“The evil that men do lives after them;” says Shakespeare’s devious Marc Antony in his famous funeral oration from the play Julius Caesar. “The good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” And Woodrow Wilson too? Or not?

The Wilson Legacy Review Committee of the Princeton University Board of Trustees, in taking on the responsibility of assessing the record of Mr. Wilson, who was president of the University from 1902 to 1910 and president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, has gathered letters from nine distinguished Wilson scholars, from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and universities, providing dozens of pages of historical information and insight, but nothing likely to make the committee’s job easier.

The one discernible consensus seems to be that Woodrow Wilson’s life was rich and complex and that the committee’s worthy task in exploring and confronting the whole truth in his history is essential as the University seeks to move forward.

Most of the scholars chose not to weigh in directly on the questions of what to do with the honoring of Wilson through his name on the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Wilson residential college, and his vivid presencel in a campus dining hall mural.

Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber referred the question of Wilson’s legacy to the Board of Trustees following a November sit-in at Nassau Hall by student members of the Black Justice League and demands for making the climate of the University more welcoming and supportive for all. The Board has authority over how the University recognizes Woodrow Wilson. Their ten-person committee is headed by 1969 Princeton graduate Brent Henry, who is vice chair of the Board.

The committee has also received more than 500 observations and opinions on Wilson online, and is providing opportunities for in-person conversations on campus. Relevant information, including the nine scholars’ letters, is available at wilsonlegacy.princeton.edu.

The committee has asked for views about Wilson’s record and impact as a faculty member and president of Princeton; his record and impact as president of the U.S.; his legacy at Princeton today and how it is and should be commemorated; and representations on campus of Princeton’s broader historical legacy.

Among the scholars writing in, James Axtell, humanities professor emeritus at William and Mary and author of The Making of Princeton University From Woodrow Wilson to the Present (2006) emphasized Wilson’s 27 years in higher education and his many progressive reforms in shaping Princeton University. Mr. Axtell carefully distinguished between the acknowledgment of historical facts and the glorifying of them, warning that “to ‘erase’ history (which the current protests prove is nearly impossible) is to remove our ability to learn from it.” He concluded that “every generation’s job … is therefore to live with and learn from its ‘troubled wisdom.’”

Applauding the committee’s “process of thoughtful evaluation,” Kendrick A. Clements, University of South Carolina history professor emeritus and author of several books about Woodrow Wilson, claimed, “you have the opportunity to render a great service to the university and the nation.” Mr. Clements cited examples of Wilson’s endorsements of segregation, both in the U.S. government and at the University, as he discouraged black students from applying to Princeton. “Wilson was a product of his 19th-century Southern background,” Mr. Clements stated, urging the committee to carefully weigh both sides of the argument.

N.B.D. Connolly, Johns Hopkins history professor and currently visiting professor at N.Y.U., in his letter, presented the argument that “we cannot simply excuse Wilson’s racist politicking as a feature of his being ‘a man of his time.’ In the view of many members of his administration, to wide swaths of the American people, and arguably, at times, to Wilson himself, his segregationist approach to governance was both preventable and highly questionable.” Mr. Connolly described Wilson’s segregating of the civil service and imposition of Jim Crow policies in government, emphasized the “ironies of American politics,” and contended that “Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist and U.S. expansionist, made government increasingly responsible for protecting life, liberty, and property, even if his own limitations prevented him from democratically applying his vision.”

Wilson’s “record on matters of race should never be excused but neither should it be overblown or exaggerated,” warned John Milton Cooper, Jr., professor of American Institutions emeritus at University of Wisconsin and author of a 2009 biography of Wilson. Mr. Cooper, a Princeton 1961 graduate, did not deny Wilson’s racial prejudice, but urged that Wilson’s record on race “should not eclipse the many great things he did at Princeton and in the world.”

Paula J. Giddings, professor of African-American studies at Smith College, enumerated Woodrow Wilson’s contributions, but stated that “his segregationist and racially exclusive policies as president of Princeton University and as the 28th president of the United States are sufficient grounds for the refusal to honor his name in an institution that values diversity and the standards of a liberal arts education.” Ms. Giddings described how his racism was part and parcel of his progressivism.

“On the one hand,” she wrote, “he was a great progressive and reformer — as a transformative college president, a corruption-busting governor, an international visionary, and particularly as a determined president whose ‘New Freedom’ reforms were some of the most important in the 20th century. On the other hand he sanctioned segregation at the highest levels of government. That one was the corollary, not the antithesis, of the other means that they cannot be viewed separately but must be weighed as a single and ultimately ruinous heritage.”

Weighing in from a different perspective, David Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize winner and Stanford history professor emeritus, insisted on a distinction between how Wilson must be remembered — with all his flaws and racist views, along with his great achievements, brought to light — and how he should be memorialized. Mr. Kennedy’s conclusion was that “while he may fall well short of sainthood, on balance his was a life of extraordinary accomplishment — as a scholar, educator, and statesman. In a world of none but fallen people, the good that some of them manage to do deserves all the recognition that it can get. In my judgment Woodrow wilson merits that kind of recognition.”

Southern Methodist history professor and author of To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1992), Thomas J. Knock, in his lengthy letter also emphasized the importance of the difficult task of scrutinizing all sides of the past of Wilson, who, according to Mr. Knock, “is neither fondly remembered nor well understood by most Americans. Nevertheless, he occupies a secure position within the exclusive pantheon of great presidents.”

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Duke professor of African and African-American Studies and women’s studies, did not hesitate to declare Wilson “a white supremacist.” He was, according to Ms. Lenz-Smith, “hampered by his inability to see African Americans as citizens and unable to imagine the United States as anything but a white man’s democracy.” Offering context for the trustees committee in its endeavor, she wrote “College campuses are covered with monuments to people who believed, wrote, and did atrocious things. Sometimes, the correct response is to change those monuments. Other times the appropriate response is to contextualize them. Always the correct response is to confront the history, and never is the correct response to sanitize it. “

University of Richmond history professor and author of Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (2013) Eric S. Yellin also emphasized that the University must “reckon with how it understands and represents Wilson’s legacy. Wilson was a racist whose unexamined convictions on this front led to the destruction of people’s lives. Mr. Yellin went on to discuss the importance of “building an inclusive community,” and, he concluded, ”Asking students of color to study in a school or live in a dormitory named for a man who did not want them there without any recognition of this fact indicates a lack of seriousness about changing the institution to set the educational needs of its students.”

With these nine scholarly epistles, so many contributions so far on the Legacy Review website, and a plentiful array of additional oral and written commentary, the trustees committee has a difficult political, ethical, and educational endeavor ahead.