The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation

Afterword

Afterword Stanley N. Katz M y task in writing the afterword to this fascinating volume is to comment briefly on how Woodrow Wilson’s educational vision has stood up on his own campus over the course of the century that has passed since his presidency. The task is daunting since, although I teach in the school of public policy named for Wilson and the university uses a version of his most famous phrase as its public slogan, it is not at all clear how Wilsonian my university remains. Take the two specific references that persist. First, the Woodrow Wilson School is surely a unit that President Wilson would not have endorsed, since it violates some of his most deeply held beliefs: that Princeton should focus on undergraduates, that it should have a single faculty, that it should not provide vocational education, that there should be no separate financial endowments within the university, to name only a few contradictions. Second, the transformation of his phrase ‘‘Princeton in the Nation’s Service’’ to ‘‘Princeton in the Nation’s Service and in the Service of All Nations.’’ Wilson did not intend ‘‘service’’ to be the active verb implied in President Harold Shapiro’s reformulation of the slogan (as in ‘‘social service’’ or ‘‘community service’’) but he rather referred to the much larger and broader mission of the college in the development of the national ethos. It is tempting to say that we current Princetonians use Wilson’s words rather than his ideas. Or, worse, we use Wilson casually and irreverently. The students in my school refer to our eponym as ‘‘Woody Woo,’’ and they style themselves ‘‘Wooers.’’ The Old Boy is probably not smiling. As Jim Axtell has noted in his introduction, Princeton’s current president , Shirley Tilghman, told our conference attendees that she ‘‘particu- Afterword 245 larly admired Wilson’s emphases on making Princeton a serious intellectual place, renowned for preprofessional liberal arts and sciences, and ‘vertically integrated’ from freshman to president, partly through the use of residential campus housing, including four-year colleges or ‘quads’ envisioned by Wilson.’’ President Tilghman clearly and explicitly sees herself as the inheritor of President Wilson’s educational legacy, and she is proud of the extent to which she has helped to sustain that tradition. And so she should be. But the question I want to ask is: how much of Princeton would Woodrow Wilson recognize should he chance to walk through the FitzRandolph Gate onto the campus today?∞ There are many buildings he would not recognize, of course. But some of the new structures would represent the fulfillment of his most profound dream for the college—six residential colleges, three of them four-year colleges (with another in the plans). The sight of these colleges (the newest and some of the oldest in his beloved Collegiate Gothic style) would surely please him, but I am not so sure he would approve of the extent to which Princeton’s campus has been builtout . He would find a tremendous extension of the Engineering School on the west side of Olden Street (on the western edge of the campus) and an ongoing attempt to erect large new buildings on most of the vacant land on the east side. As he walked down campus he would find an arc of large and bulky dormitories on what used to be athletic fields—and the elegant ‘‘pagoda ’’ tennis courts were demolished to provide a site for the newest residential college, Whitman, a badly oversized retro Collegiate Gothic structure . As he walked down Washington Road (which bisects the campus), he would be dazzled by the new metal and glass Frank Gehry science library (apparently magically transported from Bilbao) and daunted by a series of imposing natural science laboratories on both sides of the road, with yet another under construction. He would surely be amazed by the plethora of large, elaborate athletic fields and other physical facilities. On the central campus he would encounter Firestone Library, replacing the much smaller library he knew in East Pyne, now transformed into a humanities center. In short, the former president would be puzzled by the size and complexity of the modern structure that characterizes today’s Princeton University . It is not the scale of the architecture that has changed. We do not have massive buildings, but I think that we are creating a rather closedin feeling. We have lost so many of the great vistas on the campus. The new E-Quad (with...