'Universitizing' the College of New Jersey

My last week was made memorable by two experiences. The first was meeting with my twelve freshman advisees to discuss their academic programs. No matter how many millions we spend on lavish new buildings, we seem incapable of building rooms suitable for the things we actually need to do, as opposed to the things architects think we ought to do, so that the registration process was awkwardly spread about the corridors, classrooms, and libraries of the new Friend Center for Engineering Education. Not that it mattered. The Dean of Wilson College, no doubt in deference to my seniority, had assigned me only freshmen in whom intellectual genius and personal charm joined in equal abundance. I wouldn't mind meeting with such people if the venue had to be the Motor Vehicle Inspection Station at Baker's Basin; and I left the experience reinforced in the belief that achieving a tenured appointment on the Princeton faculty is child's play when compared with gaining admission to the freshman class.

The second experience was attending the annual APGA (Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni) Awards Dinner, which fêtes the best and brightest — as suggested by their winning highly competitive honorific fellowship — of our amazing graduate students. Strangely enough this event, too, was held in the Friend Center, in a space hardly more suitable for masticating rubber chicken than for dispensing academic advice; but once again setting hardly mattered. It was an intellectually exhilarating evening. The winners, representing several nations East and West, came from all divisions of the university; and each briefly described a dissertation topic as exciting to the speaker as incomprehensible to a majority of the auditors. For the truth is that it is impossible to be knowledgeable about everything, or even very much, that is taught and learned here.

The capacious ambition of the university is remembered in the word "university" itself. Latin "universitas", which has perhaps been more faithfully preserved in modern English "universe" meant the whole of something, the entirety. Academic "university" refers not to the entirety of possible human knowledge, however, but to the aggregate of disparate structural parts distributed among "colleges,""schools" or "disciplines." The semantic difference even today between an American college and a university is that the latter pretends to do many things — often indeed, too many, though that is neither here nor there. Our institution ceased to be the College of New Jersey and started to be Princeton University scarcely a century ago with the foundation of the Graduate College and the introduction of postgraduate study.

The "universitizing" of Princeton is a celebrated historical episode frequently remembered in terms of the struggle between President Woodrow Wilson and Dean Andrew Fleming West, in which the ostensible issue was the physical location of the Graduate School. The real issue, which has taken about a century to be defined with clarity, was the soul of Princeton. Now "the soul of Princeton," even in pallid adumbration, seems to me a sufficiently portentous theme for the first column of the year. The questions implicit in the competing visions of Wilson and West have been made explicit by a century's history, and more than ever they define our sense of "university". Undergraduate education and postgraduate study are not simply the same thing in different proofs or strengths, so to speak; on the other hand neither are they so different that they can safely be abandoned, as they too frequently are, to their "separate but equal" institutional development. To consider even for a moment just how much of today's undergraduate experience is in fact brokered by graduate students in preceptorial rooms and laboratory sections, and how financially dependent the graduate enterprise is on the work of assistants in instruction, at least in the humanities, is to discover a symbiosis as fragile as it is inevitable.

There is a widely bruited view that for Princeton faculty, and per consequens for Princeton students, there is no essential conflict between teaching and research. This legal fiction, which claims its place in a wide spectrum of institutional propaganda, is one I myself once halfheartedly believed and more than halfheartedly tried to peddle to our alumni. But the truth is that for most professors most of the time there is no natural or easy correspondence between the kind of achievement expected of a "research" or "graduate" scholar and the effort demanded of a good undergraduate teacher. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. In an economy in which the coin of professional approbation is reputation made outside the institution, energy expended within the institution will be ever more jealously rationed. That is my conclusion, born of four decades' observation of the incremental triumph of the model of Big Science on this campus. There is no going back to the College of New Jersey. Even if it were desirable to do so — and it isn't — an institution in Trenton found the discarded name in our trash-bin and took it home and refinished it. But we still have a choice about how we want to balance the universitas in our University. John Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.