Voices of PRINCETON

The alma mater of Edmund Wilson and E Scott Fitzgerald is now America's "only big-time small university." BOB COLACELLO audits the class of '85

"I love it. I don't think I could have picked a better school. And I don't think I would be as happy anywhere else. The kids are just so nice and so bright, and I have some really wonderful friends. It's a very happy environment. The campus is so beautiful, and everybody has a real appreciation for being here. And academically it's superb."

BROOKE SHIELDS

sophomore

"Princeton's really the idea of the university turned into the fantasy of the university. It's got that 'perfect' quality. There are certain moments in which you think, Gee, they couldn't have made this look more like Princeton if they'd planned it that Way. "

STEPHEN B. KOCH

lecturer in creative writing

"Princeton is a womb with a view.''

STEPHEN F. COHEN

professor of politics

"The provost said Micawber's is their only good bookstore, but it's pathetic compared to other university towns'. It's tiny, it's nothing. I was trying to get something by William Gass, whom I love, and the kid who was waiting on me said, 'We never carry that, unfortunately. For that kind of thing we all go to New York, to Books & Co.' You see, they're close enough to New York that they rely on it for a lot of culture. This is a kind of leftover of the anti-intellectual image Princeton had when I was at college in '50. The recent joke is that people say not to go to Columbia, because you're in the middle of Harlem, and Harvard is in a neighborhood that's become a kind of Needle Park. And my son said, 'Well, if you're in Princeton, you might get killed by a golf ball. ' ' '

FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY author, visiting Ferris Fellow

"Undergraduate, roughly 4,500; graduate, roughly 1,500. How many applied as undergraduates? Last year, 12,715, of which we admitted just under 17 percent. Tuition, room, and board add up to $13,930 this year." ROBERTK. DURKEE

vice president for public affairs, Princeton University

"It's the only big-time small university, big-time in the sense that it's at the frontiers of research in a lot of areas, and demands of its faculty scholarly excellence. At the same time, it's a college dominated by undergraduates. All the other major universities are dominated by graduate and professional

schools." RICHARD A. FALK

professor of politics

"Frankly, I think for an undergraduate education Princeton is the best in the country. More attention gets paid to you, and you get to know your professors, who are the leading members in their field. And that's a trip."

MICHAEL SARBANES junior, son of the Maryland senator

"You have the president of the university, President Bowen, teaching a course to undergrads. That's unheard of at other universities."

NIKOS PAPANDREOU graduate student in economics, son of the prime minister of Greece

"A lot of the teachers here are interesting in that they're scholarly, and yet charisma is distinctly lacking in the faculty. But Stephen Cohen, my favorite professor, is just teeming with spark. His course this year, Soviet Politics, is the most popular. There are so many hundreds of students in it, it probably breaks fire regulations."

ANGELA JANKLOW senior, English major

"Why is my course so popular? Well, when things are bad in world affairs it's good for Sovietology. I'm a detentist myself—a radical detentist, shall we say. I don't like cold wars, but they bring money into the field, students into the course. If the Soviet Union invades another country, though, I'm going to have to get a larger room."

STEPHEN F. COHEN

"Who's popular with the students? Bruce Springsteen. Prince. The great thing about Princeton is that you can't generalize. There is no one Princeton student or experience. There is an element of the stereotype, but it's just not as widespread as people think."

CRYSTAL NIX senior, chairman of the Daily Princetonian

"It doesn't seem to me that there's a passionate interest in contemporary writing. They want to work on Faulkner and Hawthorne and Joyce, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, and Virginia Woolf—the classics, you know, through the modernists. But they're very sophisticated about film, and a lot of them know a lot about the theater. Sam Shepard seems to be a real hero."

ELAINE SHOW ALTER professor of English

"The students are very individualistic. There are many scholarship students here and minority students. It's not at all the Princeton of about twelve years ago, which was all male. And then twenty, forty years ago, it was very elite. This changed a great deal. It's very democratic, I think. It's very, very eclectic. ' ' JOYCE CAROL OATES

author, lecturer in creative writing

"The high school I attended, outside of L.A., was 70 percent minorities— blacks, Asians, and Mexican-Americans. Here it's the reverse—to me that's a learning experience."

MANUEL GONZALEZ senior, president of the student government

"You really have to bear in mind the very strong southern orientation, the southern aesthetic. It was the farthest north all those sort of wellborn southerners would go. Obviously some went to Harvard and Yale, but Princeton seemed to be the most compatible with a sense of southern style."

