Alum criticizes Princeton in new book

“I, to be honest with you, have real questions about whether places like Princeton and Ivy League colleges are good things to have in society,” Kirn said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “They [amass] huge amounts of money, huge amounts of power, huge amounts of status — they talk endlessly about the responsibility they discharge to society at large.”

“They seem to me to be about their own mystique and about their own power but don’t seem to be any better at educating their undergraduates than any other places,” he added.

Kirn’s book, which will be available in bookstores beginning May 19, criticizes the institution of Princeton as well as the culture of its high-powered student body.

“For almost everyone, there’s a certain amount of pretense and fakery in which students assimilate a wider experience than they have had, deeper knowledge than they have and greater comprehension than they actually possess,” Kirn said. “However well [students have] been prepared for college, they tend to pretend that they are even more prepared.”

Kirn transferred from Macalester College in Minnesota to Princeton after his freshman year. He said that, since he didn’t come from a college preparatory school, he felt “disoriented” at Princeton. He explained that many of his peers were more academically and socially prepared for an Ivy League education. And his father, who graduated from Princeton in 1960, did not often speak of his experience at the University.

“The kind of people I was meeting [at Princeton], the kinds of backgrounds, were all unfamiliar to me,” he explained. “I had a very difficult time, a very lonely time, especially at first. I spent a lot of time trying to find a place for myself and not knowing what it would be.”

But Princeton is highly cognizant of the variety of backgrounds students have when entering college, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said in an e-mail.

“Princeton ... is a place where the percentage of the undergraduate class on financial aid has risen from about 37 percent to about 59 percent over the past decade and where a no-loan policy allows students to make career choices that often place them in the nonprofit and public sectors because they can graduate debt-free,” she explained.

“This is a place where more than a third of the undergraduate student body comes from minority backgrounds,” she added. “Recent entering classes have had 7 percent to 11 percent of students who were the first in their families to attend college.”

Studying English at Macalester, Kirn had ambitious literary aspirations and decided to transfer to Princeton to follow the path of F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17. Once at Princeton, however, he said he was “academically confused” and had trouble finding people who appreciated him.

Kirn noted that he has received letters from many classmates and readers who said they had similar reactions to their time at college.

“It wouldn’t be a book, really, if there weren’t a lot of people who have expressed similar sentiments and have shared similar experiences,” Kirn said.

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But Kirn said he believes that institutions like Princeton attract and isolate small networks of individuals from the rest of society, which could create a problematic social dynamic.

“At places like Princeton, people need to examine the effects these institutions are having on society and whether they are promoting [attitudes of] snobbery, exclusivity and arrogance in their students that aren’t beneficial,” he said.

But Cliatt, who said Kirn’s claims “are in conflict with the Princeton of today,” emphasized that Princeton graduates often demonstrate social responsibility in their careers. “Princeton is an institution that educated the people who gave birth to Teach For America, Project 55 and the SEED School (whose founder won this year’s Woodrow Wilson Award),” she noted.

In his book, Kirn also takes issue with Princeton’s considerable wealth and the ways in which it is spent.

“Places like Princeton remind me of old cathedrals that people give money to ensure their spots in heaven,” he said, adding that he thinks Princeton has enough money to let students attend for free.

“I’m shocked at how rich and how absurdly luxurious the campus has become,” he said, noting that the size of the student body has not grown as quickly as the amount of facility space.

Kirn added that he doubts institutions like Princeton benefit society, explaining that he believes “that such private institutions aim to accumulate power and prestige.” He noted, however, that institutions’ emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge itself contributes positively to the community.

Kirn said his critical analysis of Princeton and similar institutions actually derives from the education he received during his undergraduate years at the University. The sort of thinking valued at Princeton trained him to be “critical and skeptical about large institutions.”

“In other words, I was taught to question, to be skeptical, to analyze and to stand outside of power structures and examine how they work,” Kirn explained. “That’s all I’m doing with Princeton: I’m applying the education they gave me to create a realistic and critical portrait of itself.”