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(09/27/07 10:00pm)
Earlier this week, a column by professor Joshua Katz appeared in The Daily Princetonian in which he expressed some concerns about planned renovations to Firestone Library, specifically the removal of nearly one-third of its books. Though the plans have not been formally adopted, they highlight a number of important issues about the nature of the University's libraries. Independent work is at the heart of the University; the ability to walk into an open-stack library and look for books on virtually any topic is crucial to the institution. Though online research is a highly relevant tool, not everything can be found on the Internet — a top research library that is well funded and full in scope is the best way of achieving excellence in research and scholarship. With this in mind, any attempt to subordinate the primary role of Firestone Library — providing access to knowledge, usually in written form — would be a travesty.
(09/25/07 10:00pm)
Regarding 'Ctrl+Alt+Lawnparties: The Backslash' (Friday, Sept. 21, 2007):
(09/23/07 10:00pm)
Seven months ago, in a column about books at Princeton, I suggested (parenthetically) that the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library was in danger of turning into a "lounge." This notion was quickly pooh-poohed by various campus pooh-bahs, and one of my colleagues in the Department of Classics came to my office the next day to ask what on earth I was talking about. So it came as rather a shock to some when, just a few weeks later, samizdat plans for a new-and-improved Firestone fell onto our desks. There is much to say about these plans, created — no doubt at considerable expense — by the architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch, whose report from November 17, 2004 [pdf] is in the public domain, but I will point out here just one remarkable color-coded feature. Books, by which I mean "written or printed treatise[s ...], occupying several sheets of paper or other substance fastened together so as to compose a material whole" (Oxford English Dictionary), are designated as light blue — an attractive color that is entirely absent from the plans for the third floor, the second floor and the ground floor. The dominant colors on the third floor, which currently houses the volumes of greatest interest to three well-regarded departments (my own, philosophy and religion), are gold (for "Instructional Space") and light green ("Work and Study Space"). No wonder the Latin Salutatorian, Maya Maskarinec '07, now a Fulbright Scholar in Austria, spoke passionately to the Commencement crowd in June of "[f]earing lest the library should lose its books, as silly parchment plans of architects foretell." Bruce McCall's full-page cartoon "The Reading Room" in the April 9 issue of The New Yorker, which depicts a space similar to our current Trustees' Reading Room (designated light green, so no books in its future) but with a large "history" section on "Britney" and a table of "books on cell phone," is presumably not what Shepley Bulfinch or Nassau Hall has in mind, and yet it is difficult to see how replacing perhaps one-third of the collections on the six floors with chairs could be anything other than a dumbing-down of one of the world's finest libraries, a Barnes-and-Noblification, the creation of ... a lounge.
(09/16/07 10:00pm)
Last week I went to check out the room where I'm teaching this fall. It's the same one as last year, so its quirks are mostly familiar. The tangle of wires at the front is the same, but I got pretty good at dodging them last time, a skill that should come back quickly. The spotlights that shine directly on the bottom half of the screen seem to be aimed a bit higher than last time, so projecting while using the board might be harder. The room lighting level remains so dim that the back rows disappear into the gloom, which makes them great for napping, but less so for pedagogy. The laptop projector and my new Mac came to only a fuzzy agreement on what to display, so I'll probably wind up using my ancient PC.
(04/26/07 10:00pm)
Students flipping through next year's course catalog this week may notice some unconventional names among language programs set to be offered in the fall. Polish, for example, will join the list of less traditional languages available to students, including Czech, Persian, Swahili and Turkish. Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian, offered for the first time this past fall through the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, will be offered again next semester.
(04/15/07 10:00pm)
The favorite time of day for many undergraduates seems to be around and somewhat after midnight, especially on Thursdays and Saturdays. I confess that I don't really understand why — even when I was an undergraduate, I avoided cheap beer and disliked loud music — but I have ample opportunity to contemplate the habits of the young thanks to the sounds of revelry that carry through the night from Prospect Avenue to and then through the walls of my home. No, I don't go out to the Street myself to investigate (it's hard to know whether I should be thankful or not that advancing age means ever fewer invitations to play "Robo"), though some years ago, when East Pyne was being renovated, my colleagues and I were holed up in the old Elm Club. Is there a better way to understand what makes some undergraduates tick than working next to Tiger Inn?
(03/25/07 10:00pm)
One reason I didn't spend my bright college years at Princeton is that it didn't have a department of linguistics. We still don't, which is naturally troubling to someone who thinks of himself as a linguist — in brief, someone who studies language — and who thought it worth his while to earn some degrees in the subject. So why don't we? Why is Princeton the only Ivy aside from Columbia not to offer a concentration in linguistics? (Never mind that many large state schools have distinguished departments and that you can even be a linguistics major at a little college like Swarthmore.) And what, if anything, should be done about it?
