The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson

This book is a collection of nine essays analyzing Woodrow Wilson's career as an educator and, especially, his vision of higher education and its place in American life. The editor, James Axtell, suggests that Wilson's academic work has received too little attention from historians, and he points out that of the approximately four thousand items in a recent bibliography of the scholarship on Wilson, only about 7 percent are devoted to his early years and educational career—80 percent of Wilson's life. A few weeks before his death, Axtell adds, Wilson revealed that he thought his greatest “contribution to his generation ... was in connection not so much with his political work as with his activities as a teacher and college administrator” (p. 2). The essays in many ways bear out Wilson's assessment. They portray him as a unique leader in the reorganization of American higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike contemporaries who wanted American universities to focus more on specialized, technical education or to emulate the German model of graduate research, Wilson argued for the importance of a broad liberal arts education designed for undergraduates. The goal of the university should be to give undergraduates “the spirit of learning”; the object of a liberal education, he insisted, was “the discipline and enlightenment of the mind” (p. 33). Wilson sought to make Princeton University an exemplar of this vision, as he sharply increased the size and quality of the faculty, reorganized the curriculum, and introduced a preceptorial system of young faculty tutoring students in small groups. The students who emerged from Princeton's community of learning, Wilson hoped, would become the next generation of U.S. leaders. After 1898 and the emergence of America as an imperial power, Adam R. Nelson argues in his essay, Wilson saw liberal education as “a project of preparing future leaders to spread the ideals and institutions of the United States to every corner of the earth” (p. 59

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