Woodrow Wilson

by John Milton Cooper, Jr.

  Before the inauguration, Wilson told Ellen, “I feel like a new prime minister getting ready to address his constituents.” He also told her, “Fortunately, I never worked out the argument on liberal studies, which is the theme of my inaugural, before, never before having treated myself as a professional ‘educator,’ and so the matter is not stale but fresh and interesting.” Actually, according to Stockton Axson, five years earlier Wilson had spelled out to him the three steps needed to make Princeton a place where “things of the mind” were paramount: first, reorganize the curriculum to combine electives with prescribed courses; second, adapt “the Oxford tutorial system to our American plan;” and third, divide the student body into smaller units, with unmarried faculty living among them.5 This prefiguration of major reform sounds apocryphal, but he had given talks to alumni groups stressing the need to combine the advantages of the college and the university.

  Although he exaggerated the lack of thinking he had devoted to the subject of education, he revealed habits of mind that would shape his leadership as a university president and later as a governor and as president of the United States. Wilson liked to prepare, to think things through by himself and get his bearings on a subject, and he liked to work from the general to the particular. Money presented the biggest obstacle to his plans. Axson recalled that on the day Wilson was chosen president, “he seemed a little nervous” and told Axson, “We cannot reform the University immediately. Funds will have to be found.”6 Still, he did not let such worries deter him from revealing a character trait that previously had found outlets only in his imaginings—a penchant for bold action. In situations where he had a choice, he would nearly always pick the grander, riskier course.

  During the summer of 1902, Wilson prepared a report on the state of affairs at Princeton, which he had presented to the trustees four days before his inauguration. In that report he called the university’s situation “in many respects, critical” and declared that “it is insufficiently capitalized for its business.” The quality of the faculty was suffering from low pay, and the curriculum needed “a radical change of method.” Such “essentially reading subjects” as philosophy, literature, history, politics, and economics required, with modification, “the English tutorial system.” To institute such a system, he proposed hiring fifty young men on yearly contracts for a maximum of five years. The regular faculty likewise required more and more distinguished professors, and the sciences badly needed better facilities. Such changes would require upping Princeton’s present resources of $3.8 million to more than $6 million. “No institution can have freedom in its development which does not stand at the top in a place of leadership,” Wilson argued. “If Princeton should ever come to be generally thought of as standing below Harvard and Yale in academic development her opportunity for leadership and even for independent action within her own sphere would be gone. … Either we may withdraw from the university competition and devote ourselves to making what we are solid and distinguished, or we must find money enough to make Princeton in fact a great university.”7

  He also listed steps to take toward making Princeton a leading university. First and most important was a Graduate College, the residential facility for the Graduate School, for which the dean, Andrew West, had already presented a design to the trustees. Wilson saw no need for a medical school, but he did recommend a “school of jurisprudence”—his earlier idea for a different kind of law school—and an “electrical school” to teach advanced engineering. He estimated the cost of these new ventures at $6.6 million; almost half of that sum would go to the Graduate College. Wilson closed the report by stressing how imperative it was to accomplish the tasks he had outlined: “I do not hesitate to say that the reputation and the very success of the University are staked on obtaining them soon.”8

  He was staking out a bold vision for Princeton, but for the time being he moved slowly and looked for money. He spent part of the summer of 1902 visiting haunts of the wealthy on the north shore of Massachusetts and in Maine to cultivate such potential donors as J. P. Morgan. Like other university presidents of the time, he also stalked the biggest educational benefactor of all, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Fund-raising was the part of his new job that he liked least. “To ask for money is unpalatable to any man’s spirit,” he confessed in a draft of a fund-raising letter, “even though he ask, not for himself, but for the best cause in the world.”9

  Home life also distracted him during his first months as president. Joseph Wilson had come to live with his older son’s family earlier in 1902. “He was ill much of the time and a large part of the nursing devolved upon Ellen,” her cousin Mary Hoyt recalled; Wilson’s sister Annie Howe also came to help. Wilson spent as much time as he could with his father, reading and singing hymns to him. Joseph Wilson died on January 21, 1903. “The blow of my father’s death has been very hard to me, and my spirits come back with difficulty,” he told one of his Princeton classmates. To Roosevelt, who had invited him to stay at the White House, he added, “I am for the time being in no spirits for pleasure. I feel, therefore, that I am relieving you of a sad guest in asking you not to expect me.”10

  Wilson’s cautious start also stemmed from his collegiality, another leadership trait that he would carry with him into public office. He knew what he did not know, and he wanted to assemble a staff of able, loyal lieutenants to advise and assist him. Science formed the biggest gap in his knowledge, and the natural choice both to handle the sciences and to be his second in command in university affairs was his friend from their undergraduate days—Harry Fine. In June 1903, Wilson chose Fine to be dean of the faculty, the second-ranking officer of the university. The lanky, deliberate mathematician made a natural complement to Wilson, and he was one of the first people to recognize how Wilson worked as a leader. He later told Wilson’s first biographer, “[I]t seems to have been his method throughout his life to make up his mind himself in regard to the larger policies of administration without much consultation with other people. Upon details he was always eager for advice.” Fine called him “a man of certainty” once he had made up his mind, observing that this trait “made him enemies, … yet it was one of the most powerful factors in his success. To be certain of anything in a world of doubt is to have one of the most powerful weapons that ever comes to the hand of man.”11 Fine excelled at picking promising scientists, and Wilson took part in recruiting them and other prospective faculty members, usually with a personal interview. He shone in these encounters with recruits, and his persuasiveness played a big role in enticing them to come to Princeton.

