John C. was a Big Man. Teachable. The remedy for bad speech is more speech: Seems to me useful to inject contextual material … eg, permanent National Park type panels, anti-slavery bookstall, annual performances. Not to neglect the possibility of editorialising, eg some maximally disreputable part of the building could be formally designated as John’s Office.

Harvard has the Kennedy School of Government, the University of Texas has the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Minnesota has the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the University of Alabama has the George Wallace School of Public Affairs. (OK, I made the last one up, but there is a George Wallace High School in Montgomery AL.)

A lot of universities have buildings and institutions named after local politicians who made prime time, most of whom have mixed records at best. Should they all be purged?

Who was West Virginia named after?

Adam West, as were Bruce College and Wayne State.

I’m predicting that until significant numbers of millionaires’ sons and daughters refuse to go to Princeton, or the millionaires themselves refuse to donate scads of money, then and only then will the powers that be take action.

Who was West Virginia named after?

Mae West, obviously!

Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students.

I think this is exactly right, and that the point generalizes. The status quo ante is not one that celebrates free speech in all its facets anyway, so all this pearl clutching about how these students are stifling free speech is not something I have a lot of time for.

That said, I also have more than a little sympathy for anon @70. It all just seems so symbolic. Which isn’t to say that it’s trivial—symbols are of course important, and they can be a good place to start, in certain situations. Bqut it would be nice if it also started moving past that a bit.

That article was very informative, I didn’t realise how racist Woodrow Wilson was, not being from America. I can understand why people find it so offensive that he is memorialised so much on campus:

“Raised in the South, he wrote of “a great Ku Klux Klan” that rose up to rid whites of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes.” During Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton, no blacks were admitted — “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied,” he wrote — though Harvard and Yale had admitted blacks decades earlier. Princeton admitted its first black student in the 1940s.”

I guess one thing is that all the Woodrow Wilson memorialisation is not just names of building and schools but it contributes to the campus as an imagined realm — which I guess is the reason the black justice group want to change it, and the reason that others want to maintain it. And a university campus is perhaps an imagined realm more than a built space compared to, say, a company complex.

I would guess that Princeton is not very environmentally sustainable in its built and landscaped environment at the moment. Due to this the university campus is necessarily going to have to undergo a lot of changes in the next few decades.

So as these changes in the built form of the campus will be necessary — groups like the black justice group could advocate for these changes in their “meaning making” quality to ensure that the campus reflects their principles of, for example, diversity and equity ; rather than the Woodrow Wilson traditions of the past.

I don’t know if Princeton has current plans for redesigning the campus for sustainability and climate — but in America the Environmental Justice movement is strongly associated with the black civil rights movement, so, for instance, black environmental justice figures from New Jersey could be incorporated into memorialisation and naming or other design responses like sculptures and monuments as the campus environmental form changes over the next few decades.

Some people have said that buildings don’t need symbolic names and so on. But this is not really right, in urban design research has shown that when people think about a place the composite “image” of the place they bring to mindis made up of different factors like buildings, land marks, corridors, and symbolic and social factors etc (Kevin Lynch, Image of the City) — so the campus design should be respond to how people conceive of the places they are in, and not just name the buildings as to their functions so as to do away with problems like this one.

“but as I say there, there was in fact precious little conversation about Wilson’s record at Princeton. Outside a few select classrooms. I was an undergraduate there, and the only thing I ever heard that wasn’t hagiography (and I was a history major, mind you) was that Wilson tried to eliminate the eating clubs. That was the only critical statement I ever heard. The sad fact of the matter is that until these students came along, demanding the removal of his name from various programs and colleges, there was no conversation about Wilson, except pure PR.”

https://www.facebook.com/slaughterAM/posts/468498480006087

“Which brings me to Princeton. I was the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton for seven years. I became dean roughly thirty years after I graduated from Princeton as a Woodrow Wilson School major and fifty years after my father did the same ….. As dean I had plenty of occasion to think and talk about Woodrow Wilson’s racist past and what that meant for students of color in the school. We held panel discussions with historians and looked the ugly side of Wilson’s record as President – his appointment of racist cabinet members and re-segregation of the Federal civil service – full in the face. We talked about it at Students and Alumni of Color weekends. “

I have a barely on-topic question (and sorry for the minor derailment):

I went to college in the 90s. Identity politics was (were?) all the rage back then. I wasn’t that into it (this mostly involved me hiding under tables from the South Asian club representatives), but anyway, it was the rage. Ten years later, I thought most of this had blown over—or maybe I was just moving in the wrong circles. Now it seems like the 90s are back with a motherfucking vengeance and a half.

The question: Is it just me? Was I just moving in the wrong crowds last decade? Or have other people had similar feelings/thoughts/experiences?

> something a representative democracy doesn’t actually need

Law-of-large-numbers: decisions made by a large group of people amplify the tendencies of the group from which the people are drawn, while decisions made by small groups of people or individuals disperse those same tendencies. If your voting population is generally OK then parliamentarianism works, but if your voting population is Less Than Ideal having only one person will minimise those effects.

Presidential systems are your best choice, are actually superior, if you’re dealing with entrenched oligarchism in your political structures. This is why you get demands for “strong leadership”: if most politicians are vile, having only one of them matter maximises your chances of getting non-vile decisions made. I mean, sure, even with a presidential system, most of the time you’ll get an oligarch who’ll make oligarchy-favouring decisions, but that’s still a substantial advance on the “always” you’d get if congress were running things.

Maybe not the word, but the concept’s been there since roman days, probably since greek days. Caesar was the napoleon of the day, and all that… and arose in a context of concentrated political power.

I hold no brief for Wilson in this case, but one thing monuments and commemorative names preserve is the fact that people once thought so-and-so was worth honoring. In the case that the memorial becomes shameful, this can occasion interesting historical reflection.

The problem is one of futility. For most of a century Wilson was taught, in the standard histories, as being a great and a good man. Now some people are suggesting that he was so bad that his name must suffer the indignity of being stripped from a building. This seems to imply that what people widely thought was good, may in fact not be good. Apparently moral viewpoints can change, evolve, even rotate. Why then struggle to be good? When what we think is good, may in a century or less be considered bad, even heinous. This debate about renaming – which should be unimportant, what’s in a name and all that – carries such resonance because it thrusts in our noses the dictum, which we would rather avoid, that all is vanity.