Should the bronze statue of the Rev. John Witherspoon, put up at Princeton University with great fanfare as recently as 2001, be removed from its prominent position on campus? Yes, according to a petition drafted in May 2022 by five members of the University’s Philosophy department—four graduate students and one professor—and ultimately signed by 285 people, including nine professors (seven of them in Philosophy), before it was presented in September of that year to the Council of the Princeton University Community Committee on Naming, whose ambit includes “changes to campus iconography” as well as renaming.

　　The problem is that Witherspoon (1723–94) was more—some would say conspicuously less—than the sixth president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), the only active clergyman (Presbyterian) and the only college president to sign the Declaration of Independence, and at some level the “grandfather” of the Constitution on account of having taught James Madison. He also “participated actively in the enslavement of human beings, and used his scholarly gifts to defend the practice”—or so the petitioners say.

　　The Princeton administration has been expending considerable energy on what, if anything, to do about the statue. For example, two “Witherspoon Symposia” were held on campus in 2023, and at the end of November, the University announced that there would be a series of “listening sessions” for stakeholders, from undergraduates to alumni, to share their views. Because the culture wars are very much in progress, the controversy has attracted wide outside attention, including sharp attacks on Princeton by George F. Will in the Washington Post (headline: “Wokeness in All Its Self-flattering Moral Vanity Comes for a Statue at Princeton”) and Stuart Taylor Jr. in National Review.

　　It is unclear when the administration will announce a decision on Witherspoon’s fate, but sometime this spring seems likely. To those in charge, as well as everyone else, I strongly recommend reading the essays that arose from the first Symposium, now published in the January 2024 issue of Theology Today, which include ones by Sean Wilentz and Kevin DeYoung. The former writes of “Witherspoon’s connection to the travail of abolitionist politics” that it was “not dishonorable or worthy of censure. Not even close. If anything, overall, it deserves quiet praise.” And the latter has done more than anyone else to assess what remains a question both important and vexing, namely what exactly Witherspoon’s relationship was to the two African-born slaves, John Quamime and Bristol Yamma, he is regularly charged with owning.

　　Whatever you may think of the issues, it says something remarkable about the state of the country that a commemorative statue erected in this millennium and unveiled with no controversy whatsoever at a ceremony at which Princeton’s eighteenth and nineteenth presidents (Harold T. Shapiro and Shirley M. Tilghman) spoke should already be subject to the progressive juggernaut. It is impossible not to wonder who—and which artistic representation of whom—will be the next target.

　　When I was a professor at Princeton, I used to pass by the statue many times each day since it was—and for now still is—positioned almost directly outside one of the entrances to East Pyne Hall, the building that houses the Department of Classics, where I taught from 1998 (before the statue existed!) to 2022. And I probably examined it more closely than most, not least because for some years early in my career I held a plum title for junior faculty: “John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor.”

　　Still, I have never cared for the statue or for its position so close to East Pyne. For want of a better verb, it looms—and looms gloomily, too.

　　This brings me to four years ago, when, on the 244th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a group of faculty members at Princeton promulgated a document, addressed to the University administration, that quickly became a cultural flashpoint: the now-infamous “Faculty Letter” about “anti-Blackness.” One of the requests was a harbinger of the newer petition: to “[c]ommit fully to anti-racist campus iconography, beginning with the removal of the John Witherspoon statue.” (I stress that the laundry list of claims, demands, and requests in the July 4th letter is far more problematic than the newer petition about the Witherspoon statue, which, for all that I don’t like it, is undeniably narrowly focused and tightly worded.)

　　Here’s what I wrote in response:

　　Since I don’t care for this statue or its placement in front of the building in which I have my office, I would not be sad if it were moved away—but emphatically not because of Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was a major figure in Princeton and American history with a complex relationship to slavery. There is no reason for me to say more: Innumerable sensible people have commented on the impossibility that anyone can pass the Purity Test. Someone who passes today will not pass tomorrow.

　　I meant every word. At the same time, I wouldn’t write the first sentence exactly the same way now because it just didn’t occur to me in 2020 that there was any chance that the statue would be moved. I was naive. In short, while I still wouldn’t be sad on aesthetic grounds if Princeton moved the Witherspoon statue, it would have been better if I hadn’t spoken about the matter at all.

　　John Witherspoon was “careful not to protect students from exposure to ideas that were in conflict with his own strong convictions.”

