The Making of Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the Present

Not Just Woodrow Wilson U

Reviewed by Marvin Lazerson

James Axtell. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2006.

The writing of American higher education history has been shaped by the tradition of great presidents. We think of William Rainey Harper’s University of Chicago, Charles William Eliot’s Harvard University, John Coit Gilman’s Johns Hopkins University, and M. Carey Thomas’s Bryn Mawr College. Recently, that tradition has been challenged, though not overturned, by such studies as Julie Reuben’s 1996 book, The Making of the Modern University, and W. Bruce Leslie’s Gentlemen and Scholars, published in 2005.

An excellent and exceedingly well-written book, James Axtell’s The Making of Princeton University: From Woodrow Wilson to the Present seeks to meld these two ways of viewing higher education’s past. Nonetheless, the book’s title could easily be “Princeton and the Long Shadow of Woodrow Wilson,” for the Princeton of the early twenty-first century is primarily an extension of Wilson’s vision: “If Princeton is one of the very best universities in the country, indeed the world, today, Wilson’s articulate goals, disciplined focus on its distinctive character, unlimited faith in its potential, and enduringly persuasive rhetoric are largely, though of course not entirely, responsible.”

As the university’s president for only eight years at the beginning of the twentieth century, Wilson “wanted Princeton to be modestly sized, devoted primarily to face-to-face undergraduate teaching, grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, and intellectually powerful; but above all else, he wanted it to be distinctive.” All of this has happened, Axtell argues, and much more, with the school becoming, in the course of the twentieth century, arguably the richest university in the world on a per capita basis. Along the way, Axtell shows how Princeton became different than Wilson might have imagined—open to people of color, coeducational, and internationally oriented—while traditions such as active engagement in intercollegiate athletic competitions and participation in eating clubs persisted.

To make his case that Princeton transformed itself during the twentieth century and to show how it did, Axtell takes the reader through a series of chapters on the shift of the faculty from “gentlemen to scholars”; the development of highly selective admissions (including the sorry history of racial and religious discrimination, the decision to admit undergraduate women, and the ambivalence over recruited athletes); curriculum and teaching changes; the extra- or co-curriculum (about which Wilson lamented in 1909, “the sideshows have swallowed up the circus”); student culture; the development of graduate education; and brief histories of the university’s libraries, its museum, and the Princeton University Press.

It is hard to imagine a better book on a single university. The Making of Princeton University is engagingly written, judicious in its use of materials, exceptionally well researched (here Axtell had the advantage of an outstanding archival collection), and wise in its understanding of how Princeton has become what it is. But to be genuinely enthusiastic about Axtell’s book, you have to accept his basic point of view. I do not for two reasons. The first is that he makes Wilson’s shadow unduly important as the hinge around which to write the twentieth-century history of Princeton. Whatever the “accuracy” of Wilson’s vision that Princeton should be both excellent and distinctive (and the rhetorical references to it over time), the actual development of the university is much better understood in the broader context of higher education. To take one obvious example, the extraordinary income returns to college graduates in comparison to high school graduates in the last half of the twentieth century and the additional earnings increment to graduates of selective institutions powerfully shaped what might be called “the Ivy-League-and-friends advantage.” That is one of the central facts of American higher education history and probably played a much greater role in what Princeton and its peers became than anything Wilson imagined. Princeton may be distinctive, but it still behaves more like its competitors than not.

My second dispute with Axtell’s point of view centers around his dismissal of “administrative” issues as so much clutter. He is correct that many histories of universities and colleges focus on the easily documented presidential administrations. Such histories do, as he says, “tend to give too much coverage to presidential plans, fund-raising campaigns, intramural conflicts, and building construction.” And Axtell’s determination to focus on education and not on the corporate institution makes this a special book. That said, the fact that Princeton owes much to its wealth—which is certainly one of its primary reasons for excellence and distinctiveness—suggests that fund raising was absolutely fundamental in its evolution. As Axtell notes, at the end of 2005, “each Princeton student had over $1.6 million of endowment behind him or her, by far the biggest bankroll in the country.” The major cause of that wealth was “the loyalty and open (and often deep) pockets of its now coeducated alumni.” How that happened is not administrative clutter.

One could make a similar point about administrative decision making. Certainly, one of the most notable trends of the last quarter of the twentieth century was the growth in administrative power and the stark diminution in faculty power. Some of this is undoubtedly related to the amounts of money on the table, particularly from private sources exerting much more oversight in its use. Much of the change is because of the greater complexity involved in managing what are often minicities and are now always corporate entities. Axtell’s view that “the faculty is the indispensable mind and soul of a university” may be what we would like to believe, but the faculty members make fewer and fewer of the primary decisions about the nature of the university. That means that to understand Princeton one would have to examine the nature of administration authority as it evolved over time and place that evolution against other universities and colleges. Axtell does not do that and the result is a less adequate understanding of its history.

Institutional history is rarely written as well as James Axtell’s The Making of Princeton University. It is a measure of how good his book is that my primary complaint centers around the book he did not write. Unfair, perhaps, but not inaccurate.

Marvin Lazerson is professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent books include The Education Gospel: the Economic Power of Schooling (2004, with W. Norton Grubb) and American Institutions of Democracy: the Public Schools (2005, with Susan Fuhrman).

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