ALLEN ROSENBAUM director, Princeton University Art Museum

"Well, the history of Princeton is very interesting. I've done a novel that won't be coming out till 1986, but it's set in 1906, in Princeton. Woodrow Wilson was president of the university then. During that time, Princeton changed from being a very small, really rural community to being a small town of considerable affluence. A number of very distinguished people, like the Armours and J. P. Morgan's nephew, decided to build estates out here, and they began a kind of influx of a certain social set. So it changed. The faculty could barely afford to live here, and it has been a problem ever since."

JOYCE CAROL OATES

"Princeton's young and American? I don't know if you have the right place for 'young and American.' Princeton is old and provincial. ' ' KEVIN GROOME

senior, English major

"This has always been a quiet enclave with all the virtues—and none of the disadvantages—of an English cathedral or university town, lying literally halfway between Philadelphia and New York. There are many large cities in the world where you will not find such a variety of people or such a high level of general intelligence and ability. I know of no community in the United States that is quite like it." J. RICHARDSON DILWORTH

chairman of the board, Institute for Advanced Study;

chairman of the board, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"I always say that the best thing about Princeton is that there's a bus every half-hour to New York. Many people don't share my views. Is it that dull? Yes. There's absolutely nothing to do unless you're involved in study."

RICHARD T. BURGI

professor of Slavic languages and literatures

"The intellectuals at Princeton are very compulsive hard workers—it's a very work-oriented community. But it's very social. I mean, we see people a good deal of the time, a lot of people. Lunch is very important in Princeton. Lunch is the big event. Well, dinner can be, too. We have large parties. There's a good deal of gourmet cooking in this town, which I do not do, because I don't have that much time. ' ' JOYCE CAROL OATES

"We're on the brink of becoming Westchester or one of those places where the corporate world is moving in like mad. It really is an attractive community, an island in the middle of what one writer called the 'robot vomit' between Philadelphia and New York. But real estate has gotten so expensive in town that the family-owned operations—the butcher, the shoe store, the toy store—have had to go out of business. It's all gotten very boutique-y. ' ' s ALLIE GOODMAN

professor of acting at nearby Rider College, wife of writer "Adam Smith"

"It's going to change like mad in the next five years. The traffic is appalling already. And I'm not some fusty old curmudgeon sitting in the house in Princeton. You can't bloody well drive across Route 1 anymore." PETER BENCHLEY

author

''The population of Princeton Borough? Twelve thousand five hundred. And about 14,000 in the township. One of our problems is the development along the Route 1 corridor in what is really South Brunswick and West Windsor. And it's all being done in the name of Princeton—Princeton Professional Park, Princeton Corporate Center. The irony is that the magnitude of the development may destroy both the pleasant physical ambience of Princeton Borough itself and the mixed-income nature of our community. People think of Princeton as preppy heaven, this side of paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald-style. Princeton Borough has been for centuries a mixed-income community, but the pressures upward are enormous. As Russell Baker wrote in the Times last year, 'Our neighborhood is going uphill fast.'" BARBARA B. SIGMUND

mayor of Princeton Borough

''People say, 'The Institute for Advanced Study? What's that? Is it C.I.A.? Is it some think tank?' Even people who have lived in Princeton for a long time wonder what this place is. They associate it with Einstein, but they don't really know what goes on here. What goes on here is purely and simply research. ' ' MARY WISNOVSKY

assistant to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study

''Yes, we used to see Einstein. He was very sweet about having pictures taken and things. We had staying with us one weekend Harold Vanderbilt, and he had a very interesting talk with Einstein. He asked him if he ever raced sailboats. 'Oh, no,' Einstein said. 'You either win or you lose.' Harold Vanderbilt thought that was a very strange answer. Oh, he was a dear fellow. All the children used to run after Einstein or get him to do their homework. I don't think he really knew how to do multiplication or subtraction or anything. But he was very sweet. We had Stalin's daughter here, you know. She was a little crazy, really. She's not pretty; she looks like a great, dour peasant girl. I tell you, a person I do have great respect for here is George Kennan. ' ' GRACE LAMBERT

grande dame

''Princeton is very angry about Svetlana Stalin, about her apparently very vicious attacks on the people who helped her, like Kennan and [her attorney Edward] Greenbaum, who really went to a great deal of trouble, a great deal of expense, and a great deal of effort to make things possible and easy for her and to make sure that her affairs were in order. And I hear that now she accuses them of working for the C.I.A." EDWARD T. CONE

professor of music

''I remember when Elizabeth Bowen was visiting once, and Virgil Thomson said, 'Oh, I bet everyone's vying—who will have Elizabeth Bowen and who will have Svetlana?' And no one even bothered. One was in one circle, and one was in another. Joyce Carol Oates? If I was interested and traveled in the same circle, I would see her all the time, but no, I don't." RICHARDT. BURGI

''There are a lot of writers in town, but there isn't a kind of center—it's not Montparnasse. There isn't a cafe where people go. In fact, there's no cafe at all. The stand-in for the cafe is the Chinese restaurant. It's in the shopping center on Harrison Street, and it's called the Great Wall. Why did I come here? One of the reasons is that they had also hired Sandra Gilbert, so it was a wonderful opportunity to work with another feminist critic. I think it's remarkable what's happened at Princeton. It was only in 1969 that they admitted women and began to hire more women."

