Princeton's campus is ghoulishly calm at 3:00 a.m. on a weeknight. It is a dreary and silent world for those ragged souls still awake and stuck with pages to read or write, where it is all too easy to feel lost amid blue computer light and dense text. Such students are not so alone as they think: A late-night walk across campus reveals many slouched profiles in dorm windows. Still, how infinitely more bearable the misery of late-night work would be if it did not have to be suffered in lonely silence!
It's not totally true that Princeton lacks late-late night study spaces. Whether or not most students use them, a smattering of all-hours computer clusters and study spaces exist across campus in residential colleges and academic departments: hideaways under McCosh and Fine, for instance. Still, for fallible human beings like us, not quite accustomed to an ascetic life sans caffeine and camaraderie, are out of luck late at night. Firestone's Trustee Reading Room empties at a conservative 11:45 p.m.; Murray-Dodge's social space shuts at 12:30 a.m.; and Café Vivian and Frist close at 2 a.m. Across campus, downcast students trudge home to lonely labors.
On a campus that takes students' academic, health and lifestyle needs seriously, support for the late-night academic is conspicuously lacking. If Princeton has a general shortage of "pleasant public spaces," as history professor Anthony Grafton suggested recently, the total absence of late-night study/social quarters is glaring. No one pretends that students climb into bed at 2 a.m. sharp, but for most of us, it's impossible to track down a single spot with the necessities of late-night survival: a well-lit desk, nourishment and a little company.
Nevertheless, Princeton could make big strides with small steps. Extending reading room hours, publicizing the location of late-night study spaces and furnishing a few centrally-located venues on campus with the bare essentials — coffee, snacks and a little communal space for reading or (heaven forbid!) chatting — could mean a new source of hope for those of us who don't always squeeze Pequod readings into that deceptively short window between dinner and midnight.
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