  Wilson also relied heavily on Jack Hibben. He appointed Hibben to head the most important faculty committees and leaned on him in dealing with administrative details, conferring with him daily. Later, when he fell ill and took a leave of absence, he named Hibben acting president.

  As dean of the Graduate School, Andrew West remained an independent power. Wilson seems to have distrusted West at the outset of his presidency; Bliss Perry later recalled him saying soon after he became president, “If West begins to intrigue against me as he did against Patton, we must see who is master.”12 Despite those misgivings, he found West friendly and cooperative, and the priority he placed on building a graduate college and improving graduate education guaranteed harmony between the two men for a while.

  During his first three years as president, Wilson concentrated on the changes that were easiest to make—beefing up the faculty and revamping the curriculum. In pursuing those goals, he revealed still another aspect of leadership that would carry over to public office: he made speeches to people he considered his key constituents—Princeton alumni. This was the part of the job he liked most. He hit the alumni circuit far more than Patton had done and sought to build a base of support for what he wanted to do. He also spoke at other colleges and universities and to educational groups in an effort to bolster Princeton’s visibility and broadcast his vision to a wider public. Securing a better faculty involved increasing th
e university’s size and recruiting distinguished scholars and scientists. The faculty grew from 108 at the beginning of Wilson’s presidency to 172 eight years later and became less inbred, with Princeton degree holders dropping as a share of the total from two thirds to less than half. Wilson also scrapped all notions about Presbyterian orthodoxy and hired the first Catholic and the first Jewish faculty members.13

  Faculty affairs caused the first friction between him and others at Princeton. Unlike Patton, who had solicited names for new hires from the trustees’ Curriculum Committee, Wilson often acted on his own. Some trustees complained, but he continued to initiate appointments, submitting them afterward to the committee for pro forma approval. He likewise pruned dead wood from the faculty ranks. Most of the lesser lights were older men whom he could ignore or let retire, but in several cases he pushed full professors into retirement because of bad classroom performance. This practice left hard feelings, but he made dismissals stick and proved that he was in earnest about faculty standards.

  Another aspect of improving the faculty dovetailed with reform of the curriculum. Princeton lagged behind other colleges and universities in establishing academic departments and organizing its curriculum along disciplinary lines, and Wilson changed that by organizing courses into “groups,” such as philosophy, classics, mathematics, English literature, and the natural sciences, with distribution requirements among the groups to ensure that students took “a well-considered liberal curriculum.”14 He also announced that the faculty would be organized into eleven departments, and he appointed chairmen, including West in Classics and Fine in Mathematics. His own department was to be called History and Politics. When the department later split in two, the second half remained Politics; it did not become Political Science, a term Wilson sometimes used but disliked.

  Nor was Wilson a detached overseer of student life. As he once noted, “Sometimes, when I go through the campus of Princeton at night, and see the brilliant display of lighted windows, I know perfectly well what is going on in those rooms. I have lived in those rooms myself.” He continued to teach throughout his presidency because he did not want “to lose this direct contact with the men, or the intellectual stimulation which comes from class room work.” He usually taught two courses each year, both in the second semester. He also remained approachable to students outside class, and he befriended several of the more serious and personable ones. Two such students were Raymond Fosdick and Norman Thomas, of the class of 1905; both were minister’s sons from small towns, serious scholars but lively, sociable young men with potential for leadership.15 In them, Wilson could see a later generation’s embodiment of himself. Such young men represented his ideal student, but he knew how exceptional they were and how little the prevailing atmosphere encouraged other students to be like them. A lack of seriousness about studies still bedeviled Princeton, and its “picnic” reputation and plethora of easy courses, locally known as pipes, had increased in recent years.

  Presbyterianism’s grip on Princeton had loosened, but the influences that were replacing it among the students boded no intellectual improvement. As part of a larger social trend, more and more sons of the wealthy were going to boarding schools and prestigious colleges. Matriculation at these colleges had become an upper-middle-class rite of passage that featured social connections, attendance at football games, and the frenetic pursuit of leisure and excitement. Princeton’s prevailing undergraduate style of dress—dirty corduroy trousers and a black sweater—tended to mask differences in wealth, but social distinctions were growing. McCosh had barred the Greek-letter fraternities that were proliferating on other campuses, but starting with the founding of the Ivy Club in 1879, “eating clubs” had come to play the same role of discriminating among students and introducing a universally acknowledged social hierarchy. After 1895, the eating clubs expanded in number and social importance, and President Patton had once allegedly boasted that he ran the best country club in America.16

