Tilghman, Malkiel, other top administrators advise independent work

Since he did not find an adviser on his own, the history department assigned him one: Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel. “I didn’t even know she was an adviser,” Miller said. “It kind of surprised me.” Miller is a former sports editor for The Daily Princetonian.

As Miller’s thesis adviser, Malkiel was fulfilling one of the lowest-profile duties of top administrators. Though administrators advise fewer students than most professors, Malkiel, President Shirley Tilghman and other administrators do advise some undergraduates.

Though advising places another demand on their already busy schedules, administrators said that doing so provides a valuable opportunity to stay connected with students and with their academic fields.

Tilghman said that administrators’ participation in teaching and advising sets Princeton apart from peer institutions.

“My experience, talking to my colleagues at the presidential level, is that this tradition of teaching at Princeton is very uncommon,” she said.

While the process of matching advisers varies by department, students are typically paired with faculty members who have expertise relevant to their research topics.

Miller’s match with Malkiel resulted from his interest in the American civil rights movement.

To work with Tilghman, molecular biology students must choose a non-laboratory approach to their research, since Tilghman no longer has a lab group. Nikhil Basu Trivedi ’11 and B.J. Sullivan ’11 are currently producing junior papers under Tilghman, and they will write theses under her guidance next year.

Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who is a Wilson School professor and is Tilghman’s top deputy for academic and budgetary administration, said that he regularly receives advising requests but only accepts them if they meet two criteria.

“First, the subject of the thesis has to grab my attention — since advising adds hours to an already long day, the topic needs to be one that I find interesting,” Eisgruber, who is advising three theses this year, said in an e-mail.

“And, second,” he added, “I tell students they need to be ‘self-starters’ — with all the other items competing for my attention, they need to be able to get going themselves, and they need to be persistent (and flexible) when they need to see me.”

Working with a top administrator does not always require a highly self-guided approach. Miller noted that he met with Malkiel once per week starting early in the fall semester, adding that Malkiel “made clear she could always find a time for me.”

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Miller said he was nervous at first about working with Malkiel.

His friends would joke that Malkiel, the architect of the University’s grade deflation policy, would give him “an A on chapters one through three and a B on chapter four,” he said.

But Miller found that she “gave me just a ton of great feedback” throughout the year. Whenever he turned in the draft of a chapter, she would send it back the next day, he recalled.

Malkiel was “very nice, very approachable, very down-to-earth,” Miller said.

Basu Trivedi said in an e-mail that his advising experience has also been positive. “It has been a terrific pleasure working with President Tilghman thus far,” he said.

Tilghman called advising “an intellectually engaging and exciting part of my job,” adding that it allows her “to stay engaged in my field, which is a wonderful bonus.”

Malkiel, who is not advising any students this year, also said she enjoyed advising.

“It’s one of my very favorite forms of teaching,” she said. “What I love is watching a student move from the beginning with an idea to a fully developed piece of scholarship by the end.”