On Friday, November 3, the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Committee on Naming held a symposium entitled “Monuments, Memory, and the John Witherspoon Statue.” According to a poster advertising the event, it was held to “explore memorialization, monuments in American art history, and the university campus as a space and a community” in relation to the ongoing debate surrounding a campus statue of John Witherspoon, the University’s sixth president and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The statue has lately been the subject of controversy, given Witherspoon’s participation in slavery. During the event, many of the invited speakers raised the possibility of removing or replacing the Witherspoon statue, which currently stands in Firestone Plaza.
This symposium marks the third public CPUC event to consider the possibility of removing the statue. The CPUC is empowered to consider any “general issue related to the welfare of the University” and make recommendations related to University policy. Its membership consists of Princeton faculty members, staff, students, and alumni.
Deliberations regarding the future of the statue were initiated in 2022 in response to a petition demanding that the statue be removed and replaced with “an informational plaque which details both the positive and negative aspects of Witherspoon’s legacy.” Signatories argued that the statue’s presence causes students discomfort, given that Witherspoon “participated actively in the enslavement of human beings, and used his scholarly gifts to defend the practice.” The CPUC subsequently held listening sessions on the issue for students, faculty, and alumni in November 2022 and a symposium that continued the discussion in April 2023.
The Friday symposium began with an introduction by Professor Beth Lew-Williams, Chair of the CPUC. Lew-Williams summarized the findings of the April symposium and reviewed Witherspoon’s legacy as a leader in the struggle for American independence and an advocate for gradual abolition.
The first speaker, Rachael DeLue, Chair of Princeton’s Art and Archaeology Department, discussed the artistic merit of the Witherspoon statue and how students are likely to perceive it. DeLue recently taught the course “America Then and Now” (AMS 101), which focuses on the Witherspoon statue, its history, and its worth on Princeton’s campus.
DeLue argued that “all works of art, including monuments and memorials, tell a story.” She offered one possibility of how to deal with controversial statues: install a new statue that upends conventions of memorialization and represents more diverse subjects. DeLue pointed to Rumors of War as an example, a statue that portrays a young black man on horseback wearing sneakers and a hoodie.
According to DeLue, most of her students consider Witherspoon a man who “did, in fact, know better” than to hold slaves. They also agreed that, from a technical perspective, the statue is either “not a work of art” or “a really bad one.” Though DeLue argued that removing the statue is preferable, the purpose of removing the statue is not “erasing Witherspoon from the history of Princeton,” but rather about mitigating “the [harmful] work that the statue does on campus.” She noted by comparison how, when the artist Kehinde Wiley visited Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA, “the experience as a Black man was terrifying to him.”
The next speaker, Patricia Kim, an art historian and NYU assistant professor, also made the case for removing the statue. She began her speech by acknowledging universities’ efforts to “take accountability” for their historic role in perpetuating “racist, antisemitic, or Islamophobic beliefs.” In this context, she urged the importance of carefully weighing which figures we represent in public memorials because “monuments are statements of power and presence in public space.”
Kim cited research showing that, of the top 50 figures represented in American memorials, 88 percent are white and male. Given the “privileged” backgrounds of the figures in most historic monuments, Kim stated that “we need to support a profound shift in representation to better acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of this country’s history, and certainly of Princeton University’s history.” She suggested that Princeton use an empty pedestal for temporary exhibits and art displays – as has been done in other instances when statues were taken down – or replace Witherspoon with a more diverse figure.
In the Q&A section, an audience member who described herself as a classical art historian asked Kim about “the epistemological stakes of… reshaping history” and if removing the statue was similar to “the ancient practice of damnatio memoriae,” erasing the record of a historical figure reviled by the ruling power. Kim replied that, though Witherspoon’s statue is made of metal, “nothing lasts forever; people remove things, people change things all the time for a variety of political reasons.”
Another audience member cautioned that we may stop putting up monuments for fear that people will later remove them. Kim answered: “We have to leave ourselves open to letting go of things, especially if we are to really grapple with and participate in this current political moment.” She further stressed the harms that Witherspoon might inflict on passers-by. “There’s a kind of agency that the Witherspoon statue has: his ability to exert power on students who are walking past.”
Renée Ater, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, spoke next about statues that failed to meet public approval despite good intentions. Ater’s talk focused on Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, a statue in Lincoln Park in Washington, DC, that celebrates the end of slavery. The sculpture depicts a semi-nude black man crouched at Lincoln’s feet. Ater believes strongly in its removal, seeing it as dehumanizing and denying the agency of blacks in achieving liberation.
In some cases, Ater appeared sympathetic toward spontaneous public action against certain memorials. She mentioned that she had been “very happy” to see a Washington, DC, monument defaced “because it started a conversation in DC about our problematic landscape.” She also described how “in June of 2020, a month after George Floyd was murdered,” the Freedman’s Memorial “caused serious problems in relationship to BLM,” the Black Lives Matter movement. When residents prepared to tear it down, the city summoned 100 members of the National Guard to defend the monument. This response shocked Ater given the context of the protests and “the disregard, truly, in Washington for human life.”
As to what to do with the Witherspoon statue, Ater proposed storage as opposed to display in a museum. For instance, Boston moved its formerly public copy of the Freedman’s Memorial into storage after a long public discussion period. Ater stated that museums “don’t have space” to display the objects either. Besides, “it gives value to a monument once you stick it in a museum,” she asserted. She later re-emphasized this point, claiming that museums are inappropriate venues because “monuments are not history.”
Ater dismissed the possibility of adding a plaque to contextualize a memorial. She claimed that “writing interpretive labels and doing those kind[s] of interventions do not work.” Inscriptions “can become stagnant” because communities need to continually engage with memorials, and labels can “shut down the conversation.”
The fourth speaker, Louis P. Nelson, an architect at the University of Virginia, argued that monuments “have a social power,” but must be considered as “part of a much larger memorial landscape.” Nelson focused his talk on UVA’s campus. Pavilions on UVA’s main green are meant to host lectures and house the professors, but Nelson argued that they once obfuscated the presence of enslaved workers who served the faculty’s families.
In recent years, black students from the architecture school pushed for a memorial to recognize the history of slavery at UVA. The result was a ring cut out in the green, a “hypermodern, granite design” that interrupts the landscape. Nelson concluded his speech by displaying photos of the memorial, observing that it makes visible a community that has long felt “unseen” at UVA. “I would insist that this work should not just be about that one statue: your entire campus is a memorial.”
Last to speak was Ron McCoy, who has been an architect for the Princeton University campus for 15 years and is currently leading the 2026 campus plan. McCoy’s talk reviewed the history of Princeton’s campus design in its various iterations up until the present. He emphasized how poorly Witherspoon’s statue fits the overall campus aesthetic, observing that most of Princeton’s monuments stand in niches, not as freestanding structures. Due to the rarity of statues and the “very modest iconography” across the rest of campus, the Witherspoon statue is a departure from “the tradition of the Princeton campus.”
“The quietness of the campus makes the Witherspoon statue stand out in such a strange way,” McCoy remarked. “I think that’s part of the beauty of the Princeton campus: that is it is not a heroic, civic space.” McCoy argued that our campus style may call for greater subtlety, for which he finds a model in the secluded 9/11 Memorial Garden between Chancellor Green and Nassau Hall or in the plaques, class gift markers, and similar commemorations embedded in Princeton’s infrastructure.
No date has been announced for future discussions regarding the Witherspoon statue and its fate. As of the publication of this piece, it is unclear when the CPUC will make its formal recommendations to the University.
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