On Monday, a committee convened by Princeton University with the aim of determining if it was still appropriate to recognize the legacy of the school’s prodigal son reluctantly concluded that it was. The 10-member board had the mission of reviewing Wilson’s legacy – specifically, his unapologetically racist and pro-segregationist views – with the aim of establishing whether modern standards of decency should force the institution to consign Wilson’s image to an ignominious grave. They determined that, in spite of the fact that he was an avowed racist, Wilson’s accomplishments were such that his record deserved recognition by the university, although without any whitewashing. Let future generations render their own judgments on Wilson, warts and all.

This committee made the right decision. Yes, Wilson’s legacy deserves preservation not in spite of the fact that he was a flawed human being but because of it. This is a step toward correcting the revisionism that has typified recollections of Wilson and figures like him for generations.

Posterity regards Wilson as a reluctant warrior, but his first act on the international stage was to attempt to oust the military-backed government in Mexico and, soon after that, to become embroiled in an intervention into the nation’s civil war. Wilson ran on a peace platform in 1916, but his policies were anything but neutral toward the belligerents populating static trenches channeling their way from one end of Europe to the other. It was inevitable that the United States would be drawn into that war on the Allied side – an inevitability his famously pacifist Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan foresaw and over which he resigned. That unavoidable outcome came to fruition when the German government sought to support the restoration of Greater Mexico and to formalize the low-intensity border war already ongoing in the American Southwest.

In the course of conducting an American intervention in World War I, Wilson presided over a crippling recession. His heavy-handed attorney general severely curtailed American civil liberties and, eventually, deported American citizens suspected (albeit correctly) of sympathizing with the Bolshevik revolutionary government in Russia. The Wilson administration nationalized a number of key U.S. industries, including coal production, telegraph and telephone companies, and railway lines. To finance the war, Wilson secured a constitutional amendment legalizing a federal income tax – a development which radically enhanced the central government’s power and paved the way for Prohibition by eliminating Washington’s reliance on revenue derived from the sale of spirits.

On top of all this, Wilson was also an unapologetic racist who institutionalized segregation in the federal government. His administration favored hiring and promoting whites over African-Americans. Federal offices like the Treasury Department, the Post Office, and others suddenly had separate facilities for black employees. The tone having been unmistakably set, the city’s police and fire departments soon stopped hiring African-American applicants. In 1919, African-American men at arms returned home from Europe to find a markedly more racist country than the one they had left. The tensions culminated in what would be remembered as Washington D.C.’s first race riot, which, according to the historian Tom Lewis’s account, more closely resembled an armed rebellion than an act of spontaneous urban violence.

Seventh Street became an armed camp. Random killing seemed to be everywhere. Blacks fired on whites from speeding cars; one opened fire on white people in a crowded streetcar; and a seventeen-year-old black girl who had locked herself in a room of her house killed a detective from the Metropolitan Police Department. Finally, later that day, Woodrow Wilson called out 2,000 troops. The soldiers’ presence and a hard rain that night ended the violence.

“It’s important for students to understand great people are complicated,” said Cecilia Rouse, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. “We can sandblast a name from the building, but to actually change how we operate, and what our community is like is much harder.” Rouse is absolutely right. At a time when the progressive left has determined that the nation’s collective heritage must be purged from the history books because of its embrace of cultural norms regarding race that are now rightly judged prejudicial and taboo, Princeton’s decision is welcome pushback.

A free society does not expunge its ugliest moments from the history books, although it must also be careful to observe them within the proper context. Wilson’s racial animus  is finally getting its due in center-left circles after decades in which the progressive wing of the American political spectrum thought that to properly admonish Wilson would be to open the doors to more sweeping criticisms of his liberal record. They’re right; it would, and it should. The same impulse should be applied to any number of beatified figures in American history whose records are rarely given a thorough review, and whose legacies are jealously guarded by their liberal inheritors.

The obvious example to cite here is Andrew Jackson, the bombastic populist and the epitome of the 19th-century frontiersman who gave birth to the modern Democratic Party. Jackson, too, was a God awful president. This conclusion is now generally accepted across the political spectrum, although – like Wilson – for a narrow set of reasons that deserve to be broadened. Jackson’s prosecution of the Indian Removal Act, what came to be known as the Trail of Tears, renders him a toxic historical figure and briefly resulted last year in a campaign to have his image scrubbed from the $20 bill. Equally deserving of posterity’s opprobrium is Jackson’s decision not to renew the Bank of the United States charter, leading to nearly a century of financial turbulence. The legacy of the nation’s 7th president wasn’t all terrible. Jackson presided over the continuation of an era in which the franchise expanded to a variety of demographic groups that previously could not vote. Though his administration was dubbed the “Reign of King Mob” by his detractors, Old Hickory ignored appeals from influential citizens at a time of potent evangelical fervor to weaken the division between church and state. As Dean Rouse noted, “people are complicated.”

If men like Jackson and Wilson were removed from their positions of political reverence, would their mixed legacies be properly taught? Would there be, as there is today, an effort to accurately appreciate their historical roles and their all too human flaws? It’s doubtful. What’s more, a weightier question looms: Is there any limiting principle to this? There is a less legitimate effort among maximalists on the left to cut the image of Thomas Jefferson – one of the Enlightenment’s most foundational intellects – down to size because he was a slaveholder. If that is the only measure of a man’s worth, why not rename Washington State or the nation’s capital city? And by what criteria will we be judged? If some future generation determines that our standards of conduct violate some yet unset norm and are intolerable, what will be our fates? Will we be remembered by our grandchildren as anything other than one-dimensional monsters?

These are complicated subjects, and there is space to debate all sides of the issue when discussing the most prudent way to remember the dangerous legacies of the flawed people. But remembering has to always be the objective, lest we doom ourselves to relive their experience.