The 'everyone wins' ideas

Why do people become columnists? The stock answer is something about how opinion writing is a public service, and it's partly correct. But one of the biggest real draws for having a column is the thrill of debate itself, and that can lead to problems. Many of us (including me) like debating as an activity the same way others like going to the gym or playing a musical instrument. I don't mean the anger or frustration that can be part of argument. I'm talking about the good, satisfying feeling that comes from a civil and humane exchange of views. Like going to the gym, debate serves a larger purpose: helping everybody sort through options and settle on answers to the tough public questions that we have to deal with as a group.

But there are a couple of pitfalls. One is that we columnists sometimes start to treat argument like a game, and to lose track of how important and emotionally laden most political issues really are. Another is that we can get like those animals who don't see a thing unless it's moving: Where there's no argument, we think, there's nothing to write about.

The search-for-conflict mindset amounts to a subconscious assumption that all the good ideas we can readily agree on have already been thought of. It's a little bit like seeing something green on the sidewalk and thinking "that can't be a $100 bill — if it were, someone would have picked it up already." But I like to think that there are lots of these everyone-wins ideas out there.

They're hard to spot. The only one I can lay claim to is Monday's town hall with Tilghman, which went even better than I hoped. I'm thrilled she plans to make an annual habit of it.

The recent introduction of soda behind the taps of all eating clubs is another example. The "Soda Plan," at negligible cost and without telling anyone what to do, managed to enhance people's Prospect experience and at the same time make a measurable dent in the amount of beer consumed at the Street.

I can think of one other still unrealized example. Every day a huge panoply of events takes place at Princeton. Between the campus events email, the "find" website when it was live, the home page's daunting and yet incomplete public events calendar, the weekly bulletin and email lists of colleges and clubs, there is also a huge number of places to look for information about what's happening when.

But we don't have a good just-in-time clearinghouse. If you have a few hours free in the afternoon and want to find, right then, something interesting to do that starts in a few minutes, there's no good place to look. We've all had the experience of wasting an afternoon only to find the next day that we missed some great lecture, movie, concert or play. A single site that displays a selection of particularly interesting events happening that day, each with enough contextual information to help people gauge their interest in advance, would dramatically reduce the search costs that keep us from making the most of Princeton.

There are USG efforts under way, but this is an institutional problem whose solution would significantly improve Princeton's effectiveness as a learning community. It belongs on the administration's front burner, and merits a significant commitment from the trustees if that's what it takes.

Do you see other $100 bills on our collective sidewalk — changes that would benefit everyone, and harm nobody? I'd love to write about them — or convince you to share them yourself. Drop me an email, and we'll get the ball rolling. David Robinson is a philosophy major from Potomac, Md. His column appears every other Thursday. He can be reached at dgr@princeton.edu.