Wilson elected president of Princeton, June 9, 1902
On this day in 1902, the trustees of Princeton University unanimously elected Woodrow Wilson as the 13th president of the university since its founding in 1747. Wilson resigned in 1910 to run successfully for governor of New Jersey. As university president, Wilson displayed both an idealistic outlook and a lack of political acumen that also marked his service as the nation’s 28th president from 1913 to 1921.
Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879 and studied law at the University of Virginia for a year. He then attended Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a doctorate in political science in 1886. Wilson’s dissertation, “Congressional Government,” led to teaching positions at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan University and, finally, Princeton, where he became a professor of jurisprudence and political economy in 1890.
Students, attracted to Wilson by his warmth and high-mindedness, voted him most popular professor. During a sesquicentennial celebration in 1896, he delivered the keynote address, outlining his vision of a university’s role in a democratic nation.
As Princeton’s president, Wilson sought to curtail the influence of elitist “social clubs,” in the belief that they were smothering the undergraduates’ intellectual and moral life. Some wealthy and powerful alumni opposed these reforms. As a consequence, Wilson began to move to a more populist position on the political spectrum.
In a 1910 address to Princeton alumni, Wilson said: “While attending a recent Lincoln celebration, I asked myself if Lincoln would have been as serviceable to the people of this country had he been a college man, and I was obliged to say to myself that he would not. The process to which the college man is subjected does not render him serviceable to the country as a whole. It is for this reason that I have dedicated every power in me to a democratic regeneration.”
SOURCE: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS