After attending the recent town hall meeting with President Tilghman, where where she outlined Princeton's future, I imagined how an editorial might read in an edition of the 'Prince' twenty years henceforth, considering the changes hinted at during the discussion:
"As I traverse the grassy planes of Whitman College, the envy of every non-Whitman undergrad, I wonder what this campus was like 20 years ago. They say tennis courts used to be here. Imagine that: recreational tennis courts so close to the living quarters of Butler and Wilson. Sounds like a prep school layout to me. It must have been neat to have been able to roll out of your Butler bed on a lazy Friday afternoon and walk only a few paces to grab a game of casual tennis with one of your dorm buddies.
I wonder which is nicer though. To have had that or to have what stands here in front of me today: three beautiful courtyards, each of them similarly framed in gargoyle-studded gothic arches. I guess I would have to have lived here in both times to really know which is the nicer.
I cross Elm Drive and enter Butler College, another relatively newly constructed college. Entering the cafeteria building, I spot a picture on the wall titled 'Old Butler College,' and adjacent to it, a picture of the Butler College of today with the name Harry Cobb, the designer of the new Butler College.
'Are those bicycle racks on the roofs in the picture of old Butler,' I question myself? Naw. Maybe it's just a bad angle, as I don't think the authorities of Princeton would have allowed for such poor taste to infect the beauty of its colleges.
Reemerging outside, I find myself in the beautiful Butler courtyard, which has fountains shooting water trajectories here and there. I spot an alumnus in an orange and black plaid sports jacket. He seems to be preparing the perennial wooden Reunion fences. With my curiosity of the old days of Princeton even more stirred up by the recent photos, I approach him and start a conversation about the differences between the current campus and the campus of 20 years ago, when he went here. The campus of old, he explains, was much smaller. The southern most part of the campus was essentially Poe Field, which we can no longer see since it now houses a myriad of academic and residential buildings. Hearing this, I wonder what it must have been like to have so much open space right in there on the main part of campus.
He continues, 'Elm Drive used to never have any traffic. The increased class size — 7,000 undergrads now, isn't it? — is probably responsible for that. When I went here, Princeton was a quaint place — sort of like a prep school. You knew most of the faces of your classmates,' he says.
I try to imagine such a place.
We continue our conversation. He is surprised to learn that a good number of grad students live with the undergrads in the residential colleges.
When he went here, he says, grad students never lived in the residential colleges. Grad students were outcasts. I tell him, 'they still are.'
He asks me how the eating clubs are doing, and if they were phased out by the four-year residential college system that was introduced just as he was leaving the University. I respond that they are still big, as residential food is still unsavory and social ambitions are still often realized through Bicker club membership, but that they are not as predominant as the clubs of his day."
In case you have not yet thought it, the alumnus of this imagined article is each and every Princeton undergrad who reads this article today.
Twenty years from now, we will be explaining to undergraduates what Princeton was like "way back when" — a past that is our today.
We are living in a Princeton right before a pivotal time in its development. We are living in a historic time. For the first time in 30 years, we are expanding the size of our undergraduate class, and we are considerably expanding the physical size of the University.
Although Princeton will always be a wondrous land, I do believe that the small liberal-arts environs that defines the Princeton of today is experiencing its final days.
By pointing out the fact that we are living in the evanescing days of a certain historical era, I hope to at least put up a noble fight against the tyranny of time, which has a surreptitious way of transforming the 'current' into 'history' without us realizing it.
Just as we think Fitzgerald a historical figure of our community, we should realize that we too are historical figures of a future Princeton.
Steven Kamara is a politics major from Manhasset Hills, N.Y. You can reach him at skamara@princeton.edu.
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