As some Princeton students have called for the changing of the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs and Wilson college, others have argued that this would be an erasure. They have argued that in changing the name we would forget all the good Woodrow Wilson did, or forget that every legacy (especially his) is complicated. Frankly, I am worried that we would forget him altogether.
When we erase his name, students in United States history courses across the nation would read: “After serving as the President of Princeton University as well as the 34th Governor of New Jersey, _____________________ was the 28th President of the United States.” When they have to memorize the names of all the presidents, students would awkwardly pause between Taft and Harding. They would raise their hands and ask, “Wait, who came in between 27 and 29 as President?” Their teachers would be forced to respond, “Honestly, I can’t tell you. I forgot.”
Students would never learn about how America entered World War I or the League of Nations. We would never learn about how Wilson’s Sedition Act enabled the jailing of citizens who dissented from American involvement in the war. We would never learn about the Federal Reserve System, or his policies of radically encouraging self-determination in the Philippines, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Students reading about the winners of the Nobel Prize might try to click on the list of Americans who have won it, but the URL to his page on nobelprize.org would be broken.
Visitors to his Presidential Library might be confused about the white paint eclipsing his name on the dark blue welcome sign. They might ask, “So which President’s library is this?” The ticket checker wouldn’t know: “I think… maybe it was Thomas Jefferson? But actually I don’t know. It is kind of weird that the sign was just painted over like that.”
This type of forgetting would inevitably happen here at Princeton. A senior investigating her history thesis on the formation of the precept system would see whiteout on an old document describing “__________ College.” She might read correspondence between students who informally called their major “Woody Woo.” She would try to find out from her advisor exactly what subject this was. The chair of the history department would furrow his brow and reply, “Students back in 2015 had nicknames for a lot of buildings, and it is my hypothesis that it is a misspelling of the last name of Gordon Wu ’58.”
When we say students are calling to ‘erase’ his name, we are missing the point. What we hold here is an opportunity, not to erase someone’s name from the tablet of history, but to complicate it. To affix Wilson’s name within a deeply disturbing spider web of other racists who ran our country, and to boldly say, “We no longer stand for what he stood for.”
Students in history courses, from high school classrooms across the nation to the hallowed halls of Robertson, will certainly continue to learn about Woodrow Wilson. Here, we at Princeton have the incredible chance to make a justified statement not about who we remember, but why and how.
Wilson took one good look at his new home in the town of Washington, and authorized members of his cabinet to reverse the long-standing policy of integration in the federal civil service. When his policy of segregation was addressed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he wrote, “The white people of the country as well as I, wish to see colored people progress, and admire the progress they have already made, and want to see them continue along independent lines … The only harm that will come will be if you case them to think it is a humiliation.”
When we erase his name, we do not erase Woodrow Wilson. Instead of seeing this gesture as the glass half-empty, why not see the glass half-full? Instead of erasure, this is opportunity. Instead of erasure, this is rewriting. Instead of erasure, this is creation. This is Princeton: we have many alumni who have changed public policy with more inclusive legacies. Queen Noor ’73 or Sonia Sotomayor ’76 would be on my list.
History is not a blackboard, but a stone tablet: all the truths of war, nation building, blood, virulence, oppression, succession and love are forever inscribed. No one, especially a white man who was the President of the United States, will be truly erased from history. Changing the name is not an erasure, but a balancing — it is taking away one victory from White Supremacy and adding one to Justice.
Azza Cohen is a history major from Highland Park, Ill. She can be reached at accohen@princeton.edu.
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