Professors' walls speak volumes

There is no hiding in the office of Cornel West GS '80.

Hundreds of faces, unmoving yet alive, peer at anyone who enters the room from the covers of books and recordings.

From Chekhov to Coltrane, Kafka to Chuck D, Andre 3000 to Arthur Miller, the religion professor has arranged the works that line his walls to face outward, so that from every angle he is surrounded by his "soul mates."

West achieved this effect in his office in 1879 Hall by filling his mahogany shelves first with rows of books arranged as usual, then adding an outer layer of portrait-bearing covers.

"They challenge me, they keep me honest, they help me aspire to high standards of integrity," West said of the figures, all chosen because of their "unique fusion of Socratic questioning and prophetic witness against the backdrop of tragicomic hope."

West's office is one example of how Princeton's luminaries decorate their workspaces. Troves of knowledge, knickknacks and memories, the rooms are significant because they are the intersection of a professor's academic interests and personal life. From serendipitously-found shopping carts to meticulously-kept collections, they provide much more to talk about than grades during office hours.

Swinging a small sword and posing en garde, English professor John Fleming GS '63 becomes instantly animated when asked about how he acquired the weapon that leans against one of his bookshelves. It is not a toy, but a real instrument with a thick blade. Like so many other curios stuffed among his thousand-odd books, he found it on his way to work years ago, though he did not say exactly where.

Fleming keeps everything.

He blames his reverence for even the most obscure objects on his academic passion for the ancient, explaining, "I'm a medievalist."

His office, 49 McCosh Hall, is literally boxed-in. Books tower from floor to ceiling in shelves two rows deep, and that doesn't include the 20 to 30 filled moving boxes stacked on his floor. The boxes have been there since his move two years ago from 91 Prospect Ave. There, Fleming had an office in addition to his current one as chair of the comparative literature department. He said that he has not had an opportunity to "digest" the boxes yet.

There is writing on a smidgen of blackboard not covered by bookshelves, where Fleming's granddaughter chalked figures when she was eight. Seeking to show that she could do square roots better than him, she probably didn't anticipate that the scribbling would still be there three years later.

Fleming's office is a contrast of things untouched for years and the newly found.

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"I want to write a column one day about the found objects of McCosh 50," he said of the wealth to be discovered in the lecture hall next door.

In the late 1980s, Fleming and his children gathered about 800 surplus pencils that they had collected after years of course evaluations in McCosh 50 and shipped them to a literacy project in Guatemala.

Fleming's colleague, English professor Jeff Nunokawa, also keeps goodies found around lecture halls. Nunokawa once found a shopping cart just outside his McCosh 5 office and decided to keep it.

"I've always wanted a shopping cart!" he said. Occasionally, Nunokawa takes the small silver cart, plops a few overdue books into it and heads across the blue stones of McCosh Courtyard to return them to Firestone Library.

One would think that such an eccentric alternative to a backpack might catch on among the student population.

"I don't think anyone pays any attention," Nunokawa said of wheeling the cart around campus, "Why should they really? People are sufficiently preoccupied with their own concerns to let an eccentricity of such minor magnitude pass by without notice."

Nunokawa's bookshelves hold novels he read in high school alongside Darwin's correspondences and a biography of Larry Hagman (of "I Dream of Genie" fame).

"One of the advantages of having total chaos in my bookshelves is it will lead to moments of serendipity," Nunokawa said.

In the category of bizarre office adornments, history professor Tony Grafton might well take the prize.

Apart from the expected assortment of family photos, Grafton has a framed, black and white picture of himself shaking the hand of a dead man.

The body of Joseph Scaliger, a 17th-century French scholar whom Grafton studied, was buried in a cemetery in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. In the late 1970s, when the city decided to build over the cemetery's ruins, the University of Leiden's physical anthropology lab studied Scaliger's body before it was formally reburied in the university church. A professor at the university and friend of Grafton's alerted him to the dig, and the rest was history.

"Historians have this delusion that we're always encountering the past," he said, "but I never expected to meet [Scaliger] personally!"

While history professors dream of meeting their long-dead subjects, Nunokawa said that he often amuses himself by thinking about what kind of conversation his books would have with one another at a party. What would Larry Hagman say to Darwin?

West said that if such a conversation were held in his library, he "would hope it would be characteristic of Plato's symposium," with life, death, desire and love as the main topics.

Like so many professors, West's academic passions are also very personal.

Glancing at his "soul mates" from his desk chair, West added, "And there would be a lot of voices . . . very deep voices."