I am the author of an Academic Bill of Rights (text available at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org) that was designed to foster intellectual pluralism in universities like Princeton, where it is sorely absent, and to remind faculty of their professional responsibility to students, which is to educate students, not to recruit them to their political causes.I never intended to take my Bill of Rights to legislatures, but did so after I found when I approached university administrators their response was universally to blow me off: "We have no problem here, David," I was told by Elizabeth Hoffman, the recently departed President of the University of Colorado.
Affixed outside many of the windows of the older dormitories at Princeton are bronze stars inscribed with a name and a year, marking the identities of Princetonians fallen in the twentieth century's wars.
It is no secret that, beloved as 'the Street' may be, many Princeton students wish campus social options were more numerous and social spaces more varied.
The University prides itself on being "in the nation's service and in the service of all nations." This slogan is usually taken to mean that Princeton should educate its students to spend their lives after Princeton in service.
Ladies, please bring a [sic] heels to walk in," said the email announcing auditions for Princeton's 4th Annual 'Service in Style' Fashion Show.
In the back of my mind, I was hoping that my previous column on ending the legacy preference at Princeton would bring forth a George Soros-like figure who would pledge a billion dollars to the University if it would end its 3-to-1 advantage for legacies in admissions.
I was sitting in class, running on two hours of sleep and just about to be lulled into a Power Point-induced stupor, when I was shaken back to reality by two consecutive blurbs on the first lecture slide that began with the same word.
This column originally ran in the Feb. 20, 2004 issue of the 'Prince,' during George Kennan's 100th birthday celebration.George Kennan '25, the great statesman and visionary, whose 100th birthday Princeton celebrates this week, was a miserable outcast as an undergraduate.
It's hard for us to imagine the world of George F. Kennan '25 as anything but newsreel footage. The Long Telegram, the Marshall Plan, the vocabulary of "containment" and "rollback": these are the relics of the early Cold War, a historical moment long since incorporated into high-school history textbooks.
George F. Kennan, '25 died on Thursday. He was a great Princetonian, a great American, a great world citizen.
In most of America, a bowl of salad and a cup of tea is considered one meal. But if the pricing in Frist is any indication, it must be two.Although the Frist salad bowls are deep and the mixed greens are hearty, they do not usually stave off the hunger of one person for more than one meal.
Coming back to Princeton as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School was a jolt in many ways. It is quite different to be teaching and working in an environment where you were an undergraduate than where you were a graduate student (I was a law student at Harvard and spent many years teaching there). Your undergraduate years are years of discovery, of maturation, of learning through experience and sometimes embarrassment.
This aggression will not stand. I have long suspected the administration to be the perpetrators of a dark and sinister plan to bring an end to fun on campus.
Like a fermented grape, I know when it's time to let out a fine whine. And now is that time.What am I going to whine about, you ask?
Democrat-rich faculty not fine for some . . .Regarding 'Democrat-rich faculty is just fine' (Wednesday, March 9, 2005):Until [Jon] Wiener has sat in a classroom, as a Democratic student,with a professor who is a Republican and vocal about his viewpoint, and a class full of other Republicans equally vocal and derogatory about Democratic viewpoints, he can't really claim to understand what the pressure is like within a classroom setting for conservative Republican students.
The decision to introduce a new academic program or department must be among the most difficult for a university to make.
