The school put up a bizarre plaque about Wilson and the Black Justice League

In response to November’s #OccupyNassau protests, the Black Justice League’s demands, and President Eisgruber’s signed agreement to begin answering those demands, the school has quietly erected an enigmatic plaque commemorating – or, um, mentioning – the recent events.

The plaque resides in 1879 Hall, one of the brick buildings tucked away up on the lawn above Frist.

Unless you’re in the Philosophy Department (the building is theirs), you’ve probably never heard of 1879 – it’s the one with the arch you pass through on the way to the Street, the one that hosts tons of arch sings.

But the important part is the fact the building is named after the graduating class that contained – yep, you guessed it – Woodrow Wilson.

Inside, the building hosts an odd, shrine-like memorial to Wilson’s class which contains a stairway leading to nowhere, a door that’s attached to nothing, a plaque, and a fire alarm.

There is no explanation for the door’s significance, other than that it “stood at one of the main entrances to 1879 Hall up until 2014,” and a note that Wilson sometimes used to work there, at some other part of the building, at some other point in time.

The really peculiar part of the memorial though, is a sentence that was just added to the revised plaque.

It says: “Wilson’s legacy on campus was called into question by the Black Justice League in protests that led to the occupation of Nassau Hall in 2015.”

The note is a cryptic non sequitur, awkwardly squeezed into the end of a brief history lesson about the building’s development. It makes no mention of the purpose behind the protests, the BJL’s demands, nor the reason Wilson’s legacy was scrutinized.

Here’s the full message:

In the letter President Eisgruber and his staff members signed on November 19th, they pledged to “initiate conversations concerning the present legacy of Woodrow Wilson on this campus.”

If this is the university’s first attempt at initiating those conversations, it’s a pretty weak one. The message – whose rhetoric is so deliberately vague and uninformative that it may as well not be there at all – is unlikely to appease BJL supporters or even their opposition.

Eisgruber has expressed that the university needs to do more to educate the Princeton community about Wilson’s positive legacy as well as his negative one – this plaque addresses neither.

To an uniformed tourist hoping to pick up a little Princeton history at the 1879 arch, the post essentially reads, “Woodrow Wilson used to work in this building. We think certain things about Woodrow Wilson. However, other people think other things about Woodrow Wilson!”

Hats off to Princeton for bringing unprecedented social change to the bottom of a four-by-nine inch wall sticker, in the form of a footnote that dozens of visiting moms are sure to skim over during parents’ weekend. Slow clap.