University’s Name Review Board points to former president’s ‘racist views,’ ‘segregation of federal workspaces’
Johns Hopkins University is preparing to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from a fellowship program and recontextualize its use on a residence hall entryway.
The decision by the university’s Committee to Establish Principles on Naming and Name Review Board, created in 2020, is being met with criticism both on and off campus.
The board came to the decision on Oct. 24 after a year long deliberation, according to the Hub, Johns Hopkins’ news website.
It recommended that the former president’s name be removed entirely from the Woodrow Wilson Research Fellowship, which will be renamed the University Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
The board additionally advised that Wilson’s name stay up on the Alumni Memorial Residence I Wilson House entryway but that context should be added.
“Both recommendations have been approved by the university’s board of trustees,” the Hub reports.
The university media relations office did not respond to two emails this week, asking when the changes will be made and how the Wilson House entryway will be “contextualiz[ed],” as the committee recommended.
The board based its decision, in part, on what it considered to be Wilson’s negative impact on Black Americans.
These included his “segregation of federal workspaces in Washington, D.C.,” “racist views and writings,” and “tenure as president of Princeton University during which he used his administrative authority to ensure the study body remained white and male,” as reported by the Hub.
The College Republicans group at Johns Hopkins called the name change “a pointless effort” in an emailed statement last week to The College Fix.
“Efforts to rename a research fellowship or disgrace our founder serve only to fuel the toxic, grievance-perpetuating cancel culture mindset—a mindset that does nothing but fill the pockets of opportunistic faculty and feed the conceited egos of so-called ‘social justice warriors,’” the statement read.
“They accomplish nothing but erase history, relitigate disputes, and deepen our divisions,” the group stated. “America’s history has never been perfect, but it has always strived to be.”
“Instead of wasting time and energy on uninspired symbolic gestures, the University should reinvest that time and energy into improving the material well-being of its students,” it stated.
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The College Republicans also mentioned that since the Black Lives Matter “riots, the University has also disgraced the name of its own founder Johns Hopkins, an avowed Quaker, on a tenuous and dubious ‘scholarship’ that he was a slave owner.”
This was referring to a 2020 article in which Martha Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins, told The New York Times the university’s founder owned slaves. However, the student Republicans’ group pointed The Fix to a research study and other documentation that refutes Jones’ assertions.
A historian outside of Johns Hopkins criticized the decision to remove Wilson’s name, too.
Mary Grabar, a historical scholar and author of “Debunking The 1619 Project,” called the Name Review Board “Orwellian” and said it “should be dissolved” in an email to The Fix.
“I disagree with the Name Review Board’s characterization of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘accomplishments’… The League of Nations would have imperiled American sovereignty. The Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission gave too much power to the federal government,” Grabar said.
“The ‘contextualization’ at the AMR I Wilson House entry seems problematic and biased toward a progressive agenda,” she said. “It is an insult to impose a statement written by committee on students telling them what is good or bad about a namesake.”
Grabar herself has a negative opinion of President Wilson, telling The Fix she believes he was “a bad president because of his defiance of the Constitution, promotion of the income tax, growth of government, eugenics, and rule by the expert class. I also disagree with his policy of instituting segregation.”
However, “I also acknowledge that Wilson, as an influential two-term president, is part of our national identity. You can no more change the identity of a nation than you can change the identity of a person,” Grabar said.
“Wilson’s name should stay,” she said.
Last year, the university also scrubbed the name of Caroline Donovan from a professorship program due to her connection to slavery.
Currently, its Name Review Board is considering removing two other historical figures’ names from campus: a monument to Sidney Lanier and a professorship named after Basil Gildersleeve, the university’s first appointed faculty member.
In 2020, Princeton University also dropped Woodrow Wilson’s name from a public policy school and student residence, The Fix reported at the time. The reasons university leaders gave included the former president’s “segregationist policies” and “racism.”
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IMAGE: Whitehouse.gov
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