Rename Princeton now

Princeton has dropped Woodrow Wilson’s name from its school of public policy due to the racism of the 28th U.S. president. However, Princeton hasn’t come to grips with a more fundamental problem — the name of the college itself.

A woke graduate informs us that Princeton, both the town and the school, takes its name from King William III, the Prince of Orange. The famous Nassau Hall, which is still in use, also honors the Prince of Orange, a descendant of the house of Nassau. So does “Old Nassau,” the school’s theme song. In addition, orange and black, the colors of Princeton, derive from the Prince of Orange.

The problem is that the Prince, King William III, played a massive role in expanding the trans-Atlantic slave trade. According to the woke Princeton grad:

When William became King of England in 1689, the renowned slave trader Edward Colston transferred a large part of his shares in the Royal African Company to the King in an effort to retain the monopoly over slave trade in the colonies. According to research and estimates from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, British merchants transported 76,735 slaves during the first nine years of William’s rule. This is a substantial number, but William’s impact on slave trade may be far greater than just owning shares in a company.

In 1695, William dismissed the English Parliament to make way for a new legislature that was in general more amenable to his will. The new Parliament then proceeded to enact “An Act to settle Trade to Africa” in 1698. This Act formally ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly over the slave trade and opened slave trading to British merchants. England’s merchant class had already been pushing for the opening of slave trading for quite a while. In this sense, one may argue that William was merely ceding to popular demand.

The liberalization of slave trading accelerated the growth in the number of slaves that were moved across the Atlantic. In 1697, the year before the Act was passed, merchants traveling under the British flag transported an estimated 10,180 slaves across the Atlantic. In the year 1700, this number reached 25,069. The number of slaves traded in British colonies in a year subsequently peaked at 49,897 in 1799. Between 1698 (the year the Act came into force) and 1810 (the year of the last recorded slave trade in the Commonwealth), British ships transported a staggering 2.88 million slaves from Africa to the New World, including the area known today as the United States. By way of comparison, Great Britain traded 379,552 slaves in total during its entire colonial history prior to 1698.

It seems that the villainy of the Prince from whom Princeton takes its name far exceeds that of Woodrow Wilson. Thus, if Wilson’s name needed to be removed from Princeton’s public policy school, Princeton’s name needs to be removed from the University. Now.

The school began its existence as the College of New Jersey. Wokeness dictates that it revert to that name — assuming there are no racial overtones to “Jersey.”

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