First things first: Woodrow Wilson was a deplorable bigot and one of the worst presidents in American history. He re-segregated the federal government, glamorized the Ku Klux Klan, screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House, and opposed Reconstruction and black suffrage (Dylan Matthews has more on Wilson’s racism). In common with many progressive intellectuals of his time, he was a champion of eugenics. He sank the United States into the pointless carnage of World War I. He viewed the Constitution as outmoded and sought to snap its restraints on executive power.
Ideally there wouldn’t even be an perpetually congested bridge in Northern Virginia named after him, let alone a prestigious college of public policy. Yet now that college, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (Wilson’s former employer), has announced that it’s changing its name. Here’s part of the statement from the university’s board of trustees.
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