ELAINE SHOW ALTER

''I think the presence of girls is a real shot in the arm, academically as well as socially. Let's face it: the girls have done a great deal toward making it fashionable to be serious about studies. When they first came, they were determined to show the men that they had just as much right to be here as anyone else. " EDWARD T. CONE

''I used to go to the Women's Center a lot during my sophomore year, and I just left because I couldn't deal with having to be that horribly anti."

DANA LEVINSON senior, art major

''Princeton is very conservative, and it's getting more conservative all the time. Just intolerant. For instance, the Gay Alliance of Princeton is really minuscule for a college this Size." JOHN PERRY

"You go to the library most nights and it's a real fight to get a place to sit down and study." -CARTER COOPER

Continued on page 98

Continued from page 89

junior, English major

"Gay bars in Princeton? Noooo!"

DANA LEVINSON

"This town is centered on education, not on sexual liberty." KEVIN GROOME

"Right. The straights aren't having sex. The gays aren't having sex."

JOHN PERRY

"Why? Everybody has too many morals." KEVIN GROOME

"And the weight lifting! If you go down to the weight room—first of all, the number of people down there. Of course all these boys, but then there are all these girls lifting weights."

KYRIL SAXE-COBURG junior, son of the ex-king of Bulgaria

"Membership in religious groups is growing. There are two evangelical groups with large memberships. Actually, there's a third that started this year. There seems to be a more traditional swing in people's values." CRYSTAL NIX

"I've noticed that drugs are very out— that was more like a high-school thing. Alcohol is more of a problem. The way they drink beer is very impressive for someone coming from Europe. You go to the parties—what they call parties— and all you see is beer spilling all over the place. Girls will be drinking beer until they're not able to walk. They have all sorts of games based on drinking. They don't even dance."

KYRIL SAXE-COBURG

"I think the reason they all get drunk is because they're all so sexually inhibited. According to the Princetonian polls, if you come into this place as a virgin there's a very good chance that you'll come out as a virgin."

ERIKA WOLF senior, sociology major

"You can't room with girls. You can have girls in the same dormitory but not in the same room. A lot of girls complain this is more a guys' school than a girls' school because of things like, well, there are three all-male eating clubs and no all-female eating clubs."

CARTER COOPER sophomore, son of Gloria Vanderbilt

"There are thirteen eating clubs; five of them are selective. Three of those five are all-male. 'Selective' means bicker process. Bicker is like rush in a fraternity, but it's a lot more civilized. You have extensive interviews with club members. It's not like drinking goldfish, but drinking is a big part of it."

ANGELA JANKLOW

"A lot of people assume that a selection process is automatically meanspirited, but the emphasis is more on getting people you like into the club than on keeping out elements you don't want. We make our selections on the basis of the impressions we get from interviews. It's the same as if you were stuck at the train station in Trenton with some guy for forty-five minutes. You'd get an idea of whether he was a jerk or a nice guy." SEAN McVITY

senior, member of Cottage Club

"This is Prospect Avenue, which is Club Row. Campus is the first one; down to the left is Terrace Club— they're the ones in long coats with strange hairstyles. Campus has a nice library. And we've got a pinball machine, a video game, MTV. We don't have the Playboy Channel—not because we're prudish, just because it's exploitative . ' ' ANGELA JANKLOW

"I belong to Quadrangle. It's coed. I'd just as soon we didn't have all-male clubs, but I'm more against the bicker process. I went through it and actually got into a selective club, but I left because I didn't want to be on the other side, choosing people." CRYSTAL NIX

"Next door to Campus is Tower Club, one of the two selective coed clubs. They're just the blandest group on earth. We throw water balloons at them all the time, and they really get pissed. That's Colonial Club—it almost closed two years ago, but the alums got up the money and kept it open. The alums totally support the school. They'd die for it in a minute. Now we're coming up on Ivy. O.K., here's what I'm talking about—Fortune magazine, not People. Look at this—candelabras. Hi, Steve. I'm trying to explain the differences between clubs. ' ' ANGELA JANKLOW

"We still wear no socks. Or shoes. Shirts and ties, yes." STEVE BELGRAD

senior, member of Ivy Club

"Now, Tiger, that one over there, is, like, revelry. They have tequila sprints and Dionysian Indulgences, which are hot-tub parties. All they try to do is lure women there. This is Cottage—it's beautiful, beautiful. This is where they have the lawn party with the fountain. I told you about the croquet."

