Rethinking our priorities

I'm not sure how long ago they installed the hand sanitizer dispensers in Frist, but I only noticed them last week. Perhaps the things went in two years ago when we had that miniature pinkeye epidemic, but then I think I would have noticed them earlier. I've got two questions about them. First, have the US News rankings gone to our heads so much that we now seek to eliminate that last controllable damper on campus life, the common cold? Second, and this thought was actually put in my head by an evolutionary biologist, don't those folks at McCosh realize that these hand sanitizers will makes germs become drug-resistant faster?

My guess is that these hand sanitizers are like so many other luxuries on campus that we mislabel as "necessary" to address some "problem." Yet, I'd say one of the biggest problems I've run into here is that I don't think I've ever heard the phrase, "Do we really need that?" uttered on behalf of this $40,000-ahead Academic Nirvana on Earth.

Campus construction is my favorite brand of hell paved-with-the-best-intentions here at Princeton. For one thing, most of our construction "needs" have been caused by the decision to bring in an additional 500 undergraduates. And by the way, does anyone know anyone who thinks that was a good decision? That's supposedly why my academic home at Princeton, Aaron Burr, is being gutted this year — to create more and modern office space at the price of turning the coziest building on campus into a whorish imitation of Wallace Hall, sterile and vaguely corporate. That may personally inconvenience few people other than a few undergraduates and their slightly socially awkward anthropologist-professors, but it's the principle of the thing: Why spend money on a building people liked so much the way it was?

Observation indicates that the University spends a lot of money in stupid ways — like gutting buildings that are functional and well-loved, ripping out shrubbery senselessly to replace it with younger versions, and sending out thousands of color-printed fliers that no one ever reads. Then there are the more expensive endeavors like building a science library on a well-loved field near Fine Hall, a library where the books will be in the basement to make room for a café on the first floor.

People do joke about these things and recognize the posh environment for what it is (at least when we remember to notice it), but it's also slightly scary and more than a little strange in light of, well, the way the other, not 50 percent, but 99 percent of the world lives. Ever try to explain to someone who doesn't go to Princeton why students pay $5,000-7,000 a year for food? Or explain that at that price it's not even steak every night? Ever told someone working full-time for minimum wage that student jobs here pay $9 an hour or up? Or that we pay $40,000 a year and then whine about $100 for Pequod packets?

You might ask what's wrong with well-paying student jobs? Or even paying for an eating club? Maybe nothing. I wouldn't advocate drastic changes all around. What I would like to see is some acknowledgement that the amount of money we're each costing the rest of the world is kind of high, and some thinking about this, and maybe even some talking. The proportions are certainly off somewhere, and I wonder how much intellectual honesty can be flourishing in a community where we don't actively recognize our own absurdities.

So often questions of "What should we do?" when asked at Princeton really mean something like, "What will make us more comfortable or more successful or more prestigious?" Or possibly, "How can we spend enough money to preserve our nonprofit status?" Maybe once in a while it wouldn't be so bizarre for the University to say, "What should we do?" in the sense of "What would be right to do?" Regardless of individual spending habits, the University could certainly change its spending policies a little.

I know we're not a humanitarian organization; our business is education. However, even if sending the excess interest from our endowment to hurricane victims in Florida or Haiti won't fly as far as the trustees are concerned, how about hybrid cars for public safety or higher salaries for University workers? Aileen Nielsen is an anthropology major from Brooklyn, N.Y. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.