Detecting intellect

"What happened to student intellectualism?"

This is not a question new to Princeton. It was hotly debated five years ago when this page saw "Reading Deeper Than the Commercial World" by Adam Ollendorf '00, and the response, "On Defending 'Intellectual Curiosity" by Jay Victor '98. Undoubtedly they were not the first ones to raise the issue. Indeed, to the dismay of then-University President John Hib-ben, F. Scott Fitzger-ald once described Princeton as "the pleasantest country club in America," a statement hardly consistent with a vibrant student intellectual life.

More recently, a number of similar letters, articles, and words have been exchanged on the issue. Most of the arguments put forth have been thoughtful and nuanced, and I applaud them. I am especially grateful to the U-Council for its open letter bringing the issue to the forefront once again and precipitating lively public debate and discussion.

However, I have taken it all with a grain of salt, for I do not believe anyone can comprehend the full range and character of the many independent minds on campus, even after conducting extensive interviews. Human beings—especially those at Princeton—are exceedingly complicated and surprising, and the images they project are but the tip of the psychological iceberg. Perhaps my view is merely an artifact of my own particular situation, but I am not convinced that undergraduate life at Princeton is the intellectual black hole it has been described as.

We must not neglect the possibility that there is a significant amount of unseen, nonpublic "intellectual activity" on campus. We bemoan the supposed absence of substantive informal intellectual activity, yet such interaction tends to occur in the private settings of dorm rooms late at night, small lunch gatherings, or even (gasp!) one person's individual reading for pleasure. As a result, such activities would not be readily visible even if they were common. Short of employing psychic powers, we cannot really know for sure what is going on in people's minds.

Numerical data, if it existed, would be highly suspect, for it would necessarily come from imprecise and subjective survey questions like, "On a scale from 1 to 10, rate the quality of your intellectual life outside of classes." The only potentially convincing use of such data would be to measure changes following reforms. It can't really tell us anything about the absolute amount of "intellectual activity," assuming there is even an accurate way to define such a thing. We cannot quantify "intellectual activity" as if it were akin to inflation or unemployment.

As I suggested earlier, it seems that the only way to accurately gauge the character of the "intellectual activity" on campus would be to call in Miss Cleo, Counselor Troi, and John Ashcroft to read everyone's minds and separate the "Intellectuals" from the "Organ-ization Kids." While they're at it, they could separate the wheat from the chaff as a favor to Dining Services. Undoubtedly there would be campaign buttons, petitions, and demonstrations against this egregious (an SAT word) violation of mental privacy, though of course such displays would only be for the benefit of students' resumes. The whole project would be a rather bizarre attempt to return to the compartmentalized student stereotypes that "The Breakfast Club" definitively discredited.

Though most writers on campus intellectualism have managed not to oversimplify, we must be careful to maintain their high standard. Attempts to make blanket judgments regarding the campus intellectual climate reduce things to "the simplest terms, with the most convenient definitions," to quote John Hughes's iconic 1985 film. In my years at Princeton, I've found that each one of us is an Organization Kid, an Intellectual, a Jock, a Princess, a Basket Case, and a Criminal. Does that answer the question?