#Princeton removes Woodrow Wilson name from school over his racist policies

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The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.
AP

Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said the decision to drop President Woodrow Wilson’s name from his namesake School of Public and International Affairs was due to his support of racist policies.

“Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time. He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice. He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today,” Eisgruber wrote Saturday in an explanation for the Board of Trustees’ decision.

The decision by Princeton reverses a 2016 recommendation by the school’s own Wilson Legacy Review Committee, which urged the university to hang on to the former president, who also led Princeton from 1902 to 1910. The review was initiated after campus activists occupied Eisgruber’s office in 2015.

In his statement, Eisgruber made clear that the decision to remove Wilson came in direct response to the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd and the deaths of other African Americans at the hands of the police around the country.