A Split Decision

The Board of Trustees’ recent decision regarding the John Witherspoon statue merits both praise and criticism. Their refusal to remove or alter the statue is commendable. Dedicated by predecessor trustees in 2001 to honor Witherspoon, the statue should remain unchanged, regardless of artistic considerations. Recent scholarship has provided a more favorable historical understanding of Witherspoon’s relationship with slavery than was available in 2001, further justifying this decision.

Regrettably, the Trustees erred in delegating the fate of the Witherspoon statue to the Campus Art Steering Committee. Any alteration of the statue would constitute a damnatio memoriae of Witherspoon. An ominous portent in the Committee on Naming report is the troubling conflation of judgments about Witherspoon’s historical relation to slavery with those about the statue’s artistic merit.

For example, the report’s insistence (on page 41 and elsewhere) on “contextualization” (apparently a narrative devoted to Witherspoon’s relation to slavery) inappropriately influences its recommendations on the statue’s size and location. By the committee’s logic, the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial should be diminished likewise.

Furthermore, both the Trustees and the Committee on Naming disserved Princeton by failing to address the damaging falsehoods in the “John Witherspoon” essay of the Princeton & Slavery Project. This essay continues to misinform and misdirect public discourse, as evidenced even by the Committee’s report.  The latter approvingly cited Princeton Township’s 2020 decision to remove Witherspoon’s name from a middle school. The school’s petitioners mistakenly relied on false claims from the “John Witherspoon” essay, including the incorrect narrative that Witherspoon did not oppose slavery in the New Jersey legislature. Princeton professor Sean Wilentz’s research has since concluded that “Witherspoon not only upheld this pro-abolition view, he acted on it.”

Disturbingly, the Princeton & Slavery Project has not updated its content to reflect Wilentz’s findings or other contributions from the April 2023 symposium, “John Witherspoon in Historical Context.” I commented online in PAW last fall and wrote the Trustees in May about these and other issues on the University’s depictions of Witherspoon. Neither the Trustees nor the University administration, to their shame, have acted to address the wrongful and damaging depictions of Witherspoon by the Princeton & Slavery Project.

My 39-page complaint filed with the University’s CPUC Judicial Committee against President Eisgruber and the Princeton & Slavery Project detailed breaches of duty regarding the Witherspoon essay.  Filed last October, this complaint remains unaddressed by the Judicial Committee. This inaction, coupled with President Eisgruber’s and the trustees’ failures to act on these matters, raises fundamental and unanswered concerns about Princeton’s future commitment to historical accuracy, enforcement of its own rules, and fundamental fairness.

In conclusion, while the trustees made the right decision in preserving the Witherspoon statue for the moment, their handling of the surrounding issues and failure to address ongoing and damaging misrepresentations of the historical Witherspoon are deeply troubling. These actions and inactions pose significant challenges to Princeton’s academic integrity and its commitment to truth.