Meetings and the media

During the monthly faculty meeting two weeks ago, in vacant or in pensive mood, I happened to notice that there was no 'Prince' reporter, with pencil poised, lurking by the door. It occurred to me, indeed, that I had seen no 'Prince' reporter there for many a moon. Only with difficulty did I recall that not so many years ago an issue of burning concern to the undergraduate political leadership was student access to faculty meetings.

I well remember the first time the issue was engaged. It was at a special meeting of the faculty called in response to the crisis of spring 1970, the latest development in which had been the shooting of several students by gas-masked soldiers of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4. The Faculty Room in Nassau Hall was too small to accommodate the very large faculty turnout, which assembled in McCosh 10, with President Goheen presiding from the stage. The Kent State massacre itself took place in a complex and confusing context. President Richard Nixon, who had been elected in 1968 partly on the promise of ending the war in Vietnam, and who indeed seemed to be moving toward disengagement, suddenly authorized the expansion of the war into Cambodia. This astounding initiative sparked protests on campuses across the country, and it was in a context of serious disturbance that the Ohio National Guard had occupied the Kent State campus. Though it seemed to many of us at the meeting that the most immediately pressing business was the passage of a resolution condemning the military murder of American college students, debate immediately became bogged down in a more serious matter, namely the urgent request by "the students" that WPRB be allowed to come into McCosh to broadcast the proceedings live.

The greatest minds on our campus, having inerrantly identified among a heap of momentous issues one footling and peripheral, pursued it doggedly. How many students would be allowed into the room? Fixed or mobile microphones? Or perhaps both? Once admitted, could WPRB be asked to withdraw temporarily if we needed to go into "executive session?" The late great Professor Thomas Kuhn (inventor of the "paradigm shift") rose to address us. "I suggest, Mr. President", he began, "that if the next hour of this discussion is as silly as the last hour has been, we shall certainly not want it to be heard by our students or anybody else."

Once their "rights" were permanently established in this field, undergraduate journalists soon discovered that except during brief periods of revolution, which on average occur in Princeton once a century, our faculty meetings are boring beyond description. Faculty with anything more exciting to do — such as going out to Quaker Bridge to watch the Sears truck unload — rarely if ever attend. The level of dynamic participatory democracy at these meetings is roughly what one might have encountered in the Rumanian Chamber of Deputies in, say, 1953, though the tone of the proceedings often has the elegance of some vestigial medieval provincial parliament under the ancien régime. Our new president, who attended her first faculty meeting when she took up the gavel to preside over it, was apparently appalled by our august inconsequentiality. She has launched heroic efforts to inject substance into our meetings and stimulate sentience among those who attend. She recently made a PowerPoint presentation about the possible future physical expansion of the campus that elicited spontaneous applause, as before us on the screen phantom buildings rose from the soccer fields, and a remorseless pincer movement descended upon Penn's Neck between Harrison and Alexander.

One PowerPoint deserves another, and the next thing we knew, at the February meeting, Dean Malkiel was stimulating something like protracted intelligent conversation by showing us with panchromatic certainty that lots and lots of you major in economics, politics, history, and English and that very few of you major in astrophysics, German, or Near Eastern studies. The general appreciation of this reality, which will be regarded as a mere phenomenon or as a problem depending upon your approach to liberal education, is going to have consequences in the weeks ahead. I counsel my colleagues on the news desk to redirect some resources from blow-pong competition back to faculty meetings, which are suddenly threatening to become relevant.

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.