Muchas gracias, Ballet Folklorico de Princeton

As a longtime aficionado of Latin American music, I had expected the event to be nice. It was not nice. It was fabulous - a breathtaking, aesthetic feast for the eyes, the ears and the senses.

This year the Ballet performed folk dances from four regions of Mexico - Jalisco, Guerrero, Huasteca Veracruzana and Veracruz - featuring the colorful costumes and folk dances typical of each region. Interspersed between these rhythmic dances, whose nimble but powerful footwork evidently can be mastered only after months and years of focused training, the performers smuggled in a little education in the form of illuminating video clips on the regional variations in Mexican culture and in the music and dances it begets. There was a song and even a poem penned by one of the dancers. It was, in a nutshell, Princeton University at its many bests.

What made the event particularly charming for me was the realization that some of the accomplished dancers on the stage may well have been students in my ECO 100: Introduction to Microeconomics in past years. They were the same students who had patiently copied down my turgid diagrams on supply and demand, and the same students on whom I had unloaded the fairly heavy weekly homework assignments in the course. I almost felt guilty for having done that. Between finishing those homework assignments and other similar academic tortures visited on them by my colleagues, these young people somehow had found the time to meet three times or more a week for the physically demanding exercises required to master Mexican folk dance.

Ever the economist whose mind never strays far from the topics and income and wealth, the Ballet Folklorico de Princeton reminded me once again that the wealth of great American universities such as Princeton resides not just in their often huge endowment, the splendor of their physical facilities, the human capital embodied by its faculty and love of alumni for their alma mater. A good part of that wealth also is brought to campus every year by its students, as they share their varied personal and cultural experiences with us, thus both enlightening and entertaining us, as the Ballet Folklorico de Princeton did last Saturday evening.

There are, of course, many other such groups of students on campus, who with their entrepreneurial spirit and hard work enrich our lives in various ways - be it by competing on the sports field; by interpreting literature for us in the theater, song and dance; by performing for us as talented musicians; by amusing us with clever parodies; or by devoting most of their free time to writing for or managing campus publications.

There is also the The Kathryn W. And Shelby Cullom Davis '30 International Center, originally invented sometime in the 1970s by director Paula Chow and since that time "grown" by her, as the jargon goes, to the well-known campus institution it is today. The Center not only provides a focus for Princeton's growing cohort of international students, but it also offers the entire campus a window on other cultures and on political, social and economic developments elsewhere in the world through its many cultural performances throughout the year, including the International Forum, its own television program. Before the establishment of that center, our campus was not exactly boring, but it certainly was more boring than it is now.

By thanking the Ballet Folklorico de Princeton for entertaining and instructing us all so splendidly last Saturday night, I want to thank all of our students who came to Princeton not only to learn, but also to share with the rest of us the riches of their heritage or of their varied talents. As my wife summed it up on the way home, "the discipline, the hard work, the focus, the passion and the joy these young people find in giving of themselves to others are the very traits that I hope we will see in the future leaders who will inherit from us both the accomplishments and the mess we shall bequeath to them." Well said.

Uwe E. Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and a professor in the Wilson School. He can be reached at reinhardt@princeton.edu.