What these walls will remember
And when these walls in dust are laid,
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And when these walls in dust are laid,
At 9:30 Monday morning, an email from President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 reached the Princeton community announcing that the Trustees had come to a decision regarding Woodrow Wilson’s name. Within the hour, the Prince had published a story on the non-change (followed shortly thereafter by articles from the NY Times to BuzzFeed). As of this writing, the Prince’s Facebook post carrying this breaking news story had precisely one comment: “meh.”
I’m pretty sure libertarians are wrong. Neo-cons too – in fact, I find neoconservative foreign policy downright immoral. The religious right would be better called the religious wrong, reform conservatives are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg and don’t get me started about the Trump Nation. But I’m an equal-opportunity naysayer – on “my side of the aisle,” the technocratic and neo-liberal left perpetuates inequality and runs roughshod over civil liberties, social justice movements often run disturbingly authoritarian and depressingly sectarian and the scientific illiteracy of the anti-vax and anti-GMO left literally pains me. Everyone’s wrong somehow.
"Weren’t we done with this four years ago?" I thought, glaring at the job application. The poor application didn’t deserve my anger — I’m sure the pages bore me no ill will. But this application — to a firm we’ll call Biological Sciences Corp. — had a question which resurrected long-suppressed memories of 500-word personal statements. What achievement, BS Corp., asked, was I proudest of?Unsurprisingly the answer to this question has changed somewhat in the last 20 years. Once, I’m sure, my proudest achievement was realizing that the round-shaped peg doesn’t fit in the star-shaped hole in the Fisher-Price toy that taught me spatial awareness and fine motor control. Later, that was surpassed by my pride in correcting a preschool teacher about subtleties of human anatomy — "The baby isn’t growing in her tummy, it’s in her uterus!"My intellectual achievements did eventually grow less trivial —17-year-old Bennett would have listed his AP scores and debate victories until those achievements gave him that ultimate academic gold star, which was Princeton admission.But that wasn’t all that got me into Princeton. Even at the tender age of 17, I recognized that an essay celebrating my GPA and AP scores would be either the most tedious or the most laughable part of some admission counselor's day. So I cast about for other things to take pride in and I found not only that I could talk up my non-intellectual achievements — service work in Detroit, science fiction — but also that merely by presenting them as important parts of myself, they became important to me.This raises many uncomfortable questions about how impressionable teens are, how people modify their self-conceptions to fit others’ expectations, how little distinction there is between self-discovery and changing oneself and how college admissions is, like that Fisher-Price toy, about pounding round-shaped students into star-shaped holes. Instead of agonizing over all this, I padded my application with a sonnet that vaguely gestured at these concerns and also compared admissions officers unfavorably to Egyptian underworld guardians.At Princeton, too, I took a sometimes perverse pride in my intellectual achievements — when a psychologist reassured one of my ISC classmates that symptoms of severe clinical depression were "normal" for someone with our course-load, we wore it as a badge of honor.But I also started paying more attention to what I was proud of outside of academics. Was this a carryover from the forced introspection of college applications? Could I no longer define myself as a genius once I entered a school full of polymaths and valedictorians? Or is it simply that wisdom comes with age? I doubt it had anything to do with Princeton’s branding as "in the Nation’s Service." While it’s nice to think the institution can ensure its members are conscientious and altruistic by dictate, I think we pay lip service to that statement and then somehow manage to be introspective despite our disregard (perhaps through communities, not institutions).Whatever the cause, I became proud not just of academic all-nighters, but also of having led an OA trip through the woods with a high ratio of personal growth to bodily harm. My heart was warmed when people told me that my op-eds — written to speak my truth — spoke their truth as well. I grew as a person and as a citizen.And often, I did it in spite of my academics and my research.It’s no secret that the workload at Princeton is too heavy. Princeton-specific factors — our calendar, our sometimes genuinely positive and sometimes masochistic drive to improve — combine with societal pressure for prestige and security to drive our overscheduled lives to ever-greater extremes. It was wonderful to hear President Emerita Shirley Tilghman acknowledge this during her Last Lecture with the senior class last week, challenging us to remember the last time we’d read for fun or taken a walk down the towpath to relax. But it is far easier to recognize that we spend too much effort on busywork than to actually ensure all students can suck the marrow out of their years here.It’s important more than ever that we do. The age of the gig economy is upon us, the age of artificial intelligence not far behind, and the ability to be non-academically human will be just as, if not more, important than the venerated STEM or the venerable Liberal Arts.But for now, BS Corp. doesn’t care whether I live life to the fullest — they don’t want a personal statement. I told them my proudest achievement was my senior thesis: a still-incomplete document, but a project that shows me and my future employers that I can commit a year of my life to a frustrating, interesting, challenging, expansive, incremental effort. But as excited as I was four years ago to cap my career here with a thesis, that isn’t truly my proudest achievement.BS Corp. ended up rejecting me — I may as well have given them this column as a personal statement or told them my proudest achievement was knowing what a uterus is. But perhaps it’s for the best — after failing to force my round-peg-self into a star-shaped hole, I’ve decided to pursue a career in writing, not science.Maybe that’s their answer. Maybe that’s something I can be proud of.Bennett McIntosh is a chemistry major from Littleton, Colo. He can be reached at bam2@princeton.edu.
