The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: From College to Nation

The Educational Vision of Woodrow Wilson

The Educational Vision of Woodrow Wilson James Axtell B efore being elected governor of New Jersey and president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson was indisputably the most eloquent , influential, and perhaps controversial American university president in the first quarter—and arguably the first half—of the twentieth century. In leading Princeton to full university status and prominence between 1902 and 1910, he produced large numbers of polished and often witty speeches and writings on academic reform that generated as much national news and serious rethinking on other campuses as they did amazement and, eventually, alarm on his own. The boldness of his leadership and the imaginative consistency of his thinking made him the spokesman for liberal arts colleges and universities that sought to buck the era’s trends toward unplanned growth, curricular chaos, extracurricular excess, and myopic vocationalism. For all their historical importance, those same qualities make him a surprisingly relevant guide for our own perplexed thinking about the goals and policies of higher education. When Wilson became president of Princeton in 1902, he had been thinking about higher education for a long time. As a graduate student of politics and history at Johns Hopkins in the early 1880s, he sco√ed at the new institution’s genuflections before the altar of German ‘‘research’’ and complained about the aridity and factualism of his professors’ teaching and scholarship. In his first appointment at nascent Bryn Mawr, he lamented his (female) students’ passivity in lecture classes and his (mostly male) associates’ tepid interest in his favorite subjects, politics and government. After a short breather at still small, congenially masculine, though o≈cially coed Wesleyan, he returned in 1890 to Princeton, his more ‘‘cultured’’ 10 James Axtell and ‘‘progressive’’ alma mater.∞ There he helped forge the college’s soonproclaimed identity as a university and sang, mostly sotto voce, in the growing chorus of opposition to its feckless leader and stunted academic development. By 1897 at the latest, a year after delivering the keynote address at the new university’s sesquicentennial celebrations, he had substantially outlined what he would do if he were, as he said, ‘‘the autocrat of Princeton.’’≤ When unexpectedly he acquired the presidency and a mandate for change from the trustees five years later, he launched reforms of the faculty, the curriculum, teaching, and college life in an attempt to elevate Princeton’s reputation from one of the best American colleges to the best university ‘‘of its kind.’’≥ During Wilson’s eight years at the Princeton helm, he thought hard, wrote copiously, and spoke frequently about Princeton’s problems and opportunities, as well as about politics, current a√airs, culture, literature, religion, and history. By his final commencement in 1910, he had given at least 57 talks to alumni groups and 180 public lectures. He had also published 17 articles (3 more remained in a drawer) and a book. Extensive newspaper coverage of his public and even intramural appearances drew additional attention to his bold thinking and campus controversies.∂ By the summer of 1910, the New York Times had mentioned Wilson in articles, editorials, or book advertisements 190 times; in 90 of these, his or Princeton ’s name featured in the headline. Eleven of the articles, many of the lectures, and virtually all of the alumni talks were devoted to higher education , but not narrowly so. Although many addressed Princeton topics for Princeton audiences, others were aimed at listeners and issues at other institutions. Still others took wing from Princeton concerns but then rose to prescriptive heights over a host of academic ailments widely shared. When Wilson’s analytical frame of mind turned local questions into broad answers, wide media attention to his often striking ideas and uncommon eloquence and wit gave his prescriptions—for what a later Princeton dean called the ‘‘liberal university’’—greater exposure than the analyses of any other presidential spokesman in his day.∑ At a time when the ‘‘Big Three’’—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—were renewing their leases on the top spots in academic prestige and Columbia was making a conscious bid for national attention, Wilson’s three closest presidential contemporaries— Arthur Twining Hadley of Yale, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia—could not rival his command of both the Wilson’s Educational Vision 11 literate public’s and the academy’s attention. Even during much longer terms, none of the three faced—or created—high-stakes...