(02/25/07 11:00pm)
Books — they're the currency of our realm, and if I didn't buy them and take them out of the library by the dozens, week after week, there might actually be some room in my office. And yet I have always found most Princeton undergraduates to be strangely uninterested in books. Sure, they read them, once in a while, but they seem unable to distinguish a Princeton University Press product from a Yale one at 10 yards, don't know what a serif is and can't spell "frontispiece." They also believe that something printed in 1865 or 1945 is "really old" (I wish I had a florin for every student who has said like words to me in breathless astonishment while holding some frankly unremarkable volume from Firestone's stacks as though it were a Hittite tablet), thereby showing that they know nothing about our collection of incunabula (a word they do not know) and unintentionally making a mockery of the history of the book, a subject that some of their professors practice with particular distinction.
(12/13/06 11:00pm)
Three years into his Princeton career, nearly finished with his second physics junior paper, Zack Glennie '07 decided to pursue a certificate in linguistics. He had taken only one class on the subject.
(11/19/06 11:00pm)
Nine months ago, the Annex Bar and Grill at 128 1/2 Nassau St. closed its doors after more than 70 years, without notice. All of a sudden, there was no place to go for a $7 lunch of grilled ham and cheddar and a $2 late-night gin and tonic. Sure, the food at the Annex wasn't very good and you had to steel yourself before gulping back the hock, but it was an institution, an inexpensive place that was a dive in the sense that day after day and night after night, high-powered faculty and University administrators, students, nostalgic alumni and locals dived down the neck-breaking stairs to greet and be greeted by the Carnevale family. The Annex was an honest place, as a restaurant with that old-fashioned "1/2" in its address should be, and for those of us who were regulars, its replacement, Sotto (that's Italian for "beneath"), has come as a shock, perhaps all the more so since it too is owned by the Carnevales. You just have to admire any menu that suggests "Jello (red)" without irony, as the Annex's did. But does Princeton really need yet another establishment where waiters bring out a dish of salted and herbed olive oil, where you can order "penne pasta" with some unlikely combination of hand-cured sausage, ricotta and squash blossoms and where the preposterous ritual of the grinding of the pepper is observed?
(10/15/06 10:00pm)
Inquiring into its past is often a good way to find out why something is the curious way it is now. Take Princeton, for example. Why do we wear orange and black even when it is not Halloween? Why are cases of plagiarism and in-class cheating adjudicated by entirely different committees? Why do we speak of "precepts" and "preceptors," words unrecorded in this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary and ill-understood by our friends at other universities?
(09/17/06 10:00pm)
Welcome to Princeton if you're new here, and welcome back if the ways of Old Nassau are already known to you. As you can see, I am not the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, though I confess that so majestic a title would suit me just fine. When my remarkable colleague John V. Fleming GS '63 retired in June after 41 years on the faculty, his perspicacious column in the 'Prince' retired as well, thus depriving our campus of a booming, distinctive voice. Not having the good fortune to be blessed with a basso profundo, I cannot but worry about my inability to fill Professor Fleming's shoes, which he tells me are a size 13. But since I regularly exhort my own students to take risks, I could hardly give in to terror and turn down the offer to give regular pieces of my mind to the readers of what may (or may not) be America's second-oldest daily college newspaper. If I do my job right, I will say some things you agree with and others you consider ridiculous — and you will find it worth your while to give pieces of your mind back.
(02/20/06 11:00pm)
Regarding 'Some changes aren't due' (Friday, Feb. 17, 2006):
(02/20/06 11:00pm)
Regarding 'Some changes aren't due' (Friday, Feb. 17, 2006):
(02/06/06 11:00pm)
Dan-el Padilla Peralta '06, a classics scholar from New York City, is the recipient of this year's Sachs scholarship, which will allow him to study for two years at Oxford.
(02/06/06 11:00pm)
Dan-el Padilla Peralta '06, a classics scholar from New York City, is the recipient of this year's Sachs scholarship, which will allow him to study for two years at Oxford.
(11/20/05 11:00pm)
English major and aspiring novelist Jeff Miller '06 is the University's sole Rhodes Scholar this year, one of 32 in the country.
(11/20/05 11:00pm)
English major and aspiring novelist Jeff Miller '06 is the University's sole Rhodes Scholar this year, one of 32 in the country.
(04/07/05 10:00pm)
Dan Powell '00 never expected his independent concentration in Bioethics to be a subject of conversation with Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
(11/21/04 11:00pm)
Princeton applicants were not among the recipients of the 2005 Rhodes scholarship. The Rhodes Trust announced the 32 winners, selected from a pool of 904 American applicants, this weekend. Those chosen will be given a scholarship to attend the University of Oxford in England.