I have less than 50 days until my thesis is due, and less than 100 before I graduate. Folks, it’s real. The inevitability of the approaching milestones and the immensity of the tasks at hand war for the attention of my overworked stress response. But last week, even while careening through my final months, I found more insight from a couple of serendipitous events than from any approaching milestone or academic achievement. Two evening talks — by a UC Berkeley molecular biologist and a University of Bath expert on intelligence — drove right to the heart of what I’ll miss as I prepare to leave Princeton.
Two years ago I published a column, “Where are the student activists?,” exploring the decline of protest and activism on a campus whose very architecture and academic calendar were products of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Imagine how surprised I was this fall, then, when occupations of Nassau Hall brought rapid change to the University’s handling of racial issues and forced a fundamental re-evaluation of how Princeton should memorialize its history. Protest at Princeton is, apparently, not as dead as I thought.What is clear is that campus protests this fall are no flash in the pan – American students who have witnessed these protests expect them to become the norm and to drive their future. According to a survey released last week by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, “The entering freshman class of 2015 ranks among the most ambitious in these areas [of politics and protest] compared to their counterparts” in 50 years. This is not just an increased focus on protest as a tactic – though no doubt college freshmen witnessing 2015’s upheavals now see protest as far more effective than my cohort and I did three years ago – the survey also shows a dramatic upward tick in the proportion of students who value keeping up-to-date with political affairs, and a continued leftward shift in the political identities of entering freshman, who are more liberal now than at any point since 1973.The demographic breakdown of the results – black and Hispanic students were far more likely to anticipate protesting than their White and Asian counterparts – suggests that the campus climate and identity politics will continue to be a focus of the protests. This represents a shift from previous waves of protests, whether the globally-minded anti-Vietnam and anti-Apartheid activism of decades past or the national but truncated Occupy movements a half decade ago. So it remains to be seen whether the new wave of activism will reach beyond identity politics, expanding the reach of already present groups or catalyzing the creation of new ones. Indeed, protests have been focused both in goals and in scope – in terms of both national attention and of goals achieved, the most successful have been those aimed at changing policies or practices on single campuses.The protesters have been mocked for supposed myopia – why focus on the “insignificant” injustices on-campus when there are so many issues in the larger world? I’d argue, though, that the focus is a product of pragmatism, and perhaps of a sort of selective pressure. The model of focused action – with inter-campus coordination mainly drawing attention to particular events and particular types of grievances (honored racists, misogynistic parties, affinity spaces) – allows rapid, individual successes to build momentum across a network of campuses precisely because the demands are specific and immediately actionable. This suggests a model for student-driven change which plays to the strengths of today’s hyper-connected students. Expanding this model to other realms is challenging: divestment campaigns, for example, have been largely unsuccessful (universities apparently trust students on student affairs far more than on financial decisions), but everything from corporate and government partnerships to labor actions presents an opening for student critique.Of course, focusing only on increasingly-liberal political activists ignores the diversity of thought at Princeton and other schools. While confrontational protests have brought much-needed attention to long-festering issues, it has resulted in an oft-ugly backlash (see Yik-Yak, or the comment section of the ‘Prince’). Princeton’s Open Campus Coalition and its allies at other schools present the opportunity to air legitimate disagreements with protesters’ demands and tactics while providing a framework for increased understanding. Representing a diversity of opinions is only a start – if organizations become confrontational (as in the encounter between Princeton Committee on Palestine and Tigers for Israel last week), all sides suffer.For a university system 300 years in the making, the reaction among faculty and administrators has been surprisingly swift – not only in discussing how to meet the demands of protesters, but also in anticipating future protests. In an email to all students at the beginning of the spring semester, Deans Deignan and Schreyer re-emphasized the sections on student dissent in “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities” and announced that the University has prepared a written statement to warn student protesters when they are in violation of “RRR.” But the changes in practices are perhaps more telling, and more indicative. After administrators across the country drew flack for their slow response to protests, President Eisgruber quickly responded to Professor Perry’s arrest last week with a thoughtful letter which acknowledged the political context of the events but did not make specific accusations. This increased care is not unique to Princeton – a senior administrator at a private school which did not see high-profile upheaval this year told me that, after events at Claremont-McKenna, Yale and Missouri, he and his colleagues go over emails with a fine-toothed comb, nonetheless fully aware that any statement can be misconstrued.The beauty of college is that, as a senior, I am already in the old guard – it is the new freshman, coming of age a “generation” after me and after dramatic upheaval, who will shape the future of student activism. I hope they take the burden wisely… but they’re freshmen, of course they won’t.Bennett McIntosh is a chemistry major from Littleton, Colo. He can be reached at bam2@princeton.edu
Last month, the big news in the education world was a report on the future of college admissions, with the aim of turning college stress into meaningful educational experience. If you missed the news, it’s probably because, ironically, you were too stressed over finals. But this report, "Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good Through College Admissions," has ambitions to change that. Already, a group of schools calling themselves the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success (including the Ivies and more than 80 others) plan on replacing the now-standard Common Application with a new, more holistic application.
