Longing for tradition

As usual, in the summer the campus has been a chaos of construction, renovation and repair, with several projects almost, but not quite completed before the return of the students. The mess in the environs of Firestone Library remains mysterious to me, though less so than what is going on inside the building. I recently overheard an Orange Key guide trying to convince a skeptical cohort of visitors that Firestone Plaza is ordinarily a handsome place. On the other hand, the integration of the new Humanities building with Henry House is very successful and adds measurably to the overall grandeur of the front campus.

Not all the improvements are so happy. The stone stairs in the archway joining Dillon Gymnasium and Little Hall were replaced during the summer. This is on one natural path for many heading for the Dinky Station, the WaWa store and Forbes College. The old stairs, gradually softened by decades of energetic pedestrians, had the slight concavity that is part of the genuine patina of antiquity we associate with the Oxford colleges or other ancient European buildings. I'll be dead long before the sharp-edged granite risers that have replaced them seem really to fit into their surroundings.

Furthermore, such architectural "improvements" are of the sort likely to complicate the task of Orange Key guides — a group whose importance any old-timer at Princeton will surely appreciate. The Orange Key guides are the guardians of one of our most priceless assets: our campus traditions. And when they are not preserving them, they are creating them. In future it will be harder to sustain the claim that F. Scott Fitzgerald walked down those stairs.

The other day I suddenly had the brilliant aperçu that the Orange Key spiel is in effect a kind of institutional stump speech. Though I spend little time consciously listening to the "news," NPR has become the background white noise of my domestic arrangements. Thus, I have by now heard, day-by-day in twentyor thirty-second snippets, the complete basic stump speeches of President Bush and Sen. Kerry. I even have a pretty good idea of the order in which their verbal gobbets might be arranged in plausible sequence, though aside from the fact that the "God bless the United States America!" is obviously rhetorically terminal, neither man is conspicuous for the organizational rigor of his remarks.

That is exactly how I have learned most of my Princeton lore — through forty years of accidental, random, twenty-second encounters with Orange Key tour groups as I have been going here or there on campus. This leisurely mode of learning is only superficially inefficient. It would be hard to argue that the means by which a child acquires the mother tongue through the vagaries of an enforced eavesdropping is inferior to a 101 course that meets MTWTh with a double language lab on F.

I hear — or, rather, overhear — all kinds of Orange Key lore. One of the stories I have repeatedly heard is the Legend of Alexander Hall. According to the history pieced together from about twenty guides over a period of ten or twelve years, I now know that Alexander Hall, perhaps my favorite building on campus, was the revenge of an aggrieved alumnus of the architecture school. He had presented the architectural plans for an ornate Romanesque ecclesiastical edifice as his senior thesis. His work was poorly received by his professors. Indeed, they failed his thesis.

But like many another youth of American legend the man despised in the groves of Academe went on to become a titan in the School of Beans and Bacon. He grew rich, very rich. The officials of his alma mater approached him in the hopes of securing a handsome gift. Not merely was the man rich, he was also magnanimous. Let bygones be bygones. He agreed to give them a whole building, and a spectacular one at that — provided only that the building be erected exactly according to the plan laid out in his senior project.

Several aspects of this account might invite bemusement or even skepticism. After all, Alexander Hall was dedicated in 1892. The School of Architecture was founded in 1919. The Princeton senior thesis dates from the Eisenhart reforms of the 1920s. I've never heard of anybody ever failing a thesis, not really. But it's so good a story that it deserves to be true, sort of like President Bush's enterprise zones and John Kerry's middle-class tax relief. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.