Response to the Tory Letter from the Publisher

When I opened the September issue of The Princeton Tory at breakfast this past week, I was met with the bold-print title “Plan Your Time At Princeton,” under which was placed a photograph of a man reading a very, very, very old book. Intrigued, and hoping to discover the name of whatever first-edition manuscript had informed this crash-course guide for freshmen, I read on.

I soon found, however, that I was actually reading a “Letter From the Publisher” written by Zach Horton '15 (who is also a member of this newspaper's editorial board). Dishearteningly, I also found that whatever knowledge the timeworn book had to impart certainly had not made its way into this letter.

At first, I was taken aback by the writer’s ostentatious vocabulary. If he was trying to make a guide for the newest members of our student body, as he claimed, why did I come across more highbrow terms than in the 19th-century scholarly essays I’ve parsed through for class? I imagined worried freshmen consulting Dictionary.com in secret and terrified that phrases like “platitudinal suffocations” and “obfuscate rather than illuminate” were colloquialisms on campus, although it is probably more realistic to imagine the writer right-clicking furiously for synonyms and the freshmen more than able to manage it. In fact, even if the intended audience had actually needed to reference a dictionary, they would have still had trouble with “platitudinal” and would have had to settle instead on the definition for the actual adjective form “platitudinous.” I understood the writer's need to create the air of wisdom so he could impart some on downwards, but such stiff language left me with the impression that any advice given throughout the letter was as posed as the full bookcase in front of which the writer stood in his photograph.

Still, I plunged onward. The language was a bit pretentious, but, I thought, perhaps the meaning of them had merit. There were a few neat kernels of sound advice (such as to research the reputation of a potential professor and to focus primarily on one’s education at Princeton), but on the whole they were hidden among vague platitudes (to use that prodigious word one last time) and contradictions. For example, our writer warns freshmen “not to be led astray by the ‘expand your horizons’ mentality,” only to go on to say, “of course [freshmen] should endeavor to learn things presently unfamiliar to [them], step outside of [their] so-called ’comfort-zone’.” This, though, is all that is meant when people set out to expand their horizons. We never learn what other, more insidious, connotation the term “expand your horizons” has beyond this definition. The only other advice the writer offers on the matter is that one should pick classes worth taking instead of those with “alluring course title[s] and florid description[s];” good advice, yes, but wholly unrelated to all expanding horizon mantras.

The writer’s paranoia continues in his next paragraph, where he cautions against tolerance and open-mindedness. Benevolent as such terms may seem, the writer is sure “both are dangerous snippets of partial wisdom.” The next sentence gives no clues about what dangers such seemingly innocent traits are hiding; instead of describing what terrible things may befall those of us who are tolerant and open-minded, he reverses his argument, saying, “be tolerant, naturally, of all people.” So then perhaps we were never meant to suspect those charming traits after all, and what the writer actually meant was that we should be tolerant of all people, just not of all people’s ideas. I think this is an intelligent way to approach the world, and if the writer had stopped his commentary on tolerance here, I would have agreed with him. Yet in the next sentence, the writer goes on to say that incoming freshmen should not ever “tolerate false ideas … even if cloaked in the language of ‘personal identity’.” With this new addendum, the writer’s definition of tolerance now dangerously conflates ideas with personal identities, a fusion that quickly undermines the writer’s previous desire for tolerance of all people.

With this confused definition of tolerance, the writer moves on to tackle open-mindedness. The mind, he says, must close onto something; he suggests this something should be "truth." Here, I think the writer has again, at first glance, chosen something reasonable. This rationality is muddied by the dissonance of the rest of the letter, though, and I am confident that the writer uses the vague value of “truth” the same way he does “virtue,” “character,” and “tolerance” — as placeholders for his own system of beliefs. The writer’s omniscient expectation of freshmen to “clamp down hard” once they find the truth is ludicrous; I will still not have found an ultimate truth on which to clamp down on until after I’ve graduated, after I’ve retired, perhaps never, and it would be irresponsible and self-righteous of me to settle upon a single truth now and never let anything else in. It is this immutable and definitive language that the writer uses when referring to truth that makes it his truth, and not the truth. And so it is here, instead of in reference to tolerance and open-mindedness, that I say, “freshmen, beware.”

Mitchell Hammer is a sophomorefrom Phoenix, Ariz. He can be reached at mjhammer@princeton.edu.