The conventional wisdom that Ivy Leaguers are vacuumed up by finance and consulting firms at the expense of “non-traditional” careers has been so thoroughly discussed by students and pundits that “finance-and-consulting” may as well be a single word. David Brooks blames the “brain drain” on students with a “blinkered view of their options,” Bill Deresiwicz blames “entitled little shits” with a “stunted sense of purpose.” Whatever the cause, it bespeaks a bewildering lack of initiative that so few careers are open to us — or, more accurately, that we are open to so few careers.
Compared to the job search my classmates and I face, the sophomore stress over where to eat next year may seem a bit trivial. However, with the focus this campus puts on eating options, you could think students were choosing majors or jobs instead of menus. Eating clubs are such a central part of life at the University that the everyday words repurposed to describe the clubs — Bicker, hosing, discussions — all seem to have gained undeserved capital and significance in day-to-day life in the Bubble.
The evening after the final football game, the Band gathers in the inner sanctum of Nassau Hall — the cavernous Faculty Room. Under the watchful portraits of past presidents, our senior leadership bids heartfelt goodbyes, then we play a final song and sing Old Nassau while our notes are swallowed by history’s ponderous echoes.
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, in their novel “Good Omens,”wrote “most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.” I remembered these words this month as I watched the world bleed, this week as campus tore itself apart over race, and this year as dear friends, despite (or because of) their senses of justice, loyalty and love, hurt each other and me. We are all ineffable, magnificent beings, but that same ineffability all too often builds walls of hate and misunderstanding.
I was born and raised in Colorado, a state best known (until it legalized marijuana) for its natural beauty and outdoors culture. But the high elevation which is the epitome of my home state’s beauty is its limitation: the Rocky Mountains’ fall hues are limited to conifer green and aspen gold, missing the rich and warm reds and oranges of their lower, eastern cousins. Arriving at Princeton, I had heard of and seen pictures of New England’s changing foliage, but my only voyages east of the Mississippi had been in spring and summer, so my freshman fall here was my first real exposure to this new palette. The trees on Goheen Walk seemed to join a chromatic chorus with the orange of my wardrobe and the orange chairs and pillars in Icahn as if to say, “Here is the new color scheme of your new life.”
Woodrow Wilson is a saint of Princeton’s past. Woodrow Wilson is a villain and a bigot. These are not contradicting viewpoints — they are both true. How we deal with his century-old legacy has striking reflections in how we treat heroes and villains in the social media age, where saints and martyrs live and die in the 24-hour news cycle.
More than any before, the column I published two weeks ago, “Study Abroad sucked – you should try it!” attracted deeply personal feedback from friends, acquaintances and strangers. In that column, I told part of the story of my term abroad (if I could fully condense any five months of my life into 800 words, they would not be five months worth writing about). But there are many other stories — stories new friends told me over dinner, stories old friends sent from new homes, stories strangers emailed me and, of course, Prianka Misra’s story, published last week on these very pages.
Before I left for my semester abroad at the University of Sussex last spring, an older friend who had also spent her junior spring in England gave me advice which would ring truer than she could possibly have expected. “You can’t expect every day to be the greatest adventure of your life,” she said. “In fact, sometimes it’s going to suck — and that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s life.”
We (or, at least, I) entered Princeton ready to immerse ourselves in the life of the mind. The eager admitted student whose soul is imprinted on the pages of my application knew exactly what he wanted out of college. In chemistry or biology or engineering, I would learn the skills necessary to make my fortune and my mark upon the world. That mark, I was sure, would be academic: adding my share of knowledge to the pool the world uses to improve the human condition. However, I didn’t bargain on spending so much time on the “improving” bit that I’d neglect the “human” side.
This week, we return to the Orange Bubble. Even those who did not leave Princeton over Intersession are returning to the familiar rhythm of problem sets and papers, applications and auditions, of immersion in ideas and academia.
Wikipedia has an entire page dedicated to listing important people who graduated from the University. There are so many politicians who would be listed on that page that the “Politics and Government” section gets its own page. The “U.S. Congress” subsection of that page is similarly privileged. Princeton is good at producing politicians. You could say that Princeton alumni make good leaders.
You would think the author of an essay titled “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League” would get a chilly reception in a room of Princeton students. Many of us, however, found ourselves applauding Bill Deresiewicz’s arguments last week as he and Joshua Rothman discussed the book from which the essay is excerpted, “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.”
I was speaking with a kind and interesting trucker last week outside of Pittsburgh, Pa., and a man — a stranger to the both of us — approached my friends and warned them: “Do you know that woman there is actually a man? I’ve never seen anything like that before. There’s something to talk about in church.”