Lance Knobel

Originally published in the Financial Times, July 25, 2003

When I graduated from Princeton University 25 years ago, students were mobilised around the
anti-apartheid campaign. The last American troops had pulled out of Vietnam during my four years at
university. The world was pre-Reagan and Thatcher. Princeton’s elite eating clubs, vividly captured by old
boy F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, were dying in the prevailing revulsion against exclusivity
and privilege. The future Nobel Prize winner John Nash was an odd character in purple trainers
occasionally encountered if you worked late at night in the maths and physics buildings. The brightest
people I knew were going to become academics, doctors or lawyers. I’d never heard of an i-banker and a
VC was still a Vietcong.
I recently returned to New Jersey for the first time in 25 years — most of these spent in Europe — to join my
class reunion, but also to see how the university had changed in the last quarter century. At first sight, the
central campus on a humid early summer day looks much the same. Dominated by Nassau Hall, where the
Continental Congress sat in 1783, Princeton prides itself on the archetypal beauty of the university, which
has been much in demand whenever Hollywood directors need an American campus setting (the Oxford
English Dictionary credits the first recorded instance of the use of “campus” in 1774 as referring to
Princeton). To my now-anglicised eyes, the collegiate Gothic of many of the student dormitories has
amusing echoes of the Oxbridge originals.
The irony is that what had copied Oxbridge has now leapt ahead, leaving its models floundering, while
unease grows in Europe and elsewhere in the world that a gap is widening between their own and
America’s top universities - a gap that they are unable to close. That unease was expressed in the UK
earlier this month by Richard Lambert, the former FT editor, in a report for the government on Oxford and
Cambridge universities - in which he warned that they must become “more business-like” or face
government intervention.
Both these universities, and others in Europe, face a continuing leeching away of their scholars and
post-graduates. In a recent interview, the famous Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells — author of the three volume
Information Age (Blackwell, 1997) — said: “The only reason I moved to the US 23 years ago was
because I could not do in Europe the research I could do in America. The combination of flexible institutions,
openness to the world, excellent libraries, research climate and above all outstanding graduate students in
real doctoral programmes creates the kind of environment that is decisive for scholarship — this is the real
superiority of the US. Everything else follows.”
As I walk along familiar paths, I begin to see Castells’ point. Many of the gaps between buildings have been
filled in both by new buildings and by artful extensions to existing structures. And as I reach what were the
outer margins of the campus in my day, the number of new buildings is staggering. When I was editor of
The Daily Princetonian, in the economically dull 1970s, we ran countless stories about budget crunches
and funding crises. There were certainly no ambitious building plans in the offing. But in the last 25 years,
Princeton has built about one important new building every year on average, even though the number of
students at the university has hardly budged.
Some of the new construction, to be sure, is accounted for by sport. There’s a new football stadium,
athletics stadium, swimming pool and indoor tennis centre. But the real breakthroughs have been in the
sciences: the astounding development of biosciences in the last couple of decades is visibly evident. There
was no department of molecular biology in my day. Now there is a cluster of vast buildings: the Moffett,
Schultz, and Lewis Thomas laboratory buildings, and nearing completion the Carl Icahn Laboratory, which
will house the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Even the physical sciences, which ruled the
science roost 25 years ago, haven’t been slighted. Jadwin Hall, where I learned that I didn’t want to be a
physicist after all (and where Nash was a nearly nightly ghost, leaving weird numerological calculations on
the blackboards), has been augmented by the glittering McDonnell Hall.
Given the massive allocation of university resources to the biosciences, it’s perhaps no surprise that the
new president of the university, Shirley Tilghman, is a molecular biologist. In my day, the president, William
Bowen, was an economist, who was certainly fluent in the financial juggling and trimming required then. He,
in turn, was succeeded by another economist, Harold Shapiro. The hard sciences now seem to have
trumped the dismal science.

“Princeton is now truly world class in research,” Tilghman says. “That’s an enormous change since you
were here.” What remains remarkable to me about this achievement is that Princeton has preserved its
emphasis on the undergraduates at the same time. They still far outnumber the graduates - 4,600 to 1,750 -
a unique distinction among leading research universities.

Tilghman, in addition to being a scientist, is of course a woman. The thorough integration and acceptance
of women at Princeton is undoubtedly the most visible change. When I arrived at the university in 1974, the
first women (including Lisa Halaby, who became Queen Noor of Jordan) had only graduated a year earlier.
A vocal band of alumni were still apoplectic at the change, believing it would ruin the university’s distinctive
sense of community — reflected not least in the nation’s highest participation in alumni-giving annually (and
demonstrated by more than 600 of my class of 1,100 showing up for our reunion).

In my year, only 30 per cent of the students were women. Elsewhere in the university the gender gap was
even greater. When psychology professor Joan Girgus arrived in 1977, she recalls there being nine tenured
women in the 820-strong faculty. In this year’s graduating class, 48 per cent of the students are women (the
engineering school, which accounts for about one-fifth of undergraduates, is still heavily male, and is
probably the only reason men are not in the minority at Princeton, as they are generally in US higher
education).
There are still apoplectic alumni, but now they focus their spleen on the administration. Extraordinarily, for
someone of my era at Princeton, virtually the entire senior administration of the university is female: the
president, the provost, the dean of the college, the dean of students, the dean of admissions and the dean
of the Woodrow Wilson School. Tilghman is undoubtedly right to note: “No woman would now say they
couldn’t find their place in Princeton because of gender.”

