One day almost four decades ago, Nancy Weiss walked through the doors of Princeton's history department intent on doing something no other woman had done before: getting a job as a professor there.
As a Harvard doctoral candidate, she had the credentials for the post, but her gender made her an anomaly among the applicant pool.
"It isn't that we have a policy against hiring women," then-history department chair Lawrence Stone told the young woman seated in his office. "It's that no one has ever suggested it before." The next year, though, Weiss joined the faculty as the first female member of the history department and one of the first female faculty members at the University.
Within two decades of her arrival, Nancy Weiss Malkiel ascended to one of the University's highest administrative posts when she was appointed dean of the college in March 1987.
Over the course of her 20 years as dean, Malkiel has undertaken scores of campaigns to make the undergraduate experience at the University more academically rigorous. Working with Nassau Hall, she has spearheaded efforts to curb grade inflation, expand the residential college system, encourage students to choose diverse majors and create writing seminars, among other undertakings.
Malkiel's policies haven't always been popular among the students she claims to champion, however. During her two decades in West College, she metamorphosed from a popular young professor who was often invited for meals at eating clubs to the standard-bearer for many of the policies most disliked by current students and alumni.
Despite widespread student discontent, the ambitious dean remains convinced that the changes she has implemented during her tenure have been necessary steps toward ensuring a truly excellent undergraduate education.
"We could leave the undergraduate program alone, and we'd be delivering a very high-quality education. But what we always want to do is to ask how we can do better," Malkiel said in an interview last month. "I'm just trying as hard as I can to do the best job that I can to benefit current and future generations of Princetonians."
Deflating grades
The University's policy to curb grade inflation is perhaps the source of the most resentment toward Malkiel.
The idea was born in the late 1990s, when a report from Malkiel's office suggested a significant rise from 1973 to 1997 in the number of A's and B's awarded to undergraduates.
After years of fragmented efforts to curb grade inflation, Malkiel's office produced another report in spring 2003 saying efforts had been unsuccessful and that grades were still on the rise. In an interview with The Daily Princetonian that April, Malkiel said the likelihood of major changes in grading policy was "very small" and that before any chances were made in grading or reporting of grades, there would be "a long discussion with students and the faculty."
But the University-wide policy announced just over a year later on April 8, 2004, caught nearly everyone by surprise.
"The truth is we had no idea this was really going to happen the way it did until one day it was announced," said Zach Goldstein '05, who was a junior at the time. "And then people were just furious. It seemingly sprang from nothing. We just got an email one night saying 'the faculty will vote on this soon.' "
The policy called for a "common grading standard for every academic department and program," under which A's would account for less than 35 percent of the grades given in undergraduate courses and less than 55 percent of the grades given for junior and senior independent work.
Goldstein said the announcement made many students panic, as they worried not only about their grades but also about how the new guidelines would affect their connection to faculty members.
"People felt betrayed by Dean Malkiel," he said. "We felt the proposal was interfering with our relationship with our professors. And professors felt the same way. There were faculty who urged us to speak out on this because it was hurting their relationship with us as well."
Former USG president Alex Lenahan '07 was a second-semester freshman when the new policy was proposed. He said students were surprised by the short period of time between when the policy changes were announced and when the faculty vote was scheduled to take place, and that some felt students were left out of the decision-making process.
"It seemed like the decision was made and then announced to students, and then questions could be asked after that point," Lenahan said. "It didn't seem that at first there was a whole lot of interest in student opinion."
Concerns that Malkiel tended to act first and discuss her decisions later were echoed by other former student leaders, who said she was not as easy to work with as other administrators and didn't place the same importance on student opinion as her colleagues in Nassau Hall.
Goldstein added that students were upset not necessarily about the policy itself, but about the way it was introduced and the perceived lack of student input received before putting it to a vote by the faculty.
"Malkiel was her own worst foe," he said. "I don't know what she was thinking. Nancy Malkiel is not a malicious person. She's not a bad administrator. She's not a bad person. She's done so many great things. It's just terrible. It's like someone you know who makes usually good decisions does one thing poorly."
But Malkiel has found a supportive ally in President Tilghman, who recognized the rough waters that needed to be navigated to gain approval for the policy, which won 156 of 240 votes at a faculty meeting on April 26, 2004.
"I give Nancy Malkiel an enormous amount of credit for the deliberation and care with which she went about creating a University policy that ultimately two-thirds of the faculty could support," Tilghman said.
Malkiel still maintains that, in time, Princeton's efforts to curb grade inflation will be validated when other universities propose similar policies.
Almost four years after the faculty vote, though, none have.
Reshaping campus life
Despite all the attention focused on other programs and policies, the creation of the four-year residential college system may be Malkiel's longest-lasting contribution to the University.
