The Pupillary Age

On April 20, 1987, a cartoon titled “The Seven Ages of Man” appeared in The New Yorker: A young boy with a security blanket (caption: “Dalton School”) develops into an older version of himself with satchel and shining morning face (“Greenwich Country Day”), who proceeds in turn to become a lacrosse-playing prep student (“Deerfield”), a P-sweatered undergraduate (“Princeton”), a young fogey in a suit (“Harvard Business School”), an old fogey in a suit (“Paine Webber”) and a duffer in a golf cart (“Hilton Head”). Princeton, of course — for the artist was the whimsical Henry Martin ’48, who earlier this year donated to the University a large selection of his books and drawings, among them this cartoon and many other pieces of Princetoniana. But there was no “Princeton, of course” for me in mid-April 1987: I was a 17-year-old senior at the Dalton School, where I had been since enrolling as a kindergartner with a security blanket, and I was having a tough time deciding between two colleges, neither of which begins with the 16th letter of the alphabet. Was I forever stuck, I wondered that month, in the first age?

It takes the security of privilege even to ask such an ironic question. (The tuition at Dalton for the current academic year is $35,300. Thanks, Mom and Pop.) And yet most people who read this column are Princeton undergraduates and thus no strangers to privilege: You’re ensconced in the fourth age, whether or not you were at Dalton and/or Greenwich Country Day and/or Deerfield before matriculating. With privilege comes responsibility, as the saying goes, and I urge you to think responsibly about your current and future ages. For one thing, no present or recently graduated Tiger will be able to coast through the rest of Martin’s story since Paine Webber is no more: Having been acquired by a Swiss company a decade ago, it now goes by the (impersonal and decidedly clunkier) name UBS Wealth Management USA.

At Princeton, you will sometimes hear the phrase “in loco parentis.” The University has a legal responsibility, in place of a parent, to try to prevent you from engaging in certain forms of behavior; in addition, though, it surely has — make that, we sure have — a moral responsibility to give you the best education it — we — possibly can. Less often heard is another Latin phrase, “in statu pupillari,” and I suggest that you in your pupillary age have the right, and perhaps even a moral responsibility, to hold the University — us — accountable for giving you this education. (The tuition for the current academic year is, after all, $36,640. Thank your parents, please, for their wealth management.)

I might not have thought to say any of this had I not recently read Andrew Hacker GS ’55 and Claudia Dreifus’ “Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.” Published at the beginning of August, this latest entry in the overrepresented genre of university-bashing (hardly a new subject: I myself started reading such books in 1987) gets plenty of things right, expressing distaste for administrative bloat and “the athletics incubus.” Unfortunately, the authors’ snarky tone, their heavy reliance on generalizations based on what appear to be fleeting personal encounters and especially their disdain for research as such and for the power of specialized knowledge to make teaching better detract seriously, in my view, from their successful salvos.

Still, what I think isn’t really the point, even about tenure, which Hacker (a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College) and Dreifus wish to abolish and about which I suppose I might dare to write on another occasion. What do you think? What do you believe Princeton’s priorities ought to be, and American universities’ more generally? Are the authors right to say that “the prime purpose” of Princeton is “to produce a stream of Meg Whitmans, Ralph Naders, and Woodrow Wilsons, plus a scattering of Scott Fitzgeralds and Eugene O’Neills” — and to rebuke Princeton for not delivering? (Incidentally, O’Neill was expelled after his freshman year and Fitzgerald famously never graduated.) Would things be in some ways better if you were instead an undergraduate at Arizona State, Ole Miss or nearby Raritan Valley Community College, all institutions that receive Hacker and Dreifus’ seal of approval?

Privilege affords the time for self-examination but also offers the option not to bother. Try to bother. To do so, you will need to step outside the Orange Bubble, to learn about and then grapple with strongly worded, publicly voiced opinions that simultaneously threaten and seek to improve the age you are now in and what you may want from the three ages to come. Princeton will be a better place if more students take more time to consider what intelligent critics have to say. Think about tough issues and discuss them openly — and if you ever invite those of us from later ages to join you in the spirit of lively inquiry, I won’t be the only one who will.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu