In June 2020, the Board of Trustees of the foundation voted unanimously to remove Woodrow Wilson from its name, citing his racist policies and beliefs.
[2][3] The first Woodrow Wilson Fellowships were created by Dr. Whitney "Mike" Oates, a Princeton University classics professor who served in the Marine Corps during World War II.
During his tour of duty, Professor Oates realized that many of his brightest undergraduates who had served in the armed forces were unlikely to go on to doctoral study and college teaching careers when the war was over.
Professors nominated or recommended promising seniors, and applications underwent review at the Foundation, with finalists examined by regional panels on campuses around the country.
These included Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowships, offered to supplement the original award for Fellows who required dissertation support; Teaching and Administrative Internships, designed to engage graduate students and young administrators with the nation's historically black colleges and universities; and Martin Luther King, Jr. Fellowships, specifically intended for African American veterans of the armed forces.
The mix of a signature fellowship with complementary programs to create access and capacity in the nation's education system became a pattern for later Woodrow Wilson Foundation activities.
By the early 1970s full funding for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowships had diminished, and, over the concluding several years of the program, the Foundation reduced both the number and amount of awards.
As the original large-scale Woodrow Wilson Fellowships came to an end, the Foundation still sought to provide opportunity in higher education for specific groups of students.
During the same period, the Foundation also established fellowships in higher education to encourage preparation for specific national high-need fields such as women's health.
During the years after the original Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, the Foundation also launched various programs to cultivate and support teachers at the middle- and high-school levels, as well as in college.
In the 1970s, the Rockefeller Foundation and other funders supported a program of Woodrow Wilson Teaching and Administrative Internships that brought graduate students to historically black colleges and universities, seeking both to strengthen HBCUs' faculty and to provide these young scholars and leaders with campus-based experience.
During the 1990s, troubled by the apparent and growing mismatch between liberal arts doctoral education and the academic and nonacademic job markets, the Foundation created a suite of programs that included the Humanities at Work and the Responsive Ph.D.
Based on numerous studies indicating that the presence of a well-prepared teacher is the single most important factor in student achievement, the Foundation created the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship to serve as its signature program for the near- to mid-term.
The Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio programs all focus specifically on teacher preparation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, also known as the STEM fields.
[21] College Presidents for Civic Preparedness,[22] launched in 2023,[23] brings together more than 70 campus leaders[24] from diverse institutions across the country who are committed to preparing today’s young people for citizenship in American democracy.