The University will relocate the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding to the former Elm Club next to Tiger Inn within the next few years, following concerns about the center's distance from the heart of campus.
"The design was reviewed with the [University] Trustees over the weekend and they were very pleased," University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee '69 said.
"The project will need to go through the community approval process, and I don't yet know the timetable for that, but the hope is that the project will be completed by the fall of 2009," he added in an e-mail.
Since its inception as the Third World Center in 1971, the Fields Center has occupied the former Osborn Clubhouse, which stands down Prospect Avenue from Elm Club.
"The proposed move would increase space for programs, accessibility and the visibility of the Fields Center," University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said in an e-mail.
The move seems to address some of the student qualms about the Fields Center voiced in the 2004 USG Survey on Race and Campus Life.
Forty-one percent of respondents said they had never been to the Fields Center. Of these students, 29 percent did not know what it was, 4 percent did not know where it was and five percent said that it was too far away, the USG report noted.
Trustees and other alumni reacted with enthusiasm when the Fields Center relocation plans were first presented by the University last fall, Durkee said.
The University gauged support for the relocation at an invitation-only conference for black alumni in September and a conference on race and community open to all alumni in November.
University trustees saw "how pleased folks seem to be with the expansion of Elm that would take place and the move into a facility that will be really wonderful," Durkee said.
Looking back
The current home of the Fields Center was funded by a white supremacist.
Henry Fairfield Osborn, a member of the Class of 1877, donated the money for the Obsorn Clubhouse, which was completed in 1892.
Osborn was a eugenicist who believed in the superiority of the Caucasian race. In 1928, he wrote in a book that "environmental conditions ... have kept many branches of the Negroid race in a state of arrested brain development."
Osborn served as a comparative anatomy professor at Princeton and later as director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
He was also a member of the Faculty Committee on Outdoor Sports. The clubhouse he donated, also known as the Field House, provided training facilities for home and visiting athletic teams, Alexander Leitch '24 wrote in "A Princeton Companion."
The University converted the Osborn Clubhouse into the Third World Center in 1971, after a group of minority students called the Third World Coalition hosted a sit-in in Firestone Library to protest University financial aid policies.
The Elm building served as the home of Elm Club from 1901 until 1973. The club reopened in the building in 1978 and housed the merged Dial, Elm and Cannon Club (DEC) from 1989 to 1997. The University agreed to acquire the club building in 1997, and since then it has served as a swing-space for departments and programs in other buildings being renovated.
Going forwardThe University will release more details about the Fields Center relocation after Intersession, Cliatt said.
Cliatt added that the University may also announce its plans for the current Fields Center and 91 Prospect Ave. The Writing Center, currently housed in 91 Prospect, will move to Whitman College over the summer.
Since the trustees were discussing the relocation plans this weekend, Fields Center director Makeba Clay declined to comment last week.
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