Malkiel's link with the residential colleges began in 1982 when William Bowen GS '58, then president of the University, asked her to serve as the founding master of Mathey College. The upperclass segment of the initiative that led to the creation of the five two-year residential college system was never approved, and after becoming dean of the college in 1987, Malkiel started to think about how the University could give more juniors and seniors an opportunity to stay in colleges.
The decision in 2000 by the Board of Trustees to expand the student body opened up the possibility of creating a four-year college system when it became necessary to plan for a sixth residential college. This fall, Whitman and Mathey opened as four-year colleges, to be followed by Butler in 2009.
"It's extraordinarily gratifying to be able to be in this office long enough to see an idea that was just extremely important to me and my fellow administrators some time ago come to fruition," Malkiel said.
Tilghman praised Malkiel's work in building the four-year college system.
"It wasn't easy," Tilghman said. "It wasn't just important to build consensus about this being the right thing to do, but it was very important to do it in a way that was not harmful to the eating club system. Being able to achieve the creation of the four-year-college system without destroying something else was actually not an easy thing to do."
Tilghman added that "if you could add up the number of critical decisions that had to be made, wise decisions that had to be made, Nancy Malkiel's fingerprints are on every single one, maybe with the exception of where to plant the trees."
Calendar reform
Though the expanded college system seems to be on its way to at least moderate success, Malkiel's efforts to reform the University's unconventional academic calendar have been consistently stifled.
In the early 1990s, the faculty approved the start of school in the fall on a Thursday and shortened the spring reading and exam periods from four weeks to three, but recent attempts to make further changes have been unsuccessful.
In its most recent effort to reform the calendar, the Committee on the Course of Study spent two years developing calendar models and surveying faculty and students, only to reach an impasse last year.
"We made a critical mistake that no scientist would make, but we made it," Tilghman said. "We varied too many variables at once. There was no one calendar that everyone could get behind."
Malkiel views the current logjam as a temporary setback, however, saying that the desire for change exists, though it is fragmented. "There are members of the faculty and many students who would like some calendar other than our current calendar," she said, "but there's no consensus on what the alternate calendar would look like."
Once Harvard moves its fall semester exams to before winter break during the 2009-10 academic year, Princeton will be the only major institution with finals after break. But Malkiel said she sees the Harvard change influencing people's minds here at Princeton.
"When Harvard moves next year to exams before Christmas, it's going to put some more pressure on us as the lone school that has exams after Christmas," she said. "I think that in itself will lead students to be saying to us, 'What is this about? No other place does this.' "
Other academic changes
Closely linked in chronology to the grade deflation initiative and the creation of Whitman College is Malkiel's Major Choices initiative, launched in 2004 to encourage students to think twice about joining a big department and instead opt for a less popular major.
During the decade leading up to the initiative, increasing numbers of undergraduates were choosing to concentrate in a small fraction of the University's 34 academic departments. Malkiel conducted a survey that showed that students essentially chose a department by following the crowd, listening to parental instructions, or when thinking about how best to get into graduate or professional school. She decided that needed to change.
"It was very clear that the experience of students in very large departments and the experiences of students in small departments were just different," she said, "especially in terms of access to faculty, access to senior thesis advisors, in terms of intellectual community among students."
Though the Major Choices initiative showed small signs of progress during the first three years after its implementation, 2007 saw a resurgence in sophomore enrollment in the University's five largest academic departments, indicating that Malkiel's efforts to diversify students' academic interests might have come to a standstill.
During her tenure, Malkiel also introduced a new writing seminar program, grew the freshman seminar program from nine courses to 75 annually and revised distribution requirements for the first time in 50 years. She was responsible for introducing the ethical thought and moral values and quantitative reasoning requirements.
The Malkiel Legacy
Malkiel said that her efforts in the foreseeable future will be spent continuing to implement the policy initiatives she has introduced in the last two decades, especially in the last few years as she has hit her stride as dean.
Though in her sixties, Malkiel is mindful of the fact that next year she will become the longest-serving dean of the college in the University's history and said that she has no plans to retire. "There ought to be a fair amount to show for it in terms of quality and effectiveness of the undergraduate experience here," she said.
Senior administrators, including Tilghman and Executive Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee '69, think that despite the opposition she faces from students, Malkiel's legacy will be a positive one.
"She will be recognized as a major architect of the four-year residential college program, and it will be seen as having significantly strengthened the residential experience at Princeton," Durkee said.
Malkiel said she hopes her successors will look back at her tenure and see a period of continued growth and improvement in the undergraduate life at America's top university.
"I hope that they'll think 30 years from now that my colleagues and I made some contributions to maintaining Princeton as the highest-quality undergraduate education," she said, "and ratcheting up that level of quality by a considerable distance while we had the privilege of being entrusted with this responsibility."
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