Nassau Hall looks ahead to next decade’s agenda

Though the decade closes on a more sober note because of the financial situation, top-level administrators looked forward to the next 10 years with enthusiasm in recent weeks, identifying a broad spectrum of goals for the future relating to academic policy, residential and social life, and enhancement of the University’s global reputation.

The core priority for the next decade will be the same as it has been for centuries: academic excellence. While world-class faculty members are essential to this mission, hiring has stalled in the last few years. Now the University hopes to change course.

“Conditions suggest that the worst of our cutbacks are behind us,” Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said. “We have made a request to the Priorities Committee to enable us to get back to an environment where we have salary pools that enable us to start on this process after a few years of minimal salary increases.”

One area where the administration hopes to stay the current path is in its grade deflation policy, though it hopes to improve the conversation with students. Despite undergraduate frustration with the policy, which seeks to limit the number of A’s that can be awarded by each department, Tilghman said that she will continue to support the revised grading policy into the future.

“The policy is creating fairness, actually, that didn’t exist prior to its institution,” she said, explaining that it aims to eliminate GPA disparities between departments.

The grade deflation policy, designed by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and approved by the faculty in 2004, will soon fall under the purview of Valerie Smith, the English and African American studies professor appointed to replace Malkiel. Smith, who will take over on July 1, 2011, said she will refrain from taking a stance on the policy until she examines it as dean of the college.

But Tilghman, who selected Smith from a pool of finalists, has a clear vision for Malkiel’s successor. “There is an opportunity for a new dean to reframe the discourse [on the grading policy],” she said.

Regarding the conversation on the grading policy, “We’ve tried a number of different ways, and a number of nuances,” Malkiel said in an e-mail. “I leave it to my successor to decide, in consultation with the president and others, how best to frame the message going forward.”

Tilghman said that one priority for her remaining time is to expand the University’s international presence in an increasingly globalized world. “We don’t think of ourselves as only an American university,” she said. “We really think of ourselves as a player on the world stage.”

Some of the administration’s goals on this front include expanding the capacity and resources of the Bridge Year Program, which allows select admitted students to defer the start of their freshman year to perform community service abroad for nine months at the University’s expense.

“Another goal is to get a greater percentage of the student body out into the world during their time [at Princeton],” Tilghman said. Currently, around 50 percent of students study abroad either during the academic year or over the summer, and the administration hopes that in the coming years that statistic will rise to 100 percent.

With regard to the University’s international status, Tilghman emphasized that Princeton cannot take its institutional prestige for granted. “We are not going to be able to sit on our laurels and congratulate ourselves on how wonderful we are,” she said. “It’s going to be a highly competitive world out there.”

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Closer to home, the administration’s priority for campus life over the next decade, improving the residential college experience, is also a carry-over from this decade. “I describe the residential colleges as a work in progress,” Tilghman said. “I do imagine that the next 10 years are going to be very important years for the colleges.”

Jeff Nunokawa, an English professor and master of Rockefeller College, said he feels the colleges have made strides already in spite of the impetus for further progress. “Where I feel like kids who just a few years ago would have felt either too cool or too uncool to have a place at the table, now ... really feel like, ‘Yeah, I’m a part of this,’ ” he noted. “It sometimes moves me beyond tears to see that.”

Malkiel said she is optimistic about residential college growth, explaining, “I expect that demand for spaces in colleges on the part of juniors and seniors will continue to grow over time.”

“Figuring out how best to accommodate student interest in living in colleges will be an important part of the work senior administrators will be doing as we go forward,” she added.

Tilghman explained that the University’s goal is to create an atmosphere within the colleges that is as welcoming and familial as the eating clubs. “I think we can learn things from the success of the eating clubs in creating those feelings of connectedness,” she explained.

Nunokawa echoed Tilghman’s sentiment, saying that the University can draw lessons from the clubs. “I believe that the clubs are going to continue,” he said. “They are a fact on the ground. I do not feel that the relation between the clubs and the colleges needs be competitive or antagonistic. In fact, I think it’s to the detriment of both for them to be so.”

He expressed confidence that the future of the club-college relationship will improve in the next decade. “I think the tension between eating clubs and the residential colleges can be reduced almost to the zero point,” he said.

Nunokawa suggested that one way to improve this relationship in the coming years is simply for the colleges to reach out to the students in eating clubs. “One of the ways I think I can actually contribute to that is by crossing the street,” he said. “I think that’s a way to make a move.”

Regarding the eating club system, the administration still hopes to change how some clubs select members. Tilghman launched a task force last year to examine relations between the clubs and the University, and one priority that emerged is to create a more equitable experience within the clubs’ selection processes.

Tilghman said the administration hopes to change the way sophomores join bicker clubs by February of this academic year.

University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said that another group of students the University hopes to better accommodate is those pursuing the arts. At a time when some in academia question the value of a liberal-arts education — and specifically the value of the humanities — in preparing students for future success, Durkee said the University is continuing to devote significant resources to developing its offerings in the arts, including through the Lewis Center.

“At a broad level, we’d love to get to a point where any student who wants to have experience here in actually doing art ... can have that experience,” he said. And this could be one of the most identifiable changes to campus culture over the next decade. “If we’re successful,” he added, “this campus, and even this community, 10 years from now will be livelier as a center for the arts than it is now.”

Despite the focus on the future, though, Durkee emphasized that the University has not lost sight of the present. One of the administration’s achievements during the tougher financial times, he said, has been to ensure that the undergraduate experience does not change over the next several years as a result of the budget cutbacks.

“In terms of the student experience — the residential experience, the teaching experience, access to extracurricular opportunities and so on and so forth — I don’t think there’s anything where students who go through Princeton during this period will say, ‘I really missed out on this because of some budget reductions,’” Durkee explained.