The (alumni) ties that bind

Like many other faculty, I travel out in the country once or twice a year visiting alumni clubs, clubs organized on the curious principle that their members once did something. Augustine reminds us that the "present" does not, strictly speaking, exist except as a metaphysical razor's edge between past and future, the actual coordinates against which our actions are graphed. This is a truth widely dramatized in academic life, but at Princeton never more poignantly than late in the spring semester, always culminating in a long weekend in which returning alumni remember a past and graduating seniors "commence" with a future.

Just as there is a "time" perspective, there is a "place" perspective. My tour began in Tulsa, Okla., and it carries me tomorrow to Saint Louis, Mo., to a "Regional Conference." In Alumni Council terms, a Regional Conference is a pretty big deal, roughly comparable to the Assembling of the Clans in the Highlands; and the highlight of that conference will be an address by the premier bearer of the orange and black tartan herself, President Tilghman. But for the tiny Augustinian slice of the present as I am writing this column, my remote location is a downtown Hilton hotel. The hotel looks pretty much like every other hotel, and from the window the downtown looks pretty much like other downtowns; but the fact that it is snowing in late April confirms my belief that I am in the Minneapolis Hilton recuperating from my guest appearance this evening at a meeting of what its older members call the Princeton Club of the Northwest. That ought to mean Portland and Seattle, but doesn't even come close. The club got there before the real Northwest had fully penetrated the consciousness of Princeton. F. Scott Fitzgerald, among our most celebrated Minnesota alumni, seems to have thought that he came from the Wild West.

You can learn a lot of American history through place names. Look at a map of America. The whole region usually called the "Middle West" really ought to be called the Middle East. A great deal depends upon a particular perspective at a particular moment. The perspective can remain fossilized in the language long after the moment has passed by. Among the oddest perspectives are the pre's. I mentioned last week my attendance at a "pre-frosh" event, meaning an event for high school seniors, but high school seniors so eager to leap to the future that they must be defined in terms of it. Even as I silently laughed at its failure, I at least understood the political agenda behind the move a few years ago to replace the word "girls" with "pre-women," but why a rich and complex period of literary history should continue to be called "pre-Romanticism" by "post-Moderns," for example, has me stumped.

But I will say that after you have spent a few days in a row visiting alumni associations, you begin to think of current undergraduates less as "students" than as "pre-alumni." This actually makes good sense. You'll spend four years here as a student, but with even a little luck you'll put in 50 or 60 years as an alumnus. Furthermore, the status of "alumnus," anticipated by some undergraduates with a sense of apprehension and foreboding, can be viewed less as a chronological inevitability than as a challenging opportunity. What you encounter, especially in some of the smaller clubs like those in Tulsa and Minneapolis, where the scale allows you to view it with clarity, is the prominent role played by many Princeton alumni in local civic, cultural and educational life. The memorial reverence and respect in which these folks hold their alma mater is touching and often even moving, but their real bond as "Princetonians" is not some hideous item of orange apparel but the common cause of educated citizens. The highpoint of this particular visit so far has been my reconnection after decades of separation with a man, now in his mid-fifties, who was, in the turbulent and revolutionary years of the late sixties, the student president of Wilson College during my first mastership there. He is a high school teacher and a major contributor of talent to the rich local theatrical scene. His life, personal and professional, has not been without the agonistic quality of great literature. A decade's difference in age, which seemed generational in 1970, now approaches insignificance, and we picked up our friendship as though a lapse of three decades were a single heartbeat. 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.