Orange, black and asphalt gray

One of the truly great American university presidents of the last century defined his three major constituencies and their perennial concerns with the following memorable formulation. "All the alumni are interested in is football. All the students are interested in is sex. And all the faculty are interested in is parking." Plus a change . . . the more perfectly it would appear to apply to today's Princeton. On the losing end of this particular triage just at the moment are our alumni. At least to judge from what I saw in the Stadium during the fall, they would be wise to develop a couple of alternative or fall-back interests, at least for the next few years. Fencing and chess are two I could recommend, not to mention mycology. Certainly the best performance to been seen on the Jadwin training fields last October was that of the psalliota campestris, which I would occasionally harvest during a sunny lunch hour.

But two out of three ain't bad; and sex and parking appear to remain hot topics on campus, and to retain their hold on their respective constituencies. I have before me as I write the current issue of the "Nassau Weekly." So inured have I become to student depravity that I rarely find the energy so much as to shake my head over undergraduate excess, but this particular rag has my head in full-spin rotation — you remember the girl in "The Exorcist"? Almost everything wrong with contemporary American youth that does not derive from the malign "role modeling" of Timothy Leary or Michael Milkin is to be laid at the feet of Woody Allen. It was this last named, after all, who first came up with the absurd and counter-intuitive theory that there is something intrinsincally hilarious in the subject of masturbating Jews. Actually the only truly funny thing ever said on this subject was said by Dorothy Parker. She named her pet canary — or was it a parakeet? — Onan (see Genesis 38:9) because "he spilled his seed upon the ground." But the folks at the "Nassau Weekly" pursue the theme remorselessly. So perfect is the union of matter and manner in the pages of the "Nassau Weekly," indeed, that a cultivated reader is genuinely uncertain whether to be more offended by the vacuity of the thought or the vulgarity of its expression. However, that same reader will hardly doubt that "all the students are interested in is sex."

This brings me to parking, the surrogate obsession of the faculty, most of whom would choose a prestigious parking assignment over an endowed chair any day. When the architectural history of Princeton comes to be written, the final decades of the twentieth century will surely be known as the "Age of Asphalt." It must have been in the late 1980s that a secret committee was created in the Macmillan Building to make a chlorophyll survey of all university land and to arrange the destruction of any greensward larger than 2500 square feet. Nobody noticed as all the once pleasant greenery east of the Dinky tracks was covertly bulldozed away. More brazen was the removal the grand old house at the corner of Ivy and Roper Lanes, traditional abode of the Dean of the Chapel, which, incidentally, involved the wholly gratuitous slaughter of the finest stand of "double" ornamental cherries in Mercer County.

The first official vandalism of our own century is penny-ante stuff. On Fitzrandolph Road, over the pitiful grass margin beyond the chainlink fence surrounding the aforementioned mushroom fields, someone has dumped a few truckloads of gravel, creating a kind of miniature drive-by parking lot. This arrangement achieves at minimal cost the two apparent aims of its architectural genre, ecological and aesthetic insult. The economy of ugliness is particularly marked; the effect achieved usually requires at least an abandoned trailer house or a couple of dead washing machines to complete. (The driving hazard created by the rear ends of the parked gas-guzzlers as they butt into Fitzrandolph Road is pure bonus.) But not everything is cheap and nasty. The campus will soon be able to boast what must surely be the world's most expensive (per square inch) parking lot. I refer to the improvements advancing at glacial place in front of Dillon gym, where the old macadam pancake has been regraded with the engineering precision of Stonehenge, and is being contained within dressed granite blocks worthy to serve as plinths in a temple of Apollo. Thus at a cost hardly greater than that of fifty graduate fellowship, health-conscious Princetonians will be able to use the Nautilus machines without the inconvenience of having to walk more than fifty yards to get to them. It was surely bad enough when, in the words of Saint Joni Mitchell, "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." Now they've practically finished off This Side of Paradise as well. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.