"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made." – H.D. Thoreau
On the evening of November 14, 1997, the salon had a dinner party. Well, maybe not a dinner party, but more like a glorified form of potluck. Thirty assorted undergraduates and three professors convened at the home of Forbes master and Religion professor John Gager. After dinner, individual guests read or shared works of literature, music, art. John Gager read a Robert Frost poem. Sandhya Gupta read some Salman Rushdie. Jon Williams read from Moby Dick. As the evening progressed, conversation became more relaxed and informal, moving onto topics as varied as senior theses, four-year residential colleges, athletics at Princeton, academics.
Professor Anthony Grafton remarked on how much busier student and faculty lives had become: How many of us, after all, are lost without our daily planner? Jerry Podair, a newly-minted PhD from the History Department, then made an especially interesting comment. He noted, "Princeton students are incredibly self-contained."
And we are. We compartmentalize our lives and place academic life in a separate cubbyhole from our social. We don't take risks. We're generally polite and reserved in class, sending formally-worded emails to our professors and meekly attending office hours. This is all fine, but it prevents Princeton's intellectual life from being a vibrant as it could. How many of us become friends with our fellow students in precept, let alone our professors? A friend of mine recently remarked, "I think being in precept with someone is deadly to friendship." So we show up for class, put in our fifty minutes and leave.
I founded the salon out of a sense of frustration as my antidote to self-containment. I was craving an intellectual community – a community of undergraduates that extended beyond my immediate and closest friends. The first meetings in the fall of 1996 were relatively unstructured and mostly composed of various recruited friends. After a few months, I compiled an e-list to accommodate the growing number of members; I sent out a weekly synopsis of the past salon. It has now been a year-and-a-half since the salon first started and we have since hosted several faculty members – from Professor Robert Darnton in History to Professor Tom Levin in Germanic Languages and Literatures.
The salon is completely student motivated and driven and various undergraduates host the salon each week. Our most recent salon on February 7 demonstrates the eclectic mixture of people and contributions. Micah Weinberg, a politics major, offered a piece from his anthropology class, "Shakespeare in the Bush" which recounted varying cultural interpretations of Hamlet. Jay Victor, an Economics major, read an excerpt from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Rob Jensen, a Computer Science major, played two Stereolab songs. John Kuhner, a Classics major, brought Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Francesca Heng who hosted the salon in her room observed: "The salon reminds us that learning and sharing ideas was meant to be fun and that is can still be that way. Because it's informal and voluntary there's a degree of engagement that is missing in most classes."
Jay Victor concurs, "I began going to the salon last year. I've realized there is an entire subculture on this campus of people who are excited to gather and think about subjects. Of course, this isn't necessarily the mainstream (eating club) social scene of which this campus is so proud, but it is our chance to meet about once a week to think and learn from each other outside of the pressures of class where every word we say is analyzed and graded."
There is one problem, though. Out of ten attendees, nine were seniors and one was a freshman. And while the salon does have a few members in the freshmen, sophomore and junior class, the bulk of its association is comprised of graduating seniors. I'd like to extend another open invitation to undergraduates – especially freshmen and sophomores – to sit in on a salon or simply subscribe to the salon e-list.
The salon homepage, http//www.princeton.edu/~bobchen/salon.html, contains all salon synopses. Check it out if you have a minute. The salon has been my most personal investment in the Princeton community, and I only hope that it continues, in one form or another, to provide an outlet for intellectual discussion and exchange.
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