ust know this, dear freshman self, a year from now you’ll return to the campus that looks so foreign today and find that it really is the “best old place of all.”
After four years at Princeton, I think the only profession I have really learned about is academia. We spend a lot of time with professors and begin to understand what their daily lives are like. So why can’t other people teach? Professors research part-time and teach part-time, so why not have professional computer programmers or doctors teach? They might be better teachers, and they will certainly expose students to other ways of using what they learn in class in their future careers.
What Princeton Reunions have, that Facebook can never take a way or make obsolete, is the element of all-inclusiveness — grandparents, students and grandchildren all having fun simultaneously.
It is from these moments that I learned that what makes Princeton amazing is not the brand name, or the world it opens up to its students. It is simply the people it has brought to me. And when I charged through Bloomberg arch on Saturday, ending one history with Princeton as I begin another, it was those same people that ran beside me, who continued to make every moment as quintessentially Princeton as it is, and ever will be.
It is time to restore the tradition lost in 1970 of acknowledging Princeton’s country and heritage. It is time to sing the national anthem during graduation and recognize that Princeton stands for more than itself.
Tomorrow is Dean’s Date, with 5 p.m. marking the official deadline for all undergraduate written work with the exception of take-home and in-class exams. An unofficial holiday for the University, with the USG and ODUS sponsoring food and festivities in McCosh Courtyard, it is meant to be a time of ease and relaxation before diving once more into the books for the rest of exam period. For many seniors, this relaxation will be short-lived as they must prepare to sit for senior departmental exams on Wednesday and Thursday.
And there were the serious lessons. As a graduating senior, I can officially say that out of all the classes that I’ve taken here, there is only one, just one, that I would go back and drop. Every single one — sometimes in fields that I had never even been aware of before — broadened my mind, taught me something valuable, changed my outlook or simply fascinated me by virtue of the sheer coolness of what I was learning. And those snippets of knowledge have come from all over the academic world: philosophy, molecular biology, French theatre, politics, chemistry, classics, anthropology and more. So I learned the value of a liberal arts education too.
In the final scene of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” a glowing Gene Wilder tells Charlie not to forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. Charlie shudders for a moment. This is the final dose of the Wonka charm we’ve grown to love: He ignites fear and then extinguishes it with childish warmth. Like a bipolar peekaboo, Wilder beams: “He lived happily ever after.”
Individuals, be they students in dorm rooms or private citizens in their homes, deserve a high level of privacy in the places they live. For this reason, we encourage the University to voluntarily hold itself to the same standards to which police and sworn Public Safety officers are held by federal and state law.
My friends tend to assume that’s the title of my next column, unless I’m writing about eating clubs that time. They would be more correct if they thought my title were: Drinking for quality rather than quantity makes for happier, safer drinking. I write so much about those two topics because perhaps writing about alcohol and eating clubs makes for more entertaining Friday morning reading than sharing my opinions on the things smarter people spend entire lifetimes studying does. Or maybe it’s that most columns that I have written tend to focus on the same topics because I’ve drawn inspiration from the old ‘Prince’ columnist Brandon McGinley ’10.
After three years as a columnist for this paper, writing a final column is surprisingly hard to do. I’ve spoken my piece on most of the things about this place that have caught my attention. What’s more, I’ve experienced so much, owed so much and grown so much that I cannot possibly summarize it in 900 words. In fact, that is the essence of Princeton: There is more to do here than can possibly be accomplished in four years. Happiness requires choosing the important parts and pursuing them without reservation.
The ‘Prince’s’ Editorial Board makes a factual error in its call for “Improving Precept.” Princeton’s teaching requirement for graduate students is just about the slightest among its “peers,” defined either narrowly as the Ivies or more broadly as American research universities.
In an article about Princeton University’s overseas financial investments published in this newspaper on April 27, Pakistan was singled out as one of the countries in which the University had held an investment. In fact, Pakistan was mentioned in the title of the article and was the only country out of 29 in which the University holds investments to be discussed in the article. The article suggested, both with references to previously controversial overseas investments as well as the crises that have rocked the U.S.-Pakistan relationship over the last year, that investing in Pakistan was a suspicious and possibly condemnable activity. This is an irresponsible and inaccurate depiction of reality.
Sometimes it’s easy to judge an individual who has taken a leave of absence as someone who just could not handle the Princeton atmosphere. But these individuals should encourage us all to dig deeper as to why they have decided to leave in the first place. With all the opportunities that are presented to us daily, it is easy to think that there is nothing to be unhappy about at the University.
But despite the terrible dullness of the town of Princeton and of this University, opinion writing at the ‘Prince’ remains a worthwhile goal — if only to make immediate the problems waiting just beyond FitzRandolph Gate. Their immediacy is perhaps best summed up by Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” who observed in 1998 that “We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end and, at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that,” he continued, “but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say.”
As classes give way to reading period, we find ourselves knocking on summer’s door. I find May to be an extraordinary time of year: the eve of our next great adventure.