　　There are many things I did not imagine just a few years back. I did not imagine that statues of Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt in my native Manhattan would be removed from City Hall and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), respectively, or that even George Washington might be on the chopping block. Nor did I imagine that Princeton, which used to be bucolic, would build in the center of campus a “new museum [that] bears a striking similarity to an immense air conditioner”—designed, embarrassingly, by Sir David Adjaye, whose name must no longer be mentioned—or two new brutalist residential colleges with “bubblegum pink furniture meant to encourage ‘childhood dreams.’”

　　In her presentation at the second of the Witherspoon Symposia, Professor Rachael Z. DeLue of Princeton’s Art Archaeology department, who has discussed the Witherspoon statue in classes for two decades, stated that “many of [her students] are convinced that it is not a work of art” (18:31 here)—or, according to a student reporter who was present, “a really bad one.” And she herself concurs in this judgment: “Maybe it’s a work of art, but it’s a really bad one. It’s poorly executed. The technique is shoddy. … It’s just a bad work of art.” Perhaps, although one student present at the unveiling in 2001 wrote at the time, “I have to admit that the sculpture is beautiful. Everyone in the crowd seemed to agree.”

　　In any case, given what else is happening on Princeton’s campus, it is difficult to take seriously the University’s claim that one of the reasons to consider “remov[ing] the Witherspoon statue relates to the work’s unique aesthetic considerations.” And as for the idea that “campus style may call for greater subtlety,” I agree—but for the man responsible for approving the immense air conditioner and bubblegum pink furniture, University Architect Ron McCoy, to argue the point at the second Witherspoon Symposium (as the same student reporter says he did) does not pass the laugh test.

　　Meanwhile, I am now happily employed at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and have begun exploring Washington, DC. The city is of course filled with statues and other monuments, many of which people don’t even notice as they go about their daily lives. As it happens, one of these statues is of John Witherspoon—and it is located just a block from AEI in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. I am embarrassed to say that although I had passed it dozens of times, I had never looked at it or known that the man on the plinth was Witherspoon until my colleague John Fortier happened to mention this to me.

　　It’s a good statue, or so I think. The work of William Couper, this monument to Witherspoon was commissioned by a group of Presbyterians who had formed the Witherspoon Memorial Association in 1907, with John W. Foster (grandfather of the Princetonians John Foster Dulles and Allen W. Dulles) as its chairman. It was erected in 1909 at a ceremony where another now-suspect president of Princeton (the thirteenth), one Woodrow Wilson, gave an address; in 1978, it and thirteen other figures that form the American Revolution Statuary were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (A curious aside: one of Couper’s other statues was of Morris K. Jesup. Besides being a member of the Witherspoon Memorial Association, Jesup, who died in 1908, was the third president of the AMNH. His statue used to stand in the foyer of the Museum but, like the one of Teddy Roosevelt before the main entrance on Central Park West, is no longer there. I have not been able to discover what happened to it.)

　　By an act of Congress, Couper’s statue of Witherspoon was placed on public land in front of what was then the Church of the Covenant and later became the National Presbyterian Church (NPC). (Another aside: the church was designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, who was also the architect for part of the AMNH.) But in 1966, the church was torn down—this has been described as one of Washington’s “greatest losses in historic religious structures”—and replaced by a wholly uninteresting office building.

　　The NPC then moved to its present, less central location on Nebraska Avenue. The modernist complex, whose cornerstone another Ivy League president-turned President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, laid in 1967, occupies considerable space. No statue of one of the most famous early American Presbyterians is to be found there, but this was not for want of at least some effort. In 1976, the NPC asked Congress to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to allow Coupers statue to be moved to its new complex, but the Commission of Fine Arts unanimously rejected the idea, stating that the Dupont Circle location is “visually prominent” and that moving it to “the remote site of the Presbyterian Headquarters on private land would diminish the public value of the work.” Instead, the chairman of the Commission, J. Carter Brown, reported the recommendation that “a copy be made at private expense and erected on a suitable site” on the new NPC grounds. I do not know why the recommendation appears never to have been acted on.

　　Unfortunately, the Witherspoon statue in Washington is not in fact visually prominent. It is located at the awkward intersection of Connecticut Avenue, 18th Street, and N Street, on a small triangle of land few people would ever have reason to walk to. And so Witherspoon stands there mostly alone, Bible in hand. Some days I stop by to say hello to him and to commiserate about what has become of Princeton University, where, to quote from the University’s official page about his presidency, he was “careful not to protect students from exposure to ideas that were in conflict with his own strong convictions.”