The school’s leadership would be foolish to reject a man of great character so important to its history.
The school’s leadership would be foolish to reject a man of great character so important to its history.
S ince 2001, a ten-foot-tall bronze statue of John Witherspoon, one of the country’s Founding Fathers, has towered over Firestone Plaza atop a seven-foot, seven-inch plinth with three tablets explaining his legacies as a patriot, president, and preacher, next to the main library on the campus of Princeton University. The administration is weighing a petition by some 286 (a pretty puny number, by the way) students and others to remove or relocate the statue because he owned two slaves. This, the petition says, gives people “a right to feel uncomfortable, to feel less at home.”
It is unknown how many of the tens of thousands of Princeton students who have walked past the statue have felt that way, or whether any of them were aware of the evidence that Witherspoon was an advocate of eventual abolition who expected to free his slaves by age 28, or that as a Presbyterian minister he had baptized a fugitive slave in Scotland, or that he was the only signer of the Declaration of Independence who was a clergyman and a college president, risking execution or prison if the American Revolution failed, or that some 40 of the other 52 signers also owned slaves, including George Washington, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin. A student said at a university listening session on the matter, “For a lot of black people, one of the first things they think when they see that statue is slavery.”
Witherspoon, a man of great courage, was the most important and dynamic early leader in bringing Princeton, a school that was in dire straits when he arrived in 1768 at age 45, after being recruited from Scotland, to prominence as a place of learning. He was the university’s sixth president, following five who together served 19 years. The current president, Christopher Eisgruber, is no John Witherspoon, as suggested by recent events, including Eisgruber’s gutting of Princeton’s nominally strong rule protecting free speech.
Removal of the Witherspoon statue would be a big step further down the cancel-culture road. On June 26, 2020, at Eisgruber’s behest, during the moral panic following the murder four weeks earlier of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the board of trustees had already decided to strip the name of Woodrow Wilson, another consequential president of Princeton (1902–10), from the School of Public and International Affairs. That reversed a board decision, four years earlier, not to remove his name.
Wilson was a racist who as president of the United States segregated the civil service in 1913. Witherspoon’s ownership of two slaves 119 years earlier and his opposition to immediate emancipation did nothing to make things worse for African Americans. Arguably he tried to make things better by, for example, baptizing the fugitive slave, teaching free blacks at Princeton, and proposing a New Jersey law to free, at age 28, slaves who were born after the law’s adoption.
“While we might wonder about the consistency of writing against slavery while later owning slaves, Witherspoon likely reasoned, as he explained in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy, that releasing those already in slavery ‘would make them free to their own ruin,’” explains Kevin DeYoung, a North Carolina pastor who wrote his doctoral dissertation on him, in an article for the Princetonians for Free Speech website. “In his last will and testament (written in 1793 and executed upon his death in 1794), the final line lists at £200: “2 Slaves supposed to be worth until they are 28 years of age”—perhaps “a hint that Witherspoon and his wife intended to manumit their two slaves, perhaps even in the near future.”
After the woke take down Witherspoon, if they succeed, who might be next? Maybe President (of the United States) James Madison, Founding genius and drafter of the First Amendment? A Princeton graduate (1771), Madison stayed on an extra year to study under Witherspoon and lends his name to the university’s James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service. He had far more than two slaves. Would Princeton spare the two iconic paintings of George Washington — with his hand on a cannon and with the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was then known, in the background during the Battle of Princeton, and at ease after winning it — by Charles Willson Peale, who himself experienced the battle firsthand? Professor and leading free-speech advocate Robert P. George, Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, sees the push to evict Witherspoon as an opportunity for advocates of woke ideology to show that they, the virtuous, are now in charge. He calls it “an effort to separate the University from its past,” which its detractors see as corrupt to the core.
Princeton’s website lists the names of the ten members of its “Naming Committee,” which controls the “listening sessions” on the fate of Witherspoon, conducted by people who (some listeners suggest) appear to have made up their minds not to listen to the unwoke. The deck already seemed stacked. The committee’s members include Princeton professor Angela Creager, interim chair; LaTanya Buck, dean for diversity and inclusion, in the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life; and Hilary A. Parker, vice president and secretary. Parker is very close to Eisgruber, who controls the virtue-seeking board of trustees and seems very fearful of crossing the woke, perhaps including Princeton’s DEI bureaucracy.
Speaking of which, the website lists, in the “sits with the committee” category, Michele Minter, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity; Shawn Maxam, senior associate director for institutional diversity and inclusion; and Kevin Heaney, vice president for advancement. Minter and Eisgruber have within the past year issued separate rulings to eviscerate Princeton’s pro-free-speech policy, which Eisgruber pretends to support. Only three of the 13 were educated at Princeton, the website indicates.
It is people such as these who have taken control of higher education in America. Stay tuned for details on Harvard University’s brand-new president-designate Claudine Gay. Not to mention uber-woke Yale president Peter Salovey.
Fortunately, one George F. Will has shouldered the task of smiting the woke, as only he can do, in the Witherspoon context. The headline: “Wokeness in all of its self-flattering moral vanity comes for a statue at Princeton.”
The Naming Committee should give careful consideration to the fact that the Witherspoon statue was installed in its prominent place with the strong support of widely respected President Harold Shapiro (1988–2001), who attended the dedication of the statue in Scotland, where an identical statue still stands, and the board of trustees. The university paid approximately $200,000 for it.
Eisgruber should respect Shapiro’s legacy and beware the decline in recent years of his own reputation in non-woke circles. He should support adding to the plinth a fourth tablet explaining Witherspoon’s ownership of slaves — and advocacy of eventual abolition — to the three tablets that explain his legacies as a patriot, president, and preacher. And Eisgruber should leave the statue where it is.