When most students think about their professors, they picture them waxing eloquent in the lecture hall or presiding over a precept.
Faculty who arrive at the University, however, face a difficult choice when planning their outside-the-office hours: where to live in relation to campus.
Many students say they appreciate it when faculty dwell close to the University, valuing the social and academic intimacy that's possible when they run into their professors at Starbucks or walking down Nassau Street.
For professors, however, the choice of where to make their home can be fraught with complexities, including the high cost of living in the Princeton area, family connections to other locations and fear that they won't keep their jobs long enough to make it worth uprooting to a college town.
Anthropology professor Janet Monge, who lives in Philadelphia, said that even with good starting salaries, the price of residing close to campus is "formidable," particularly for younger faculty members. "Even though they have a good salary, it's compensating for the cost of living base," she said. "I can't even imagine a young person [starting his or her] first job managing like that."
To compensate for the high real-estate values in the Princeton area, the University offers low-interest mortgages and rental property to its employees.
Faculty and staff who work at least halftime can qualify to rent apartments, town homes or single-family houses, and the University also oversees a mortgage loan program that lets faculty members obtain low-interest mortgages on homes within a nine-mile radius of campus.
These programs are designed to foster a sense of community by having professors live close to campus, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an email.
"There is housing at a variety of price points, and so it is likely that there is something for everyone," he said.
Such programs, history professor Hendrik Hartog said, are the result of "straight economics."
"The University wants to be able to recruit people from where it's cheaper to live," he said. "They would simply lose those people if you had to buy what is here a million dollar house."
Attracting professors who currently teach in locations with low costs of living, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is "an endless problem" for Princeton, Hartog said.
He added, however, that the University has not been deterred from trying. "I think the University does as good a job as it can in getting people to live here or within this area," he said. "I don't know a university that does a better job in achieving that."
But Roblin Meeks, interim assistant director of the McGraw Center and a former professor in the Princeton Writing Program, said his family situation prevents him from living near campus. Meeks — who commutes from New York, where his wife works — said it would be difficult for his wife to find an equivalent position in the Princeton area, and a commute to New York would limit the time she could spend with their young children.
Though it "would be great to live here, [to] be close," Meeks said, "given our personal situation, it's not really that feasible right now. It's not so much a function of commuting as much as our personal situation."
In the current academic job climate, Meeks added, the decision to move can be a major decision for professors unsure of how long they will hang on to their posts.
"One thing about academic jobs, they're very transient," he said, noting that writing seminar professorships last no more than five years. "It's a big deal to uproot a family and relocate. If you're going to have to relocate in two years or three years, that's a factor. Academic jobs are becoming more and more like that."
Other professors said they chose to live in places like Philadelphia and New York, rather than right in Princeton, because of the positive benefits such cities offer.
Monge, a forensic anthropologist, has an additional job at Penn and does consulting work on behalf of poor or minority defendants in criminal cases.
"[My colleagues and I] have a group of skills that can be very helpful to a group of people," Monge said. "We always considered it almost like a kind of public service."
Monge and Meeks said they don't see their commuting as negatively affecting their relationships with students. "In all the student evaluations I ever got, not one said, 'I wish he wouldn't have been gone so much so I could have talked more,' " Meeks said. In fact, he added, students' awareness that he didn't live close to campus led to more organized, distilled conversations when he did meet with them.
Monge noted that email and other technologies have made it easier to stay in touch. The juniors and seniors she advises, she said, know about her home's relative distance from campus but still find time to meet or communicate with her.
But Rocky master and English professor Jeff Nunokawa said being part of the University community trumps many of the advantages that come with living in a larger city. Though he still has a home in New York, he has spent increasingly less time there over his years of teaching at the University, he said.
"I don't have the energy or the desire to make that commute," he said. "I get to New York now at most once a week. There's too much going on here."
"New York is still a central part of my life," he added. "But Princeton is home now."
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