Words of Wythes-dom: The man behind the report

For the first time since his committee released its report, Paul Wythes '55 spent the weekend visiting the campus he believes should house 500 more students.

He met with some of the University's leaders, including members of the Alumni Council Executive Committee, the Governing Board of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni and the USG.

Before returning home yesterday morning, Wythes — who is a founding general partner of Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture-capital firm in Palo Alto, Calif. — sat for an interview and discussed the implications of his committee's plan to increase the size of the student body by 10 percent.

The proposal — which trustees will vote on at their April meeting — will take between eight and 10 years to implement, according to Wythes. "The first 125 would be admitted four years from now and the last 125 eight years from now," he said. "We need to get in place infrastructure that would be needed to handle that increase — not just the buildings, but all the things that affect your life as a student, from clean restrooms on the weekends to having more room for practicing music."

Wythes said he was confident that the increase in the size of the student body would not adversely impact the quality of the education at the University, though he noted that the current student to faculty ratio of approximately 6.3-to-1 would rise. "[The proposed increase] would make it go up a little — roughly to seven students to one faculty member," he said.

Nevertheless, the Wythes Committee Report does not call for any immediate changes in existing plans for hiring additional faculty. He explained that plans to increase the size of the faculty from just below 800 to 835 had been "set in concrete" through 2004.

Wythes said his committee also recommended that the office of the dean of the faculty play a more central role in the hiring and distribution of University professors.

In the existing system, each department chair is responsible for filling vacated positions as professors retire or leave, and the University does not change the faculty salary budget, allowing departments to maintain their sizes, Wythes said.

Wythes said the office of the dean of the faculty may need to shift faculty salary funding from one department to another to accommodate the larger student body proposed in the report. "What we're recommending is that the [faculty position] doesn't necessarily belong to that department head. It goes back to the dean of faculty," he said.

He added that the administration could then redistribute salary funding to rapidly growing departments from those that are growing less quickly.

Wythes said faculty age was another issue that was closely scrutinized by his committee. "The faculty, over the last 20 years, has crept up in age. The median age is now around 57. It was around 53 a little less than 20 years ago," he said.

"We think that the additions to the faculty should be younger personnel, rather than hiring some senior member who may be 60 or 65 years old. We'd rather try to get a young professor who might be the next star."

Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Wythes said he and other trustees plan to continue gathering feedback about his committee's proposals, and he noted that even if the plan is approved in April, contingency plans to suspend student body growth will exist if unforeseen problems develop.

"If something came along during the interim, we could back off. But the intent is to go ahead with it," he said. "That's the kind of thing that the administration will get into during the interim years between now and when we first start seeing new students show up."

Another issue is the possibility of accepting a small number of transfer students, according to Wythes. "The committee felt that it would be a plus," he said. "We're not talking about a great number of transfers and we're not talking about transfers in the junior or senior year. We're recommending that a small number of freshmen each year be accepted as transfers."