  In seeking to promote intellectual seriousness at Princeton, Wilson had his work cut out for him. Although he would later fight against social discrimination, especially by the clubs, that was not his original or primary aim. His focus during his first years as president of Princeton was overwhelmingly, relentlessly intellectual. Besides putting the new curriculum and departmental organization in place and stalking prospective donors, particularly Andrew Carnegie, he continued to speak out about his vision of liberal education and Princeton’s leadership in the world. He also dealt with student affairs, including a case of a student who was caught cheating. The young man’s mother had reportedly come to plead for her son, claiming that she was about to undergo a serious operation and his expulsion might kill her. “You force me to say a hard thing,” Ellen’s cousin Mary Hoyt remembered Wilson saying, “but if I had to choose between your life or my life or anybody’s life and the good of this college, I should choose the good of the college.” Mary Hoyt also remembered Ellen telling her, “And he came home so white and ill that he could eat no lunch.”17

  By his third year as president, Wilson felt ready to prescribe stronger medicine to remedy the lack of intellectual seriousness. In February 1905, in a report to the trustees, he recommended the “tutorial system” that he had long advocated, which would combine the “advantage of the small college” with the “advantage of the great university [that] lies in its stimulating life.” He proposed to bring in a new corps of teachers to deal with “small groups of students, whose guides, counsellors, and friends they will be in their work,” and thereby “make a reading man of [the student] instead of a mere pupil receiving instruction.” Though intentionally short on specifics about this new system, he could not avoid the subject of money. He estimated that $2.5 million would be needed. “But,” he argued, “no more distinguished gift could be made to American education.” At the same time, he launched a committee of fifty wealthy alumni, headed by Cleveland Dodge, to raise the needed funds, and he went hunting for the men who would do the teaching. In a magazine article titled “The Princeton Preceptorial System,” Wilson proposed to gather faculty and students “into a common body … among whom a real community of interest, pursuit, and feeling will prevail.”18

  His enthusiasm drove the project forward. He interviewed nearly all of the candidates himself, thereby exposing them to his persuasiveness. Appointed in June 1905, the initial cohort of what the students dubbed the “fifty preceptor guys to make us wise” actually numbered forty-four, with two more, in mathematics, appointed in September. By any measure, it was a remarkable group. Thirty-seven of the preceptors held doctorates, only three of which were from Princeton, and many would go on to distinguished academic careers, most often at Princeton. Given the normally glacial pace of change and ingrained resistance to innovation prevailing in most academic institutions, Wilson pulled off a remarkable coup in getting the preceptorial system up and running so fast. Even more remarkable was its instant, unqualified success. All interested parties praised the experiment. The faculty was delighted, and as one of the three Princeton Ph.D.’s among the preceptors recalled, “This infusion of new blood was the best thing that ever happened to Princeton. The place was too inbred.” Even the undergraduates got caught up in the excitement; one who had been a freshman in 1905 recalled “that the intellectual life of Princeton was immediately quickened.”19

  Some of this seemed too good to be true, and it was. The system depended on the character and enthusiasm of the preceptors. Not all of them lived up to expectations, and small group tutorials did not work well in all fields. Fine recognized early that, except in mathematics, this approach did not apply to the sciences, and he diverted his preceptorial funds to laboratory instruction. The preceptorial system really depended on the inspiration provided by Wilson, and its greatest drawback was that the stimulation would wear off after this first blush of enthusiasm and would cool down in the absence of such inspired leadership. Nevertheless, the system did lift intellectual standards and expectatio
ns for years to come.

  It also gave Princeton lots of good publicity and made it more attractive to applicants who were bright, ambitious, and well connected. In 1907, there would be rumors that President Roosevelt’s second son, Kermit, might forsake his father’s and older brother’s alma mater, Harvard, for Princeton. Those rumors proved unfounded, but they gave a hint of how Princeton’s reputation was blossoming. The preceptorial system made Wilson the best-known college president in the country, and newspapers and magazines carried numerous stories about this dynamic academic leader. Such publicity was heady stuff, and it came on top of other successes. Yet Wilson did not neglect the more mundane, practical aspects of a university president. Financially, Princeton’s budget increased and ran deficits, a circumstance that evidently did not bother him greatly. He took an active interest in the university’s buildings, possibly under Ellen’s influence, and worked closely with Ralph Adams Cram, the country’s leading exponent of Gothic Revival architecture, on the design and construction of classrooms and dormitories. It was during his presidency that the campus began to acquire the features that have given Princeton its distinctive look.

  Nor did the athletic side of the university suffer under his leadership. Wilson remained a devoted fan of the football team, and in 1905 he joined with twelve other university presidents in an initiative of President Roosevelt’s to fend off agitation for the abolition of college football by reforming the rules of the game. That year, Princeton also opened its first golf course, and the next year saw the dedication of the most significant athletic facility built under Wilson’s presidency—Carnegie Lake. This lake, for rowing, was the only gift Wilson was able to wheedle out of the Scottish-born philanthropist, despite playing upon Witherspoon’s, McCosh’s, and Princeton’s Caledonian heritage. He had hoped for a library or money for the preceptorial system. Instead, in keeping with his pacifism and belief that football was warlike, Carnegie paid for a lake in order to promote rowing as a major college sport.