Was Woodrow Wilson a key founder of modern liberalism, a visionary whose belief in an activist presidency laid the groundwork for the New Deal and civil rights legislation of the 1960s?

Or was he a virulent and unrepentant racist, a man who not only segregated the federal workforce but nationalized the Southern view of politics, turning the federal government itself into an instrument of white supremacy for decades to come?

Wilson’s record on race has long been debated among historians. But in the past two weeks, the topic has burst into broader view, thanks to student protesters at Princeton University who have demanded, among other things, that the former president’s name be removed from its prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

The protests have prompted a fierce round of op-eds and Facebook discussions and more than a few laments that a scant number historical figures would be deemed pure enough to have their names inscribed on walls in today’s heated atmosphere. (What’s next, more than one Twitter wag asked, a demand to take the name of George Washington, a slave owner, off the nation’s Capitol?)

The debate comes amid a flurry of continuing renaming controversies on various campuses, including Georgetown, which recently announced it was removing from campus buildings the names of two of its former presidents who had been involved in selling slaves, and Yale, which is hotly debating whether to rename a residential college named for John C. Calhoun, one of the 19th century’s foremost defenders of slavery.

But the controversy over Wilson strikes closer to home for many liberal-leaning historians and scholars, threatening a symbol whose broader vision many would wish to defend, while raising the uncomfortable question of whether Wilson’s racism constitutes a blot on his record or an integral feature of the progressive tradition he helped found.

“The irony here is that Wilson really is the architect of a lot of modern liberalism,” said Julian E. Zlizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton.

“The tradition that runs through FDR to LBJ and Obama really starts with his administration.”

Wilson has long been a favorite target of conservatives like Glenn Beck, who has blamed him for everything from overweening government to Nazi eugenics. Shortly after the Princeton protests, a writer for The Federalist, a conservative website, praised the students for targeting “an authoritarian hatemonger who also happened to be one of the most destructive presidents in the history of the United States.”

Scholars, however, have generally taken a more sanguine view. Polls, like one this year of several hundred members of the American Political Science Association, often rank him in the top 10 U.S. presidents. Defenders tick off a list of his accomplishments, including his leadership in World War I (he won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize) and advocacy for national self-determination in international relations and, on the domestic front, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the graduated income tax and new antitrust and labor laws.

“Going to the mat for Wilson should not be hard,” said David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University. “If your standards are liberal progressive values in general, Wilson deserves to be celebrated.”

While the segregation of the federal government during his administration “deserves to be deplored,” Greenberg added, evaluating Wilson solely by his record on race “stacks the deck.”

But other scholars counter that Wilson’s racism cannot be neatly cleaved off from his broader program, or from the broader political tradition he helped found.

“Historians usually say, ‘Here was this amazing liberal progressive who was a racist, which is too bad; now, let’s go back to talking about the good things,’” said Eric S. Yellin, an associate professor at the University of Richmond and the author of “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” a study of the segregation of the federal workforce under Wilson.

“But it’s important to see that Wilson had a whites-only progressive view,” Yellin said.

Wilson’s attitudes and record on race, even his staunchest defenders agree, is hardly a pretty one. As president of Princeton, the Virginia-born scholar discouraged an African-American prospective student from applying, calling it “altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.” His textbook “A History of the American People” referred to Reconstruction-era efforts to free the South from “the incubus of that ignorant and often hostile” black vote. As governor of New Jersey, his administration included no blacks.

After his election to the White House in 1912, Wilson, a Democrat, appointed a Cabinet that was heavy on Southern racists, including William McAdoo as treasury secretary and Albert Burleson as postmaster general, both of whom quickly pushed to segregate their departments, demoting and firing many blacks.

Wilson, who also nominated an African-American for register of the Treasury (the nomination was withdrawn after Southern Democrats in the Senate raised a furor), did not spearhead those efforts, though he did go along with them, noted John Milton Cooper, a retired historian at the University of Wisconsin and the author of an admiring 2009 biography of Wilson.

“Trying to make Wilson into this gung-ho, committed white supremacist is just wrong,” Cooper said.

But other historians say the matter ran much deeper than Wilson’s personal feelings or intentions. Nathan Connolly, a visiting associate professor of history at New York University, said that while Wilson may not have spearheaded the segregation initiatives (which were not reversed by his Republican successors), when criticized for them by black leaders and others he “doubled down,” rationalizing segregation as a strategy to keep the racial peace and a benefit to blacks themselves.

“It’s important to remember that Jim Crow segregation was itself a Progressive Era reform,” said Connolly, author of “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.”

And Wilson’s racism, Connolly said, didn’t stop at the nation’s borders. The president’s vision of national self-determination, he noted, did not extend to Haiti, the occupation of which Wilson authorized in 1915, partly to replace a national constitution that forbade foreigners to own land.

“Even the internationalism that people want to credit him with was deeply inflected by animus towards black people,” Connolly said.

How to evaluate Wilson’s historical legacy and whether to give him a place of honor on campus are different questions. And there, even some who support keeping Wilson’s name on the policy school credit students with starting an important conversation.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Wilson School, wrote on Facebook that when Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, said he would start a process to consider whether to rename the school, she thought it was “a crazy decision.”

But Slaughter, now the president and chief executive of the nonpartisan think tank New America, said she had come to see the value of the debate itself, if not the removal of his name.

“It seems to me much more in keeping with values of liberal education that you keep the name and render the whole person, so you have to simultaneously confront that many great people have dark sides,” she said.

Connolly said it might be more constructive to leave Wilson’s name on the school but build, say, a monument to the occupation of Haiti in front.

The important thing, Connolly said, “is to write segregation and race into the story, not to write racists out of it.”