New decade, new campus: Science rises in the south

“The single strongest predictor of collaborative success is in meters, and it falls off exponentially,” he said. The closer people are physically, he added, the more likely they are to collaborate.

The University’s first-ever 10-year campus plan took that idea to heart, grouping buildings together by academic discipline in hopes of fostering collaboration. The most visible sign of this process has been development of the natural sciences neighborhood in the southern part of campus. When the new neuroscience and psychology buildings near Poe Field are finished, the process of uniting the sciences will be as well.

But bringing the sciences together moves them away from the rest of campus, raising fears that their connection to the rest of the University — and Princeton’s status as a unified, liberal arts-focused institution — will be lost.

‘It is possible to ruin Princeton’

The biggest transformations to the University’s structural landscape in recent years have been in the southern area campus dedicated to the natural sciences, where cutting-edge, steel-and-glass structures for the chemistry department, the psychology department and the neuroscience program are joining the existing complex of biology, physics, mathematics and genomics buildings.

Though scientists interviewed generally supported the new construction, others, inside and outside of the sciences, expressed concern. Humanists and scientists alike warned that creating discrete neighborhoods for specific areas could destroy the unified nature of the campus, and architectural critics warned against a landscape overcrowded with new buildings.

“It is possible to ruin Princeton,” said W. Barksdale Maynard ’88, who has lectured on architectural history at the University. He added that that the University may be too quick to destroy its heritage by tearing down historic buildings and replacing them with modern structures.

As a result of increased construction, the campus has become “less park-like, more urban,” Maynard said.

“If you’re going to keep it walkable, but you’re going to have more students, and you’re going to have more science facilities — in particular more labs — then you just have to squeeze more and more and the campus becomes more crowded,” he added.

Though Maynard bemoaned the deterioration of Princeton’s verdant campus, others felt that the traditional view of Princeton as a liberal arts institution was under attack. Chemistry professor Martin Semmelhack, though, pointed out that Princeton’s liberal arts nature can be overstated.

“I’m not sure there was that much natural interaction between the old chemistry location and McCosh, let’s say,” he said. “They were next door to each other across the road, but that’s not what makes the opportunity for interaction.”

Even so, Princeton holds the ideal of the unified, liberal arts university in high regard. Cohen pointed out that music, English, and philosophy majors have earned neuroscience certificates.

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“The fact that we end up advising those students or having those students in our classes and working with the faculty who are their advisors in their home departments, again, is a mechanism that ensures that there’s cross-fertilization and discussion and sometimes maybe even rich collaborations between neuroscience and the other disciplines,” he said.

Other faculty members also said they saw undergraduates as central to preserving Princeton’s unified character. Chemistry professor and structural biologist Clarence Schutt cited a freshman seminar he taught in which half the students came from an arts background and half from science.

But Schutt said he feared the “mixing force” created by undergraduates might be weakening as the science departments increasingly turn their focus from undergraduates to research, especially to the collaborations with business that bring in added funding for research and facilities like the new Frick Chemistry Laboratory. “Our connections to industry are good, but it does tend to take us away from campus,” he said.

Schutt added that even the senior thesis may be losing its ability to connect faculty and students.

“The tradition of the undergraduate thesis is getting watered down,” he said. “They might be in a lab with [a faculty member], but they’re spending time with a grad student.”

“My point is, the more the faculty gets distracted from undergraduates, the more the dangers,” he added.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz saw similar dangers in the growing spatial segregation of the campus. “I think architecture is destiny,” he said. “And we really have committed ourselves now to a different kind of university.”

The University is moving away from a world in which history buildings abut psychology laboratories and chemistry experiments happen next door to English precepts. What used to be a 30-second dash across the street to get from sciences to humanities has turned into a cross-campus journey.

History and Hellenic studies professor Molly Greene said that the new natural sciences area “just seems to be a separate world.”

Many scientists acknowledged that building connections within the sciences could weaken their links to other disciplines but expressed hope that this decline could be offset by other factors.

“Everything is a tradeoff. I think ultimately you mitigate the physical distance by social structures: by having seminar series, by having seed programs that are focused in particular on interdisciplinary collaboration,” Cohen said.

University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said that facilities like the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, which will be located in a building next to the Engineering Quadrangle, could promote interdisciplinary cooperation.

“The Andlinger Center is going to be very interested in policy issues that are going to draw, frankly, not only from the natural sciences but from the social sciences and from the humanities,” he said.

The potential for integration

Even as they acknowledged the risks inherent in the campus plan, most scientists staunchly defended it as crucial to maintaining and enhancing the University’s scientific edge. Central to the development of the southern part of campus is the improvement of interdisciplinary relations among science departments.

The campus plan not only groups science buildings together, but connects those on either side of Washington Road with the new Streicker Bridge. The result is a complex of buildings meant to enhance collaboration across departments. Faculty members described interdisciplinary work as a traditional strength of science at Princeton and called it increasingly important to modern research.

“What we do, and what biology does and what physics does is so interconnected now ... You start to see people in other departments who could just as easily be here, and vice versa,” chemistry department chair David MacMillan said. “What you need ... is the ability to talk to each other, is the ability to draw upon each other’s expertise, and the ability to use effectively all the resources, instrumentation, facilities, etc., that we all care about.”

Combining research approaches from different sciences is critical to neuroscience, Cohen said.

“There’s no one right level of analysis for understanding how the brain functions and gives rise to thoughts and behavior and feelings,” he said. “We need to look at it all the way from the molecular, cellular and genetic level up to the systems level and its expression in the behavior of humans.”

Schutt said the University’s interdisciplinary focus goes beyond buildings. Connections between physicists and biologists made the University a hub of research on the structure of HIV, before the campus plan was conceived, he explained.

Having neuroscientists, chemists and biologists in close proximity will enable more ambitious projects, such as his effort to uncover the structural roots of autism, he added.

“It’s not written about that much, how to do this kind of stuff, but I think Princeton knows how to do it,” he said.

For the first time, this approach to fostering interdisciplinary work is enshrined in a physical document: the 10-year campus plan. The plan has had a profound effect in only four years, and when completed, it may well redefine the University.

The speed of these changes is making the lack of consensus on the University’s priorities more relevant. “If you want to define Princeton, the word is excellence,” MacMillan said. But there is no consensus on how best to achieve that excellence — and what really makes Princeton excellent.