Bridging the gap

With President Shapiro honored this past weekend by the Board of Trustees, it seems as appropriate a time as any to assess the apparent disconnect between students and administrators. By almost any measure, from fiscal health to strategic progress and institutional currency, President Shapiro's administration has been an unqualified success. The many recent tributes to him have all stressed appreciation of that success. And yet students — who have perhaps the closest daily access to the life of the University — often seem much less appreciative.

Some students complain that, at least during their time at Princeton, administrative focus on the physical infrastructure of the campus has been too great. Others argue that at least some of the University's growing financial resources should have been offered to students in the form of tuition reductions. But for most of us, I think, the administration simply seems too far removed from our daily lives for us to understand it.

At any college or university, students and administrators have different goals and different visions; at Princeton we tend not to articulate those goals and visions to each other with any great regularity. Students think about the University in four-year blocks of time and the administration rightly does not. For students, it can therefore be difficult to think about campus planning from the forward-looking perspective of the administration, and it probably is equally difficult for administrators to focus on the need to occasionally communicate in present-minded language that students can appreciate. As a result, the administration and the Board of Trustees often seem to be ruling from on high, issuing decrees that can at times appear insensitive to immediate student needs. The trustee alcohol initiative is, for some, one example. The decision to increase the student body size is another. And each time construction of a new building begins, the devotion of University wealth to physical capital is a third because students often do not accrue any immediate benefits from such construction. The problem is not that students cannot grasp the longer term benefits of such decisions; the problem is that students sometimes feel irrelevant to the decision-making process, as though the advance of the University master plan never pauses long enough to welcome each new class. It is easy at Princeton to feel privileged with access to all of its resources, but it is difficult to feel any ownership of the place. To an extent, that reflects reality — students in fact do not have any real ownership and are merely four-year guests of the institution — but it does not have to feel that way. The problem is, at bottom, one of communication and contact. The administration does not do a good enough job of communicating its vision to students, and the lack of informal contact between the two groups only exacerbates misunderstanding by denying any real relationship between students and administrators. The best place to begin to address this disconnect is at the top — in the office of the President.

This is certainly not to say that President Shapiro should be blamed for any of these problems, for in truth, student relations are only a very minor part of his job description and should occupy only a very small amount of his time. But administrative turnover, in the office of the President or elsewhere, is only good in the first place because it presents an opportunity to try new things. Now is therefore a perfect opportunity to try a new approach to student-administration relations.

Whenever President Shapiro's successor is inaugurated, he or she should spend a few hours each month establishing a tangible presence among students. The new President could eat an occasional meal in a dining hall, in Frist or at an eating club, informally chatting with students. He or she could attend a few student-sponsored events each month. And he or she could offer a question-and-answer session in McCosh 50 every few months to make students feel more a part of the University decision-making process. Each of these steps would go a long way towards eliminating the disconnect between students and administrators and would help to begin to foster a sense of student ownership of the University, however temporary. Other administrators would feel encouraged to follow the President's lead. And then, where President Shapiro has not garnered nearly as much student praise as he deserves, the next retiring administrator might. Alex Rawson is a history major from Shaker Heights, OH. He can be reached at ahrawson@Princeton.edu.