Economies of scale

Among great universities, Princeton has long and rightly prided itself on the special excellence of an undergraduate program that brings together some of the best and brightest young people with some of the most famous and influential scholars in many fields. Our boast in this regard, while it has not yet reached the level of outright fraud, is year by year becoming ever more difficult to articulate with a straight face, especially with regard to the typical student experience of the underclass years. The experience of most Princeton freshmen and sophomores is now pretty similar to that of their peers — or as many secretly think, their inferiors — at other research universities. They may see and hear Prof. Famous from a distance of 20 yards in one of the larger lecture halls, but most and sometimes all of their more personalized education is entrusted to graduate student preceptors, laboratory instructors and what are in effect adjunct tutors in writing.

I have touched upon this reality several times over the years, and I shall not pursue it in this column. The trend, while probably irreversible, is no less lamentable. It is driven by large economic "forces" and encouraged by the administration's commitment to Big Science and its nearly inevitable star system of faculty preferment. Entering students need to know of the reality, so they can counter it by taking advantage of such vestiges or renovations of the older model as they are available. The most valuable of these — the Freshman Seminars, which everyone should experience, the Humanities Sequence and its recent imitator in Integrative Science — are as yet limited to the happy few. They are potential models for serious expansion, perhaps even in the direction of a "core curriculum."

The immediate stimulus for my meditation on these subjects is my experience of the last ten days as an academic adviser in Wilson College during the class "sign-up" period. All academic life, like all politics, is local; and advisers, ably deployed by the college deans, are naturally distributed among the residential colleges where freshmen and sophomores live. But we begin the advising year in September at a mass meeting where the advisers from all five colleges are present. The first thing I noticed this year was the evident youth of most academic advisers. There are probably four or five nontenured advisers for each tenured one. Of truly "senior" faculty — people who have been around here for a couple of decades at least — there are conspicuously few.

While no one would claim a high correlation between antiquity and ability, I might plausibly suggest one between antiquity and experience. Most faculty do what they think they have to do for professional success and what they want to do, in that order. Under ideal circumstances there is perfect harmony betwixt the two. It is not illegitimate to draw a sobering inference from the fact that of the faculty who ostensibly know the most about the institution so few serve as underclass advisers.

I have never had a finer group of first-year advisees, either from the academic or the purely personal points of view, so that the actual process of "advising" was pretty much a snap. One arrives at the slightly disquieting realization that by the second half of their first semester at Princeton, most students — for good or for ill — have pretty much taken their academic advising into their own hands.

Faculty advisers can bully their charges into finishing their language requirement or tisktisk their procrastination of a QR, but when it comes to selecting genuine electives, the students have their own preferred oracle: the grapevine. Most Princeton students choose courses that other Princeton students have taken and recommended. Far be it from me to impugn the good conservative principal that the tried and true is deserving of trust, but the unintended effect of its operations has contributed to the awkwardly imbalanced distribution among courses and departments that Dean Malkiel and others have now set out to address. If you have several hundred justly satisfied customers telling their friends that no life is complete without an economics course taught by Beth Bogan or a politics course with Maurizio Viroli, more and more students are likely to spend more and more time in McCosh 50. Meanwhile the three students who signed up for "The Cromlechs of Ancient Gaul" find their recruitment efforts somewhat hampered by the fact that the course was never in fact actually taught, having been cancelled by the dean and the departmental chair as lacking economic viability. 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.