Tabula Rasa

I am pleased to hear that students finally decided it was time for Woodrow Wilson’s name to be expunged from our campus. Now that it has been conclusively shown that this President of the United States and of Princeton supported — as did most of his contemporaries, undoubtedly — segregation, any other contribution he had as a national and world leader becomes of course immediately irrelevant. To imagine that for all this time we thought our school of public policy was named after the man who, in the wake of the First World War, founded the League of Nations, supported global democracy (against many of his contemporaries), was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, and supported women’s suffrage! These so-called contributions do nothing to efface his racism: and so he should be effaced from our campus and our collective memory.

Some have argued that Wilson’s name heading a residential college and public policy institution does not mean that these institutions support every facet of Wilson’s political beliefs and practices. They have argued that it is possible, indeed advisable, for an institution, once created by its founders or named after a relevant figure in the field, to evolve past those founding values and figures while recalling their origins. How else would it be possible to establish a centuries-long institution if every new generation is to topple past figures who become offensive to the march of moral progress? Against such conservatism I applaud the members of the Black Justice League who proclaimed that “we owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed.” The only way to cleanse institutions of their shameful past is to erase this past and its dismal accomplices. We must build new spaces and affix new names that proclaim our modern triumph once and for all over social ills which are offensive even to remember.

To that end the recent protests have not gone far enough. The landscape of the Princeton campus is a legacy of oppression. If we are to reclaim our University as a symbol of our enlightened contemporary values of the present, we must tear down all its markers of its benighted past.

Reminding us that white, male, Protestant dominance is the foundation of our University the statue of John Witherspoon, preaching from his pulpit, in the center of campus. Should we not replace him with a less alienating figure? In its stead I would suggest an image of Barack Obama (offensive to none but the most intolerant of Republicans) or a rainbow.

Notice the books below Witherspoon’s pulpit: authored by Cicero, Newton, Locke and Hume. Could we not have included at least one female or minority author here? Most heinous of all is that Cicero —a slave owner, for God’s sake — has been placed atop the three other authors: meanwhile, the Classics Department perpetuates the study of the violent and repressive cultures of Greece and Rome and of a core curriculum authored by old white male Europeans in the very center of campus, and Latin inscriptions are to be found ubiquitously. Let’s face it: Latin was the language first of the slave-owning, Christian-crucifying Romans, and then of the inveterate white male elite of Europe. Moreover, these inscriptions, oppressive to the rest of us, are meaningful only to the elite sector of the student body that had the leisure to study Latin. I would recommend that all these polarizing totems be replaced by quotations authored primarily by minorities, not in English — whose universality is directly linked to Anglo-Saxon violence and British imperialism — but in Esperanto, buttressed by a new mandatory course in Esperanto for the universal but diverse language requirement. Meanwhile the core curriculum must be abolished: it is too painful even to gloss over such authors.

I pass over Washington Road (a Native American-killer), Aaron Burr Hall (a murderer), the Rockefellers (fossil fuel tycoons) and even the highly offensive, undemocratic name of “Prince”-ton. I call your attention instead to Nassau Hall, which is decorated with the plaque of every graduating class since its inception. I would recommend that the University develop labyrinthine layers of subcommittees to analyze in light of irrefutable modern scholarship which classes could be determined to be at odds with our present values. Those classes which fit the criteria should be exhumed to watch as their plaques are obliterated from Nassau Hall with a non-violent, non-phallic cannon ball.

My fear is that we will have to expunge all so-called “great” classes predating Woodstock, and probably even later. For, when we survey the cane-toting, slave-owning, brandy-swirling privileged white males whose songs we sing, whose names don our spaces, it is undoubtedly better if we have to erect a brand new campus free at last (thank God!) of its ugly past. The new structure should be designed by a minority woman, and white males should be obliged to use the backdoor. Buildings should be named after universally representative minority figures, and only provisionally: for example, “Barack Hussein Obama Library (unless new historical evidence shows he pulled out of Iraq too soon).”

Brandon Bark ’13