Paradise when?

As the sun slants through the early fall leaves and warms the handsome stones of Whitman College, it's hard to believe that Princeton — or any other member of the group of wealthy private universities that it belongs to — faces serious problems. The endowment is rising like one of those guided missiles that used to worry us but somehow don't anymore, even though thousands of them are still around. Cranes loom, teams play, arts groups perform, professors babble, seniors gear up for their great intellectual bungee jumps and the president prepares to ask alumni for a lot more money to support even more frenetic activity. Everybody's virtuously busy.

No wonder bright young men and women all over the world are racking their brains for ways to convince this university to admit them. Contentment reigns — at least until the time comes to take MCATs, LSATs and GREs, interview with skeptical bankers and consultants, and to walk at last through the iron gates. American schools are a joke, American politics are a catastrophe and the American dollar is a hissing and a byword. But American universities are the envy of the world — especially Princeton and the other great private universities. Even those masters of irony, the 22-year-olds who write the articles in The Economist, agree — though they make an exception for silly humanists like me.

So every prospect pleases. Or does it? Last year I uttered heresies — among them, the observation that Cambridge seems to do a number of things better than we do. Let's see if I can do worse this year. I offer two snarls for your consideration.

Small snarl: outdoor tables. Princeton's gorgeous. The trees and flowering plants on this campus are so lovely that they distract us from the architecture — no! down, down, bent nib, let's leave the buildings for another column. No, it's not the stonework I want to complain about, it's the lawns, or their use. This is — as more than a few of you must have noticed — the age of the totally mobile student and professor. "Omnia mea mecum porto" ("I carry all that is mine around with me"), we could say, like the teacher Kulygin in Chekhov's "Three Sisters", as we schlep sacks of xeroxes, books and laptops everywhere we go so we can work wherever inspiration strikes, from coffee shops to sylvan glades.

So why, I asked myself, as I worked outdoors on Saturday in the tiny, handsome courtyard next to Joseph Henry, is that almost the only place on campus actually designed for outdoor work? Two students at the table next to mine asked each other the same question, and we talked briefly before we all got turned back to our books. It's not hard to provide good outdoor space for working (and sitting and talking). You need good tables — not ancient, miserable metal ones. They and the surface they stand on have to be dry — which means they need to receive some sunlight. But readers — and talkers—need to be sheltered from the New Jersey sun — which means you need to place the tables carefully and provide them with umbrellas. That's all, folks.

Sun-blasted benches look nice, but they're not good places to read. Wood picnic tables in deep, sodden, mosquito-ridden shade and wobbly metal tables without any form of shelter don't even look nice. So, Princeton landscape architects: Why not build us some more nice courtyards for readers (remember reading? We still do that here). Would 10 tables be too many? Or 15? The ones at Henry are always busy. If we had more, our lovely campus might stop looking, outside of class change times, as if it had been struck by a neutron bomb.

Big snarl: transparency. I never really understand what's going on here, because the facts simply aren't available. And I'm not alone in my bafflement. Take Firestone Library. We all know that architects have drawn preliminary plans to reconfigure and update it. But nobody on the faculty knows exactly what these plans call for, and as my friend Joshua Katz wrote last week in this space, some of the rumors that have sifted out are scary. More than one department seems to be slated to lose vital, dedicated space for books, students or both.

The library affects hundreds of us. It's our humanistic "please-touch" museum, our Sunday home for sermons and soda water, our source of data bases. It's still a center, if no longer the center, of the campus. All of us who use Firestone should have access to the information that would let us argue reasonably about its future. That's how East Pyne was renovated, just a few years ago. The process was painful, but the results are mostly wonderful. Why aren't we doing this again?

Or take diversity — economic diversity. I'm proud of the way we have stretched and pushed to bring more students on financial aid than ever before. These are real gains — even if Harvard, which we nudged into similar actions, has largely stolen public credit for them. But what exactly have the new policies achieved? Why, for example, do so few of our students receive Pell Grants — as critics of Ivy League admissions regularly point out? What is the exact economic and social profile of the new student body? What should it be? Faculty and students should be talking about these issues — and to do that reasonably, we need data. Why don't we have them?

Why don't we hold public, constructive discussions of the big and little decisions that shape the University? Because we don't have transparency about the conditions in which we live and work. That, at least, I understand. But why we don't have more useful outdoor tables? That baffles me completely. Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.