Making the University Safe for Democracy, 1902-1910

The service of institutions of learning is not private but public,” Woodrow Wilson proclaimed at his inauguration as Princeton University’s thirteenth president. “Princeton for the Nation’s Service,” the title of Wilson’s 1902 inaugural address, captured his vision of Princeton’s mission. The nation, Wilson believed, desperately needed the university. The nation and its affairs, he observed, continued to “grow more and more complex” as a result of industrialization and bureaucratization. Furthermore, as successive waves of non-Protestant and non- Anglo-Saxon immigrant groups—”the more sordid and hapless elements” of southern Europe, as he described them elsewhere—congregated in the nation’s growing cities, Wilson, like other Protestant leaders of his day, feared that America’s democratic society stood on the verge of chaos. The very fabric of American society seemed to be ripping apart under the weight of ethnic and religious diversity. Like other educators of the day, Wilson envisioned the modern university’s playing a crucial role in ordering the nation’s business and political affairs and shaping the aspirations and values of the American people. A university education, Wilson explained, was “not for the majority who carry forward the common labor of the world” but for those who would lead the nation and mold the “sound sense and equipment of the rank and file.” The university’s task was twofold: “the production of a great body of informed and thoughtful men and the production of a small body of trained scholars and investigators.” The latter function gave the university a larger civic mission than a college. According to Wilson’s vision, Princeton would not train “servants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a profession.” By enlarging the minds of students and giving them a “catholic vision” of their social responsibilities, Princeton instead would cultivate “citizens” who would live under the “high law of duty.” “Every American university,” Wilson concluded, “must square its standards by that law or lack its national title.” Wilson’s inauguration appeared to confirm the New York Sun’s assessment of his election: “the secularization of our collegiate education grows steadily more complete.”