ANGELA JANKLOW

"People would ask, 'What club are you in?' and I would say, 'Cottage.' They would be surprised, because they saw me as someone who probably would be against a club like that. But in terms of the all-male selective bicker club, I don't have a problem with it. It's not so much that you exist as an all-male club to the detriment of females, but for the benefit of the members of that all-male club, for atmosphere and camaraderie. On the other hand, I'd be all for an allfemale club. ' ' MANUEL GONZALEZ

"This is a fun one—Cap and Gown. And down there is Cloister—boring, chess. I mean, look at it. It's a church. And beyond that is Charter, which is popular with politics majors, those kinds of people. You can tell a lot about the character of the club by how the serving is done. At Ivy they're served by servants. At Campus you get up, you get your own food, you scrape the plates off yourself, you put your plates in the thing. I'm not saying this is a difficult world where you're going to get dishpan hands, but there's a different attitude. ' ' ANGELA JANKLOW

"I'm not a member of a club for two reasons. One, I can't afford it. And two, it's not my social life, so I don't think I would derive a great deal of pleasure from being in one. How expensive is it to join? About $2,500. The university meal plan's about $1,900. At the Third World Center we've come together to form a food cooperative. We have excellent meals, and it's about $400 for the whole year. ' ' JOEY HARRIS

senior, chairman of the governance board of the Third World Center

"People at the Third World Center, more than anyone, feel that Princeton's tradition is alive and well and much too strong. When I first came to Princeton, a lot of people gave me a hard time because I decided to join the Princetonian—they thought it was insensitive to minority concerns. But I decided to join anyway, because I didn't want to do just Third World activities or just mainstream activities. I don't think you should put people in a box and say just because you're black you have to be this or that way. ' ' CRYSTAL NIX

"Our grades come first. And our careers. I think that's true not just about Princeton; it's a national phenomenon, as is the decline in overt political activity. But that's not to say that we don't have a progressive element on campus that does take part in political activities. We have people that have been to Nicaragua. And a group of Princeton students is planning to go to New York and demonstrate at the South African Consulate." JOEY HARRIS

"It's ironic that the university attaches so much importance to racial and geographic diversity, and almost none to intellectual diversity. I think the most telling point is that there aren't any conservatives on the faculty—no more than five. I don't think there's a big overtly Marxist influence. But I do think there's a crusty, paunchy, liberal monopoly that is unreceptive to ideas from both the left and the right." DINESH D SOUZA

editor. Prospect, published by Concerned Alumni of Princeton

"I think that the real conservatism of American universities is what I would call epistemological—what constitutes knowledge, what is important for people to learn. What I feel higher education in general is doing, not only here, is preparing people to be successful in a capitalist society but not to be very good citizens, not to understand wider issues, deeper issues, connections between things. So it pacifies. It breeds inordinate respect for experts, regards problems as complex beyond one's own skill, and places tremendous virtue on professionalism and on the acceptance of a certain 'realist' view that regards all the fundamental issues as basically unchangeable . ' ' RICHARD A. FALK

"I don't share any of the conversation that goes on today about kids' being more interested in finding a good-paying job and living it up out in Des Moines. I think the kids have a greater sense of concentration about what they're doing, about their craft. There's a kind of interest on their part that never existed in the late sixties and the seventies. It's a great time to teach."

MICHAEL GRAVES professor of architecture

"There's pressure on them from parents, from the university, from the job market, so you can't blame the kids. But it drives me up the wall when students come in and say, I'm not going to get into this law school or business school because you gave me a B in Soviet Politics. ' ' STEPHEN F. COHEN

"After I graduate? What I'd really love to do is work in a hospital, diagnosing diseases. It doesn't sound too glamorous, which is why I think my mother gives me strange looks."

CYNTHIA HIGGINS junior, molecular-biology major

"I'm considering going into some level of government, maybe the Department of Transportation, but that's more in the future. In terms of next year, I want to get some management experience with one of the banking programs and then go on to get my M.B.A."

MANUEL GONZALEZ

"A lot of my friends are graduating here, taking a month break, and then off to Amex, off to Lehman Brothers, off to Morgan Stanley. Women too. God, some of the fiercest competitors I know are women. ' ' ANGELA JANKLOW

"Well, I have an R.O.T.C. scholarship, so when I graduate I'm obligated to serve in the army for four years as a second lieutenant." MICHAELSARBANES

"Hopefully I'm going to Oxford on a Rhodes. I'm sort of toning down my appearance. I used to have a Mohawk."

ERIKA WOLF

"The barber does well here."

GREG MORGENWECK waiter. Greenline Diner