Senior Thesis

It's Friday, my deadline day, and I haven't so much as begun to think about a topic for this column. That is because — I say self-servingly — I've been too busy thinking about another deadline, that for senior theses in the English department, three days hence.

It is awkward having to preach to one's advisees what one so seldom seems able actually to practice: slow, steady work performed without stress over the duration of a well conceived and carefully disciplined schedule. At least I am not so bad as the great Doctor Johnson, one of the inventors of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century. He generally did not even begin to write until the printer's boy was at his door with an urgent request for finished copy.

A comparison of deadlines, of course, is as skewed and misleading as most comparisons. The writing of a weekly column is hardly the "high point" or the "culmination" of my "Princeton experience." Yet those are exactly the fulsome words to be found in the pages of university publications and on the lips of Princeton administrators, faculty, students and (perhaps above all) alumni, when describing the Princeton senior thesis.

For about forty years I have been talking the talk too. Only in the past few years has such language begun to make me nervous, as I have found myself coming dangerously close to entertaining "Stone's Heresy," named for Lawrence Stone (1919-1999), one of the faculty giants of the generation just past, the founding director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, and the widely acknowledged "father" of the history department in its present era of preeminent excellence. He was a man of capacious intellect and indefatigable energy, whose often severe affect and polemical postures were incapable of masking a deep collegial geniality and a warm affection for his students.

We all thought him a man who could do no wrong on the Princeton campus — until he began promulgating his heresy. Professor Stone came to believe that the idea that every Princeton student should write a senior thesis, an idea with roughly the same authority in Mercer County as the second law of thermodynamics, was unsound. Not all Princeton students, he came to believe, were capable of the kind of research really required. At the very least there was in numerous instances so great a disparity between the student effort required and the quality of result obtained as to call into question, on purely practical grounds, the educational soundness of the thesis requirement.

To think such heresy was bad enough. To have it spread upon the letters pages of the PAW was terrifying. Various deans rent their garments at the blasphemy, and the older alumni to a man excoriated "Stone's Heresy" in terms by no means uncertain.

I noticed even at the time, however, that in many instances the alumni praised the "thesis experience" rather as ex-Marines praise the "basic training experience": as an ordeal that you must go through because, by God, I went through it — a form of hazing raised by tradition to sacramental status.

I have a slightly different take than did Prof. Stone. Most professors long ago learned if possible to avoid teaching an upper-class course in the spring semester, so that student absenteeism, physical or mental, seldom bothers me.

What has struck me most forcibly in recent years is the high level of anxiety the experience of thesis writing induces in an increasing number of seniors. It is true that even among Princeton students there is a diversity of gifts that will lead inevitably to a diversity in the quality of theses submitted.

But I have concluded that the focus of concern should fall less on the quality of the students than on the quality of supervisory relationship.

Many faculty, having published several scholarly books with different presses, know firsthand how two press editors can differ as widely as chalk and cheese. Again the analogy, though imprecise, could be instructive. Neither the ability to be a good thesis supervisor nor the ability to make good use of a supervisor is a hardwired gift of nature. They are skills — the latter perhaps more conspicuously than the former — to be learned through concentration and practice, and maybe even a little conscious training. This is an issue to which our learning community might well direct some intentional reflection. Otherwise increasing numbers of Princeton undergraduates will continue to find in the second semester of the senior year a kind of Parris Island of the mind.

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