A cyclist rides past Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in Princeton, New Jersey, November 20, 2015. Princeton University has pledged to consider renaming buildings dedicated to former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the latest U.S. campus effort to quell student complaints of racism. REUTERS/Dominick ReuterDOMINICK REUTER/Reuters
More than any one person, American president Woodrow Wilson invented the world that came after the First World War, with a plan for self-determination of nations, democracy and a planet governed by law and not force. Wilson was also an out-and-out racist. He believed in racial segregation of black Americans, and the racial superiority of whites.
Protesters at Princeton University have targeted the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who headed the Ivy League school before entering politics. They want his name stripped from institutions such as the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, created in 1948 to honour the man best known for promoting international peace through his advocacy of the League of Nations.
Wilson's views on race are shocking – in part because they historically haven't received much attention. As president, his administration actively discriminated against black employees, and no black students were let into Princeton during his tenure. Segregation suited him fine. This was wrong, but it was also a disease of his time and place. He did not fight it, but he hardly invented it. The party he led, the Democratic Party, was until the 1960s the party of Jim Crow, which worked to disenfranchise blacks in the U.S. South.
But the story doesn't end there. Wilson was bigoted and he was also progressive, a man from an all-too different past who is now being forced to face the judgment of the disapproving present. This can't easily be done with any degree of historical accuracy or fidelity to the professed values of an open-minded modern university – unless all you're interested in is defusing racial tensions not just by criticizing Wilson (and he deserves to be criticized), but by making his name disappear.
All humans are mixtures of good and bad, if only relative to the values of others. Equally, the inconsistent greatness of history's honorees like Woodrow Wilson (or slave-owner George Washington – should America's capital city be renamed?) should be allowed to remain visible as a constant reminder not to be too smug about our own presumed superiority. Wilson was great and brilliant, and profoundly wrong about many things. But he was not uniquely wrong. We too will be judged some day, in a world very different from this one. Will they see only our faults?