Woodrow Wilson, in his time as a professor and then university president at Princeton, may have made the strongest case for producing leaders through a combination of a technical and a humanistic education. In doing so, the future politician also gave a strong clue as to where today’s obsession with leadership comes from.
Wilson was fascinated from the beginning of his career in the 1870s by the problem of the leader. With the rise of mass society, he argued, it had become necessary “to organize democracy” by means of a “consummate leader.” For such individuals, “men are as clay”; in their hands, society promised to be “led at last into self-consciousness and self-command.” For Wilson, leadership was not simply a matter of party politics or government administration. There was also a “touch of statesmanship,” he wrote, in engineering and business. The “captains of industry” of the past, mere small businessmen in comparison with the gargantuan manufacturers of the late nineteenth century, had moved up the ranks to become what Wilson celebrated as “generals in command of the forces of mankind.”
Yet Wilson was troubled by the educational tendencies of his time. The new approach to graduation requirements after the abandonment of a curriculum dominated by Greek and Latin was a focus on “electives,” which allowed students to focus almost entirely in the sciences if they liked. But a purely scientific education, Wilson argued, threatened to make a mere “tabula rasa of a man’s mind”; the sciences did nothing to prepare students for the chief danger of the late nineteenth century: socialism. “To hear the agitators talk, you would suppose that righteousness was young and wisdom but of yesterday,” Wilson joked. The task of the university, then, was “making this nonsense ridiculous.” The turn to science in college education was especially worrisome because what made “modern socialism … dangerous,” Wilson feared, was that “its methods are scientific and … the age is also scientific.” From Saint-Simon to Marx and Engels to the US Socialist Party, radicals on the left had found in science a source of progress that had been co-opted by the owners of property but, they insisted, could be repurposed for public ends. This was why, as Wilson put it, a “revolution conceived and led in the scientific spirt” promised “utter destruction.” For Wilson, only a truly liberal education based in literature and history offered students the understanding necessary to oppose the scientific and socialistic “waves of materialism” breaking across the bow of his time.