Princeton 50 years later, Princeton 50 years hence

How has Princeton changed since Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954? So asked my good friend, 'Prince' Editorial Page Editor Jonathan Williams. "What hasn't changed?" replies this white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male graduate of the Class of l957 (perhaps the most redundant set of adjectives ever to parade across this page).

As I try to pull that long-ago May day into focus, a memory and an observation arise: First, virtually every other student looked like me, embedded in a mosaic of white faces set upon the bright greens of a Princeton spring. Second, a recent random sampling of a few classmates revealed that none remembers much of anything about the campus reaction to the decision.

I do. Sometime that afternoon, I ran into fellow Mississippian John Stennis '57. The ruling was a terrible mistake, we agreed. Surely the South must change, but the worst way to accomplish change was by judicial edict.

We weren't in the minority, I expect. Most white Americans, northern and southern, were unabashedly, openly racist in those days. (If you don't believe this, read the old polls.) Princeton was unabashedly if not openly restrictive in thought and deed. Jewish admission quotas prevailed and anti-Semitism barely muted its voice. Homophobia was a given rather than denied, and if there were five black undergraduates in the four years I was here, I don't remember three of them. (And, of course, it was all male, all the time, weekends aside.)

I was what passed for an affirmative action baby in those days, putting aside alumni children. I graduated from a public high school in the far off, impoverished Mississippi Delta, exotic leavening for a class in which preppies and Easterners predominated.

Today, Princeton arguably exists as a different planet in an inarguably different societal solar system. So-called minorities are present in roughly the same numbers as the population at large. Women now approach numerical parity. Gays and lesbians, out of the closet , are never going back. Princeton can proudly boast of a need-blind admissions policy that actually makes good on its rhetoric. And as a close friend, father of a recent Jewish graduate, has been known to muse, what's not good for Jews at today's Princeton?

Of course, as in the nation as a whole, racism has gone underground at Princeton, to creep out on drunken nights and in code word attacks on affirmative action. The Street still offers its secondhand approximations of the class divisions that prevail in our allegedly classless nation, though even the Street is open in ways that are anathema to stereotypical Old Grads.

Just as the South was eventually forced to the commanding moral heights occupied by the North at the time of Brown, Princeton has moved upward with its own version of all deliberate speed. But just as "those commanding heights" were far short of the mountaintop, so are Princeton's gains.

Where will we be tending over the next 50 years, Jonathan also asked. Journalists, old or new, should stay away from prophecy; we have a hard enough time getting the facts of current events right. But another question can help shape some possible answers: What kind of world will Princeton inhabit 50 years hence?

Most certainly, dramatically less white than it is now. Unless we are very purposeful, even more polarized between haves and the have-nots.

And that suggests a goal for anyone who cares about something more important than "I've got mine." Princeton, while continuing to educate great teachers, scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen, must place itself in the vanguard of the quest for lasting connections, from local to global, between disparate peoples.

In my senior year, a History 301 preceptor leaned into our bland faces and scornfully intoned, "Princeton exists to produce the Praetorian Guard for American industry." We were unamused, if not startled. In the nows to come, Princeton can match the record of the past 50 years if it decides to produce a Praetorian Guard for what were once unselfconsciously referred to as American values—liberty, justice, democracy and equality. But this Praetorian Guard — this Princeton — must be far more representative of the society, the values and the globe it seeks to advance than it is today. If that sounds far-fetched, think again of where Princeton was in 1954. Hodding Carter III '57, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was a Princeton trustee for 14 years and a longtime newspaper and television journalist.