Princeton Agrees to Consider Removing a President’s Name By Liam Stack and Gabriel Fisher
Princeton students ended a 32-hour sit-in in the university president’s office on Thursday night after administrators signed a document that committed them to begin conversations about addressing racial tension on campus, including possibly removing the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from some public spaces, the university and students said.
The sit-in came amid racial tension and escalating student activism on college campuses nationwide and focused in part on what students called Wilson’s legacy of racism. Shortly after the document was signed, an administrator received a bomb or firearm threat by email. It was being investigated late Thursday.
Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879 and served as its president from 1902 to 1910 before becoming president of the United States from 1913 until 1921. Historians often remember him for liberal internationalism amid the horrors of World War I, but he also held a number of racist views.
A group of about 20 graduate students gathered in the Columbia Law School lobby on Wednesday for what they called an emergency town hall meeting to discuss discrimination on campus.Princeton Students Hold Sit-In on Racial InjusticeNOV. 18, 2015
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the university’s president, told students Wednesday that he agreed that Wilson had been a racist but that he had done some things that were honorable and others that were worthy of scorn.
The document signed by students and administrators was published on the Princeton University website late Thursday. It contained no firm commitment to removing Wilson’s name from campus. Instead, it committed administrators to writing an email to the chairwoman of the university board of trustees “to initiate conversations concerning the present legacy” of the former president on campus.
“We appreciate the willingness of the students to work with us to find a way forward for them, for us and for our community,” Mr. Eisgruber said in a statement posted on the university website. “We were able to assure them that their concerns would be raised and considered through appropriate processes.”
The document held administrators to a series of spoken statements they had “verbalized” during the sit-in and committed them to write emails “to initiate the process to consider removal” of a mural of Wilson from a cafeteria in a residential college named after him. Administrators also said they would “collect information on the campus community’s opinion” on whether the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a prestigious public policy school, should continue to bear his name.
The university expressed “a commitment to working toward” more campus artwork showing people of diverse ethnic backgrounds and said it would allocate four rooms of one building for the use of “cultural affinity groups.” It also said they would consider making a curriculum change to include a “diversity requirement.”
Esther Maddox, a junior who participated in the sit-in, said it was “a long, exhausting and really trying experience.” She said she felt that “what we are doing is creating a campus environment that will eventually allow people like me to feel more comfortable on this campus.”
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