Alumni can be found in all sorts of places

I am occasionally asked how it was that, more than a decade ago now, I came to start writing a column for the "Princetonian." The answer is that an enterprising editor cajoled me into writing with the argument that a faculty columnist might help reanimate the kinds of informal student-faculty interchange that in my early years were a treasured part of the Princeton undergraduate experience. That was the theory. The practice has turned out to be somewhat different. Though I do get a fair amount of response from the campus — sometimes outraged and sometimes approbative — most of my mailbag comes from the GAD: the Great Alumni Diaspora.

I usually get to my office at 6:30 a.m., and before heading over to Dillon for my swim I spend 10 minutes glancing at email. The paper 'Prince' has perhaps not even been delivered to the distribution stations at that hour, and I certainly have seen no copy. Yet on an average Monday I will already have half a dozen notes from London, Rome, Hong Kong and other points east. That so many Tiger tycoons take time out from the running of the global economy for an online dip into "Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche" is curious but also gratifying. Then throughout the day I can pretty well monitor from the calendar of my Inbox the sun's westward course and the arrival of the lunch hour in Dallas and then Seattle.

Many of the alumni who write, probably most of them, are unknown to me, or rouse only the vaguest of semi-memories. During the course of a year, a professor — at least this one — comes to know reasonably well only a few undergraduates: some freshman advisees, some juniors and seniors doing independent work, some members of a Freshman Seminar or a preceptorial. On the other hand, through lecturing or participating in public campus events that same professor may quite unknowingly each year be making some kind of impact on dozens, even hundreds of undergraduates who, a decade or two later, decide to dash off an email from Bahrain! Under these circumstances one has to fight the impulse to view undergraduates less as students than as pre-alumni.

Of course the Internet simply magnifies the phenomenon most longtime Princeton faculty must be familiar with: that any time a professor is in a public place there is a 48 percent chance that he will encounter an alumnus, or should I say post-student? Last Saturday night, my wife and I were in New York for a special showing of two documentary films made by Katja, my girl friend in law, or however one describes one's son's partner. The films were terrific and fully earned their warm reception. In addition to the showing itself, a triumph for Katja, which took place in a ratty little theater on the lower East Side before an audience of pulsating coolth, the evening included a dinner in an Indian restaurant in which six of us sat at a table about the size of one of the individual Firestone study nooks, and finally a postprandial drink in a trendy, meaning grotty, youth bar somewhere on Avenue A. I'm used to being in places where men don't wear coats and ties, but here the vibe was that they had never before seen a coat or a tie.

After some low-octane, high-decibel chitchat with obscure movie stars, my wife and I exited this source of conviviality. We were followed onto the street by a curiously accoutered young man with a smooth face, shaven head and tight-fitting, panchromatic garments. He was gesticulating — I think that's the word — and calling out my name: Professor Fleming, Professor Fleming! I did not at first recognize this man, for which fault I can only invoke the impact of the Yul Brenner effect. He was John F (yes, another one) of the class of 1991. This man was a brilliant student who wrote an excellent thesis on medieval fabliaux — which are dirty jokes raised to an art form by the power of literary skill. He had been one of the "stars" of the promotional video called "Conversations That Matter" that is still pulled out on occasion for Parents' Weekend and Alumni Day. He had helped me enormously in my work for an ill-starred Chaucer encyclopedia. Now he's a weekday mogul of website design, and on Saturday nights he makes the scene on the Lower East Side. I don't know whether he's been reading my column, but now that he's in it, he'll have to start. So, I say, God bless our alumni. It's not often that a writer can find a subject and an audience in the same place. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.