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that drives institutions of “higher” learning to this day. There is a sweet irony in the fact that the virulently racist Wilson was the prime mover in a progressive movement that is directly responsible for the hypersensitive, multicultural, and “trigger-warned” college campuses of today.
    While he’s had some competition through the years, Wilson remains the most “academic” of any U.S. president. After a short stint at North Carolina’s Davidson College, Wilson enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he graduated in 1879. He also briefly attended the University of Virginia Law School butsoon abandoned practicing law. In 1883,he received his doctorate in political science and history from the recently formed Johns Hopkins University.
    Wilson had been a student for more than a decade, so it was surely time to leave academia behind for the world of business, right? Of course not. Instead, he went into teaching, bouncing from Cornell to Bryn Mawr to Wesleyan and then finally back to Princeton as a professor and, eventually, as its president.
    It wasn’t until 1910, when he was in his fifties, that Wilson eventually got his first “real” job—if you consider being governor of New Jersey a real job (after Jon Corzine and Chris Christie, I have my doubts). Just two years later, a man who had spent more than three decades with his head in the academic clouds (and not one day in private enterprise) became president of the United States.
    But let’s be clear on something: Wilson defied the absentminded-professor stereotype. He was no bookish wallflower. Quite the contrary, he was a powerful speaker with a rich baritone voice. His students worshipped him. But he was also cold, calculating, and power-hungry from a very early age. (As a child, he printed up calling cards reading “Woodrow Wilson, United States Senator from Virginia.”)
    Wilson didn’t spend decades in academia simply to learn. To him, higher education was a tool to hone a new philosophy of American government led by Hegelian experts focusing on the collective instead of the individual, an elite cadre of intellectuals at the helm working to perfect society. Wilson plotted to be the captain of that ship.
    His time at Johns Hopkins only helped cement his big-government attitudes. Many of that university’s early professors were German-trained. Through them—particularly the influentialearly progressive economist Richard Ely—Wilson lapped up an admiration for Prince Otto von Bismarck and the powerful new authoritarian German welfare state. He also imbibed a belief in Darwinism, concluding that amore powerful, centralized government wascritical to society’s evolution.
    It all added up to an absolute infatuation with governmental power. “If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson,” observed historian Walter McDougall, “it is this: he loved, craved, and in a senseglorified power.”
    Wilson was passionate and ambitious—and also quite arrogant. In 1886, as a young Bryn Mawr professor, he wrote, “[A]ll the country needs is a new andsincere body of thought in politics.” Wilson had earlier made a “solemn covenant” with a friend in which the co-conspirators swore “that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion . . . that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking andenlisting them in our purposes.”
    These new “sentiments” and “ways of thinking” amounted to an entire rejection of the American experiment in limited government and classical liberalism. According to historian Charles R. Kesler, as “an undergraduate, graduate student, professor, and university president, Wilson