I must begin this column with two confessions. The first is that its subject — a proposal to establish at Princeton a college of geezers — is unlikely to be of much interest to the majority of undergraduate readers of the 'Prince.' My intended audience on this occasion is one that for the most part is not even resident in Princeton. I refer to the trustees of the university, and to the upper echelons of alumni leaders, especially the Executive Committee of the Alumni Council, the class agents for Annual Giving, and the chairs of local Schools Committees. The second confession is a little more awkward and personal: my column is blatantly self-serving. I wish that I had come up with this idea twenty or thirty years ago when it might have sounded a little less like geriatric special pleading; but, as is well known, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Dr. Johnson famously remarked, concerning the recently acquired moral alacrity of an eighteenth-century celebrity clergyman about to be executed for forgery, that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. That is, there are certain things you don't think much about until they face you. Now I am facing retirement, and I have mainly thought about this prospect only in the most general of terms, under such pleasant abstract categories as "grandchildren," "leisure", "travel", and "tractor pulls". My only practical preparations, if one could call them that, are frequent and nervous visits to the TIAA/CREF website to check on my nest-egg, which is apparently rapidly evolving through Enronism into a goose egg. Then a terrible thought did invade my mind as I sat chatting with an advisee in McCosh 49 the other day: where in God's name am I going to be able to put all those books?
As my students can attest, there are all sorts of good reasons for me to retire, but I will eschew the specifics. I have taught here now for thirty-five years. Furthermore, and however confused the deans may be, I have worked pretty hard most of that time, and I am rather tired. There is, furthermore, a kind of moral argument arguing for my retirement. In nearly all fields of the humanities, though not in the humanities alone, there continues to be a painful disparity between a large supply of newly trained PhDs and a smaller demand for their services as teachers and researches in colleges and universities. For twenty years and more now I have had to watch from the sidelines as able and talented graduate students struggled to find jobs worthy of their capacity and training. The root causes of this problem are complex and numerous, but among them, at least in some institutions, is the simple fact that the Old Order passeth not away. There is no lack of new blood; the problem is with clogged arteries. College professors even lobbied successfully in the Congress to be exempted from any mandatory retirement legislation. We have the legal right to stand before the youth of America, our dog-eared, yellowing notes crumbling in our palsied hands, forever. But most of us would get out of the way in a New York minute — if only we could keep an office on campus.
So here is the deal I propose. I encourage the trustees, now that the new sixth college has been guaranteed by the largess of Meg Whitman, '77, immediately to begin the planning of a seventh. Call it the Senior Academy, or maybe Geezer Gardens. Like the college of electors or the college of cardinals, the new seventh or rather Septuagenarian College would be essentially metaphysical in nature, consisting of perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty modest offices scattered throughout the campus and assigned, on petition and for term periods, to emeriti professors wishing to maintain a modest but vital connection with the intellectual life of the institution.
But these retired professors would not just hang around; they would render some service for their office privilege by executing a few specific assignments each year. These assignments would rarely involve our regular baccalaureate or graduate programs. Anyone familiar with what is going on in American higher education is aware that what are possibly its fastest growing sectors are so-called "continuing education" and "distance learning". I myself already give about a dozen lectures each year to various "senior" groups around Princeton and elsewhere in and out of the state of New Jersey. Each year I get letters from geriatric fans all over the world who have seen videotaped lectures on medieval literature I made some several years ago with the Teaching Company. Only last Saturday, I and various other actual or imminent geezers just gave lectures to enthusiastic audiences. Princeton was a leader in the idea of the "alumni college", including its on-line version; but now every gimcrack school in the country has them. Here's another chance for Princetonian leadership. Let's have a Seventh College, with a permanent but ever changing emeriti faculty, that could take the continuing education of our alumni to an entirely new level of excellence — as well as postpone my book problem for a few years. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
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An open letter to President Eisgruber and VP Calhoun concerning minoritized student safety
Patrick Jaojoco, Brandi Bushman, and Humza Gondal"We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color."
"We — the undersigned leaders, community members, and allies of cultural affinity groups of Princeton University — condemn in the strongest possible terms the University’s utter disregard for the safety and wellbeing of its students of color."
On the occupation of Clio Hall and the treatment of Graduate School staff
Cole M. Crittenden“There are real power differentials on this campus, and we all have an obligation to be mindful of them. The students, postdocs, and faculty who occupied Clio Hall seem to have abused their privileges in the ways they treated staff as an expression of protest. That is wrong.”
“There are real power differentials on this campus, and we all have an obligation to be mindful of them. The students, postdocs, and faculty who occupied Clio Hall seem to have abused their privileges in the ways they treated staff as an expression of protest. That is wrong.”
Regulations on ‘disruption’ restrict dialogue at Princeton. Let’s change the standard.
Rishi Khanna“When Princeton administrators suppress mere disruptions tied to progressive speech, they effectively suppress a substantial portion of the speech itself.”
“When Princeton administrators suppress mere disruptions tied to progressive speech, they effectively suppress a substantial portion of the speech itself.”
