Obscuring the real Princeton

The Undergraduate Admission Office recently launched a new website to serve as Princeton's face for potential students and their parents. The site includes excellent descriptions of the residential colleges, Princeton's unique academic program and the University's unsurpassed financial aid policy. Yet the site also includes sections that are disingenuous representations of the amount of diversity on campus.

The student profiles overemphasize the presence of racial and ethnic minorities. Of 11 current students chosen to be profiled on the site, three are white. Similarly, the 19 faculty profiles include two core faculty and an associated professor in the Center for African-American Studies (CAAS). It is rather hard to believe that nearly one-sixth of Princeton's faculty is associated with CAAS. The minority-centrism of the site is also carried out in the profiles of all three sociology professors featured, which lead with references to their research regarding minority and low-income college students.

Rather than use means of communication such as these profiles to exaggerate the presence of certain groups or causes on campus, the University should honestly highlight the diversity that actually does exist. While it is not the case that eight out of every 11 students come from minority backgrounds, Princeton can still celebrate that four out of every 11 do represent minority groups. In addition to being proud of its faculty in the Center for African American Studies, the University should also showcase celebrated professors in other departments, such as economics, whose faculty were noticeably absent from the profiles.

By sincerely representing Princeton's diversity to prospective students, the University would move toward the important goal of becoming more transparent regarding real conditions on campus. In previous editorials, we have called for the Admission Office to release more nuanced statistics regarding the backgrounds of admitted students and for the University to study the socioeconomic backgrounds of eating club members. The University can only benefit by undertaking these steps toward transparency. It has already begun to do so by improving the accuracy of the information it disseminates about the eating clubs and their advantages and disadvantages. The administration should recruit students with candor, not obfuscation.