“As we venture into the world beyond Princeton, let us always remember the unbelievable strength and resilience of the community we’ve built together. And let us always remember how communities like this are made.”
“As we venture into the world beyond Princeton, let us always remember the unbelievable strength and resilience of the community we’ve built together. And let us always remember how communities like this are made.”
Read in one light, Newman’s account paints a fairly innocuous picture of a naïve young person whose short-term ambitions have repeatedly gotten in the way of his long-term goals. But there is a critical omission in Newman’s public telling of this story: his own agency in navigating a system he condemns as corrupting and beyond repair.
Read in one light, Newman’s account paints a fairly innocuous picture of a naïve young person whose short-term ambitions have repeatedly gotten in the way of his long-term goals. But there is a critical omission in Newman’s public telling of this story: his own agency in navigating a system he condemns as corrupting and beyond repair.
When our professors are able to lean into their pedagogical missions more intentionally on platforms like Twitter, it does us all better — and reminds us that the democratizing power of scholarship and critical thought, even squeezed into 280 characters, is not to be underestimated.
Over the last several months, something new has taken hold within and around us. It’s not just uncertainty about what lies ahead. It’s a sort of meta-uncertainty: an unstable framework of constantly shifting time horizons that offers a poor foundation for decision-making. A long and uncomfortable silence in response to the question, “when do we finally get to know again?”
Our relationships in and beyond the classroom are undeniably central to the quality of our learning. And while it will surprise no one that virtual Princeton is markedly different from physical Princeton, the potentially damaging impact of online learning on our way of engaging with each other should alarm us. Knowing this — and knowing what lies immediately ahead — we should fight to mitigate the effects of these phenomena.
This is a time for us to recognize just how hard all of us are working to stay afloat, and to reward that hard work with positive reinforcement and compassion. It would do us well to accept “the state of the world” as a valid reason for lethargy and shorthand for the multifaceted but difficult-to-explain circumstances that make it challenging for us to be our best selves right now—emotionally, socially, and academically.
In person, our tolerance for silence is greater, and no encounter starts and ends as abruptly as a Zoom call does. We accept fluctuating conversational dynamics and take care to gradually phase out of interactions — and even when they end, we can always run after people to wallow in the togetherness a little longer.
If we must continue to cling so helplessly to naming as a tradition, we should defuse the ticking time bomb of eponymic memorialization by normalizing public scrutiny — not as behavior deemed oppositional to naming practices, but as a welcomed endeavor.
