Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
The current Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars derives from a
remarkable effort to honor President Woodrow Wilson. A group of friends
and admirers created a foundation named for him, the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation, some time after his death, and amassed a significant
endowment designed to support academic projects that Wilson would have
judged worthy. The Foundation's major initiative was The Paper of
Woodrow Wilson, edited by Princeton's Prof. Arthur S. Link and
published in 69 volumes between 1966 and 1994. When the Papers project
concluded, the Trustees of the Foundation, led by former Princeton
University President Robert F. Goheen, decided to transfer their
endowment to the University in order to honor Wilson at the University
he had led with such distinction in the early twentieth century.
Thus a new fellowship program, originally named the Society of
Woodrow Wilson Fellows, was initiated in 1994 under the supervision of
the distinguished former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, Donald E.
Stokes. The Society was conceived of as a prize fellowship initiative
that would bring graduate students in the fields of greatest concern to
President Wilson (basically the social sciences and history) together
with distinguished faculty in those fields. The common link was to be
scholarly concern with issues of public policy.
The program was renamed the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars in
order to avoid confusion with the newly-created Society of Fellows, a
post-doctoral program in the Council of Humanities. It is composed of
approximately fifteen faculty members, each serving a three year term,
and twenty to twenty-four graduate students on one-year, potentially
renewable, fellowships. The aim of the program is to bring faculty and
graduate students together to examine multi- and interdisciplinary
perspectives in relation to important issues of international and
domestic public policy. The Fellows meet once a month for dinner (at
which one of the Faculty Fellows speaks) and once a month for lunch (at
which one of the Graduate Fellows presents a dissertation chapter).
Professor Stanley N. Katz of the Woodrow Wilson School succeeded Dean Stokes as Director of the Fellowship of the Woodrow Wilson Society in 1997.