As an ardent fan of both Parker and Hepburn, I wonder if the reference to the spectrum from E to P gives a nod to Dorothy Parker’s devastating comment on Katharine Hepburn’s performance in 1934′s “The Lake:” “Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

You have again lifted my spirits–this time with your knowledge and thoughtfulness about Woodrow Wilson–and the facility with which you convey your thinking. Equally impressive is your ability to relate your own cultural and geographical place of origin with living in Pavilion II and laboring at Jefferson’s unique, sometimes quirky, university. And finally, you continue to notice and remark about John Casteen’s remarkable awareness of Jefferson’s intentions for the University, and his uncanny ability to see a few high-quality Jeffersonian notions installed and operating on the Grounds–such as AccessUVA.

As I wrote in my remembrance, “On Scholarship: from an Empty Room at Princeton,” the folks around Nassau Hall were ‘way behind the diversity curve when I entered there in 1953; happily people such as Bill Bowen came along to pick up where Wilson left off. Thus, as you write, “Since his time there, Princeton overcame the elitism and privilege of that century-old era, to become not just a great university dedicated to scholarly excellence, but one of extraordinary diversity. Mr. Wilson would have been proud.”

No question in my mind, both Wilson and Jefferson would be proud of Meredith Jung-En Woo. Me too!

Thank you for your response. Any examination of historic leadership is, as you say, incredibly complicated. But I want to raise two questions: First, what responsibilities does a leader have when he/she brings new kinds of power to bear? Wilson, like President George W. Bush, had a messianic view of American democracy and chose to break precedents to bring that to the world. I might argue that in both cases this “good intention” came with such little understanding of the world – and such blind spots to human cultural differences – that it seems (almost) intentional. When we see how Wilson behaved toward Asians, toward Africans, toward Catholics – all of whom had access to the “same information” of the time period and had come to expect something near equal treatment (see “Peacemaking 1919″), we have a right to look for motivation. And in looking for motivation we see that not just in national terms, but in personal terms, Wilson was “behind the curve” on race and gender, fitting solidly into the most conservative camp in the nation. Can we celebrate his accomplishments in building “the modern university” if his intention was an exclusive university (at a time when that was a specific social choice)? I am not sure.

Equally, secondly, I am unsure of our responsibilities to our own personal heritages as academics, as researchers. We all have the right to pursue our own personal agendas and we all have the responsibility to follow what we see as academic truth, and yet, the purpose of diversity in the academy is not just a variety of skin colors sitting in offices, but rather to bring diversity of collective experience into research and teaching.

So, Woodrow Wilson was considered one of America’s worst Presidents during the 1920s and 1930s for political reasons (a worthless war, a “lost generation,” a missed opportunity for many reforms). He was rehabilitated by FDR influenced academics (and film-makers) in the 1940s and 1950s for very specific political reasons (some quite valuable in my mind), and he is a subject of a grand debate now, again for political reasons. So it was not my intention to demean you about the dinner remark, but more a question of what brings an Asian Woman to his defense. You, of course, have every right to tell me that the question is not material.

Thanks again for the thoughtful conversation.

Your points are well taken and I agree with much of what you say.

Wilson was complicated, in being part of and also abetting the limitations of his time, particularly regarding race, yet he also saw beyond other limitations — like a world under no adequate form of international law. In that complexity he was similar to Jefferson’s own contradictions, not different. I certainly wasn’t apologizing for the racism of the time — in which Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously implicated (disparaging native Americans) and capable of transcending (regarding discrimination against Japanese-Americans) — but trying to point out that most Americans of the time, including leading “experts” on race difference, divided the world into invidious racial categories.

Finally, I would say that my ethnicity and gender are not material to what I wrote, in part because discrimination against Asians and against women still continues, if in more subtle ways than in Wilson’s time (whether or not he might have invited me to dine).

None of that is “Jeffersonian.” Jefferson saw beyond the limitations of his age. Wilson carried a post-Civil War Klan perspective from the past into his present. There is no nobility in that.