One of the alumni scare tactics about women has also been proven spectacularly wrong. “Women,” they
would have it, “won’t give as much to the university as the men.” Last year, Meg Whitman, chief executive of
eBay, gave $30m to mark her 25th reunion year. “The change in the role of women in the university is
remarkable to the extent that it is no longer remarkable,” says economics professor James Trussell.
The larger numbers and greater presence of women is only part of a more diverse university. Only 12 per
cent of the students in my year were non-whites; since then the figure has risen to 25 per cent, with a
particularly noticeable increase in the number of Hispanic- and Asian-Americans.

Yet for all the greater diversity and inclusiveness, Princeton is a more conservative place than 25 years
ago. The university was never a hotbed of radicalism: in the 1960s, Harvard, Yale and Columbia were the
activist campuses in the Ivy League. But 25 years ago, when we protested about South Africa, no student
voice was ever raised against us. Now, when I open my reunions edition of The Daily Princetonian, there is
an advertisement for the Princeton Peace Network and one for the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism,
which describes itself as “Princeton’s patriotic student group”. The conservatives are now as vocal as the
progressives. At least a lot of students do seem to care about political issues. “Students care that students
are portrayed as apathetic,” says Austin Starkweather, editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian. “They’re
not.”

Compared with 1978, Princeton’s students seem to lead a very cushioned existence. I visit Georgia Nugent,
dean of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, in her office in the facility-packed Frist Campus
Center for students. Nugent, an alumna from that pioneer Princeton class of women in 1973, was a classics
professor, and now runs a unit that is designed to help everyone in the university community. Faculty are
encouraged to learn how to be better teachers, graduate students get some vital training and
undergraduates receive coaching in how to be more effective learners.

“There’s an expectation today of support and service on the part of both students and parents,” Nugent
says. She also admits to another concern: liability and litigiousness. According to Nugent, the safeguards
provided by the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (which has mandated, for example, accessibility to
all public buildings in the US) are being extended to include psychological and learning disabilities. So
Princeton faces the spectre of a student who doesn’t get into Harvard Law School charging that the
university failed to provide the necessary support for his or her “learning disability”.

The pressures students feel for what happens to them post-graduation are severe, and grade inflation is
one of the results. In the late 1970s, pride had long since vanished in the “gentleman’s C”, but good grades
were hard to get at Princeton. There was no shame in a B or even the occasional C+, particularly in some
notoriously hard classes, such as organic chemistry, Spenser and the epic tradition, and some of the
knottier mathematics classes.

Economics professor Burton Malkiel reckons attitude towards grades is one of the signal differences over
the years. “For me, teaching is one of the great callings in the world,” Malkiel says. “But the most
unpleasant part of teaching today is the enormous emphasis that students place on grades. In the early
1970s, students would treat a grade report with disdain. They questioned the very right of teachers to grade
them. Now students feel their whole life depends on getting an A- rather than a B+. I had somebody this
year complain that they had an A and they should have had an A+.”

Malkiel believes the attitude derives from economic uncertainty and competition to get into the best
graduate schools or the top Wall Street banks. After all, that job at Goldman Sachs could now be a
guarantee of absurd wealth. Girgus agrees the competitive market post-Princeton is a factor, but she seems
more sanguine about the effects. “Students generally work hard, they’re smart and they’re ambitious,” she
says. “In the professional schools, admission is so much by the numbers. Should it be harder for our
students to go to medical school just because they went to Princeton?”

What Girgus does see, however, is that today’s students are overly worried about the consequences of
their actions. When I occupied Nassau Hall with 100 other students to protest the university’s South Africalinked
investments, none of us really worried it would be a blot on our record. Similarly, one of my Princeton
friends spent the two years after graduation playing on a rather down-at-heel professional table-football
circuit. He went on to be a founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

The faculty I spoke to characterise the shift as the disappearance of the eccentric, the unusual. “The
students today are on average a bit brighter, and a bit blander,” says astrophysicist David Spergel. The
problem, however, is recognised by the university, with its tradition of harbouring eccentrics such as the
famously forgetful Albert Einstein. President Tilghman has been quoted as saying she wants to see
Princeton admit more students with “green hair”.

The other factor that may account for the fretful students is the sheer cost of a Princeton education. In
1978, tuition, room and board cost $6,995. Those costs have far outrun inflation: students at Princeton this
year had to pay $36,072 for their tuition, room and board. In my day, it was popular shorthand to say that a
Princeton education could be had for the price of a Chevy. You could buy a pretty good Chevy today for
$18,000 or so. Princeton now costs an Audi A6.

Fortunately for many Princeton students, there is one figure that has far outpaced the growing cost of an Ivy
League education. In 1978, Princeton’s endowment was $500m. The endowment is now $8.3bn, a growth
seven times above inflation, which amounts to more than $1.2m per student in the university. Two years
ago, the university decided to use its wealth to abolish student loans - a lead which, curiously, even equally
wealthy Harvard has not followed.

In 1978, 39 per cent of my class received some kind of financial assistance, usually a mix of outright
scholarship, loans and a requirement to work in the university for 10 hours a week, serving food in the
cafeteria or filing books in the library. Since there have been no loans since 2001, and fully 45 per cent of
the undergraduates have scholarships for all or part of their Princeton costs, purely on a needs-related
calculation. The 10-hour-per-week work requirement hasn’t changed in 25 years. According to university
officials, the result is a more economically diverse student body than in my day.

In 1909 when Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton — before he downshifted to become president of
the United States — he said: “The college has been the seat of ideals. The liberal training which it sought to
impart took no thought of any particular profession or business, but was meant to reflect in its few and
simple disciplines the image of life and thought.” Wilson’s ideals have come under a lot of pressure in the
last 100 years, and perhaps particularly in the last 25. And as Shirley Tilghman said to the students who
graduated this year, the disciplines are no longer few or simple. But to this son of Old Nassau, Wilson’s
core philosophy still seems to be thriving in central New Jersey.