It’s the early 1900s, you’re a young (male) Princeton student, and it’s time for your weekly humanities precept. You’re probably heading to the house of Dean Andrew West — classics professor and the first dean of Princeton’s graduate school — for your weekly, multi-hour discussion of Horace’s Epistles with four of your peers, smoking cigars around a wood fire.
Princeton’s precept system was launched by Woodrow Wilson in 1905 to give students a “first-hand command” of material. The goals of precept have always been lofty, transcending weekly quizzes designed to catch those who skipped readings and aiming to promote closer and more organic engagement with course content. Ideally, precept was supposed to help students mature into assertive contributors to academic, social, and moral conversations.
It’s a far cry from 2025. Right now, I’m in a ten-person English precept that frequently stalls when the preceptor asks a question and receives no response. It would be easy to just say that people aren’t doing the reading, but I’m sure at least some are. The problem feels more difficult: We are supposed to be working through these difficult texts together, including our confusion, but no one will take a swing at a question. When comments come, they are isolated, and we just move on. Making it through the fifty minutes feels like a Herculean task.
It was imagined that a Princeton education — a precept education — would give students “the responsibilities as well as the opportunities of maturity.” This original conception is that precept — being asked to do the thinking, the messy and uncertain parts of scholarship for ourselves — is teaching us how to grow up and be in the world as adults. Since that process of maturation seems to be floundering today, it’s time to reevaluate the purpose of precept in direct conversation with the current tumultuous academic climate.
Renewed attention to precept, not just for basic academic success but to genuinely embrace criticism, confusion, and interest in the people around us, might not just make us smarter. It can teach us, as we face a diminishment of both critical thought and perhaps more frighteningly of human care and relationships, to be empathetic and astute adults.
Student engagement is a touchy subject. Right now, Harvard students are under scrutiny for slacking off. At Princeton, it seems like insufficiently engaged students fall into one of two camps: indifferent, or so anxious about saying the perfect thing that they don’t say anything at all.
Elizabeth Armstrong GS ’93, Associate Professor of Sociology and Public and International Affairs and Head of Butler College, told me in an interview that there has been a post-COVID shift “in how people perceive their interactions with other human beings.” A reduced interest in engaging with others, perhaps even on some level a fear of others, drives what Armstrong described as a fraying of the social contract.
“Trust in peers is probably lower than it used to be, lower than when I first started teaching, and I think social media probably has something to do with that,” she told me. As our ability to focus — on readings and on each other — diminishes, so does the quality of precept conversation.
David Tubbs GS ’01, Visiting Associate Professor of Politics, also attributed students’ increased struggle with reading completion and comprehension — a topic which has lately received great attention in national media — to technology use.
These observations should not be misconstrued to justify accusing today’s college students of laziness. Instead, they emphasize how precept is particularly vulnerable to the ways in which technology is changing our brains. Armstrong suggested that social media has not only shortened our attention spans, but also exacerbated anxiety by provoking the pervasive sensation of social judgment, which may drive many students’ hesitation to participate in discussion.
But this is not a new problem. For nearly as long as precept has existed, administrators have reminded students that they’re supposed to throw themselves into spirited precept participation. In 1953, 1962, and 1983, the Dean of the College published and drafted preceptor guides and mission statements. In 2002, the Undergraduate Student Government launched a “Precept Reform Initiative” to “revitalize” the system. And in 2008, the University released a booklet about the purpose of precept, entitled “Inspired Conversation.” All of these guides say the same (vague) things: deepen your understanding, take initiative, engage thoughtfully.
While it’s true that participation in precepts might just be what you’re ‘supposed to do’, repeated, vague extolment of close engagement and discussion hasn’t done much to motivate students. These guides aren’t working—hence their repeated pleas for engagement—because they advertise precepts as roundtables meant to churn out clever model students. But the ability to defend our ideas, to explain what matters to us and listen to others do the same, underlies not just our intellectual but our social existence in the world. Precept doesn’t just teach us about the material particular to the class: it’s where we learn to balance our individual principles and ideas with our capacity to care for others. Armstrong points to that as a “foundation of human life.”
It’s impossible to evaluate the crisis of student engagement without considering this highly particular context of what it is to be a young learner today. Questions of what is and what is not worth our time are shaped by the twin threats of AI and the Trump administration’s attacks on free academic thought. How we treat our precepts matters now, right now, because there has never been a worse time to stop paying attention to the world and to one another.
Precepts have always faced problems. In order to address them, to actually make progress towards that lively discussion idealized in the pamphlets, we need to look not to generic sentiments but to how the world around us is changing. Our modern relationship to technology may have made precepts more stagnant, but they can also wake us up to what renewed engagement can actually mean for us today.
The threat of intellectual censorship and the rise of AI have forced universities, again and again, to ask themselves who they are. Part of Princeton’s answer to that question for the last century has been precept: a practice “basic to Princeton’s understanding of itself.” Others have praised us, and we’ve praised ourselves, for how we don’t just absorb knowledge but rather commit to challenging and remaking it for ourselves. It can be messy and frustrating, but it’s never passive.
Precepts in the Humanities Sequence exemplify the progress that can emerge from that frustration. In HUM, there’s no avoiding participation. Not only is precept engagement factored relatively highly into grading, but the whole experience of the class is based on coping with material you’re not necessarily equipped to grasp in its entirety. Precepts are extensive — two eighty-minute meetings per week — but they don’t stall, because they are driven by authentic confusion, anger, and even amusement with the texts: the experience is not of mastery but of young people relearning the experience of reading and embracing the vulnerability that comes from being forced to argue over and interpret challenging material.
In that space, precept can bridge the gap between the material and the world of our daily lives: my freshman year, we discussed sexual abuse and the 2024 election in our precept on Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and queer theory in medieval love fables, to name a few. The discussion was no more polished academic jargon than it was silence: it taught us to tackle the real issues of the world around us, and on a larger scale to talk to and spend time with each other as fellow readers and fellow beings in the world.
So if struggling precepts are a symptom of a cultural struggle with care, attention, and socialization, their reevaluation might be an opportunity for Princeton and its students to take a timely diagnostic of the University’s most monumental task: making smart people smarter by teaching them to care about and understand the world beyond their immediate orbit. This might sound trite, but in a cultural moment seemingly devoid of empathy, we can’t treat these skills as givens.
Precept isn’t easy: It asks for openness and attention, for us to deepen our intellectual journeys by caring about what the people around us have to say — and by proxy, caring about them as people. No one, as Armstrong remarked, wants to “say the wrong thing,” and it might feel stressful to figure out what the right thing is.
But it’s dangerous, in the world today, to be anything less than a close listener and a strong speaker. To transform the challenge of precept into the deliberate embrace of intellectual and social vulnerability is to get better at being with others, at the act of thinking itself, in the face of chaos and confusion. That’s bad for authoritarianism, and good for human beings.
Lily Halbert-Alexander is an assistant Opinion editor and prospective English major from San Francisco, Calif. She can be reached at lh1157[at]princeton.edu.
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