Earlier this month, 50 fifth- and sixth-graders at Foundation Academy, a brand-new charter school in Trenton, paid a visit to Princeton. Trenton is only 10 miles away, but for some who live there, we are in another world entirely. My job, according to Lisa Kemp '06, was to tell the students about Princeton and make them excited about the idea of someday going to college. So I stood in front of this impressively unfidgety bunch in Guyot 10 one beautiful Thursday morning and, after introducing myself, wrote "UNIVERSITY" in big letters on the blackboard. What is a university, I asked, and what does the word make you think of? I imagined that perhaps someone would say something about universal knowledge. But that's because, sad to say, I don't spend much time with 10 year-olds. What in fact happened is that one boy's hand shot up, and when I called on him, he said, "It makes me think of outer space."
Talk about another world. Princeton may seem as unreachable as Mars to some of these children. I wish I could say that I have done a lot to find a solution — that I regularly go to Trenton for something other than DiLorenzo's plain and anchovy pizzas — but I am very tied to my books and have never (yet) done anything like my old friend Jeff Dolven in the Department of English, who took a year's leave from the Harvard Society of Fellows in order to teach at two public high schools in Boston. Still, I love the idea that these eager boys and girls are in some sense my grandkids: I taught Lisa (she got an A) and now she's teaching them. And I love even more the idea that some of them might end up at universities like Princeton and, in becoming my and my colleagues' children, relish their explorations in outer space and, so to speak, bring the outside in.
One of the things I like about my work is that I get quite regularly to bring Princeton to some folks who are not between the ages of 17 and 27. It's nice to exit "the orange bubble" — which we tend to view and protect as our inner space — and go into the outer space that most people call "the real world." But just as Princeton is not as monolithic as many assume, neither is what lies beyond Magie and the FitzRandolph Gate. There are many real worlds out there.
A few hours after talking to the kids from Trenton — one of whom asked me to autograph his football, an experience I do not expect to have again in this world or any other — I went with Leslie Jennings Rowley to Philadelphia, where we spent the evening chatting with Princetonians over tasty lace cookies in a private club. Alumni are pretty much by definition people who used to be in their university's bubble but are now outside it, and Tigers, famous for their allegiance to Old Nassau, have a special interest in "going back" into the bubble — even if the bubble is thousands of miles away on the high seas. Rowley, the superb executive manager of Princeton Journeys, has a great job: She organizes alumni trips, one of which, a 2005 cruise through the western Mediterranean, I feel fortunate to have led. So far all the trips have been on earth, but next October there is an adventure into what the 2008 brochure calls "the secret world of the Russian Space Program."
The following morning found me back at Princeton and in McCosh 50, where I spoke to about 150 aliens, family members of the Class of 2011, who were in town for Freshman Parents' Weekend. At least I have reason to believe they're aliens, for that's how their children regularly describe them to me. Whatever planet they may be from, they did appear to have an excellent command of English, for they laughed in the right places during my hour-long disquisition on grammar, a subject whose considerable comic potential I have been making it my business to tap. In any case, they deserve kudos for spending years doting on their little monsters so that they could go to Princeton, where they are proving to be very expensive monsters indeed.
The administration hopes, of course, that in a few years, many of them — that is to say: many of you who are reading this column — will become monster donors, as well as proud alien-parents of members of the Class of 2041 (whom I may still get to teach). I hope so too, especially if you balance giving yourself a few Princeton trips with giving one or two of my grandkids in Trenton a chance in the same universe. Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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