Finally there’s a protest by campus radicals The Scrapbook can sympathize with. Students at Princeton want to remove the name of the school’s most famous alumnus, President Woodrow Wilson, most notably from the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. Students object to Wilson’s racism and—you know what?—he was guilty as charged. But perhaps this particular conflict is best understood another way: Idiot student progressives are now protesting the founding father of idiotic progressivism.
In that regard, the essay by the campus’s Black Justice League justifying their cause is priceless. “We owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed,” the essay says. “There is an impulsive reaction to want to ignore uncomfortable or questionable legacies. . . . By not recognizing the importance of this discourse, the University is telling its marginalized community and the outside world that it values its bleached-clean version of history over the prolonged discomfort and alienation of students of color. This erasure is especially dangerous in the present context of state-sanctioned violence against Black people that prolongs this genocide.”
To be clear, the “erasure” they’re referring to here is the ignoring of mostly petty concerns of elite students, not the literal erasure of Woodrow Wilson’s name. But it’s the comment that “we owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed” that’s especially rich. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian view and classical philosophy, the foundation of modern progressivism is Wilson’s view that human nature is “Darwinian.” That is, we have evolved beyond notions such as original sin, self-interest, and other beliefs that we’re all “deeply flawed.” As such, Wilson believed constitutional restraints were antiquated means of preventing an obviously benevolent government, led by a progressive elite, from unleashing its nearly unlimited capacity to make our lives better. At one point, he actually lamented that “some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence.”
As for Wilson, he certainly had got beyond the inalienable rights granted by higher and more righteous authorities than himself. Everyone is fond of quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s admonition that you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater. Few people bother to mention that Holmes’s line comes from a ruling where he decided that a man posting flyers in opposition to the draft in World War I had violated the 1917 Espionage Act. Indeed, thousands of Americans did hard time because good Wilsonian progressives decided opposing the government in public was a crime, particularly when those objections awkwardly highlighted the fact that Wilson had gotten elected on a promise of keeping America out of the war in Europe. And in case you’re wondering, this is the same 1917 Espionage Act that Obama invoked last year to justify the Department of Justice snooping on the Associated Press newsroom and Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. When it comes to respecting the rights of their fellow citizens, it seems the more progressive presidents evolve, the more their basic impulses stay the same.
In particular, you’d think today’s campus radicals should appreciate how directly they’re following in Wilson’s footsteps. After some dissident students at Amherst College recently hung posters on campus that read “in memoriam of the true victim of the [University of] Missouri Protests: Free Speech,” a group calling itself “Amherst Uprising” wanted the students responsible for the posters to go through the student disciplinary process and “be required to attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency.”
Higher education these days is something of a misnomer. Far from rectifying historical injustice, the current crop of student activists should start by rectifying their own historical ignorance.
