The persistence of memory

He responded by saying that a social club he’s a member of — I won’t say which — had solved the institutional memory problem. At the end of each member’s senior year, he or she writes a one-page summary of the college experience, which becomes part of a “book” (now hosted online) passed on from one Princeton class to the next. The book discusses classes, professors, the hookup culture, theses, junior papers, other papers, dining halls, Bicker and more. “It’s made life infinitely easier,” he said.

And so, a simple proposal: The University should have all graduating seniors fill out a similar survey: a one-page, 500-words-or-fewer anonymous transition memo that would become part of an online institutional memory bank accessible to all undergraduates with a netID. It would by no means solve the problem of amnesia entirely, but it would go a long way toward stopping the experience drain that takes place each June.

Whig-Clio isn’t unique. Michael Yaroshefsky ’12, president of the USG, told me in an interview that he’s had to start from scratch a number of times over the course of his tenure: “There was a significant amount of unexpected discovery when I took office,” he said. And while things got better over time, he described a particular once-yearly meeting at which USG officers and University administrators had very different conceptions of what types of topics were up for discussion. “No one had told us what to expect,” he said.

Furthermore, implementation would be easy: The University, with the USG’s help, could set up a password-protected web portal that seniors could log on to. And the survey, while it wouldn’t ask for students’ names, could ask for majors, eating club membership, thesis topics and hometowns so that students searching the database later could sort by all of these criteria. As an incentive for seniors to fill out the survey, the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the USG or the Student Groups Projects Board could give away iPads (or cash, or gift certificates) to five or 10 random students who completed it.

Here are five potential questions: What was your favorite class at Princeton and why? Who was your favorite professor, and why? How did you go about writing your thesis? Any advice? What was the most meaningful extracurricular experience you had as an undergraduate? If you could go back in time and give your 18-year-old self one piece of advice about the Princeton experience, what would it be?

Finally, these transition memos could wind up serving another, unintended function: as a time capsule that students or professors years or decades from now could use to get a sense of what life was like at Princeton in 2011. Not all time capsules are intended to hold extraordinary objects like great works of art or technology; there is arguably just as much historical value in a description of dining hall policies or the evolution of college instruction.

Some loss of institutional memory is the inevitable consequence of a college experience limited to four years. There’s a reason that ‘Prince’ columnists can write the same hackneyed op-eds about the pros and cons of Bicker each year: with every new class of freshmen comes 1,200 blank slates who haven’t read the op-ed before.

It’s also the reason that all good TV shows about high school and college go sour eventually. Producers have two choices: either write their star characters off the show, or (a la “Friday Night Lights”) find a contrived way to have them hang around long enough to milk them for all they’re worth.

But it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel every year. There are a hundred quotes about how those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. And in Princeton’s more-than-250-year long history, mistakes abound. To take just one: The University very nearly named Nassau Hall after 18th-century New Jersey governor Jonathan Belcher.

200 years of bad puns averted.

Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.