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Letters: April 3, 1996
Do Students Have It Easy?I take issue with C. Webster Wheelock '60 *67's letter of February 7 on course loads. Those who believe that today's Princeton students have it easy should remember that a semester runs for 12 weeks of classes, plus three weeks of reading period and exams. During those 12 weeks, undergraduates are required to take and pass four courses, but in my experience, this is not the norm. Many students take five or six courses in a semester, each of which covers more material in less time and in greater depth than the counterparts offered our friends at other schools. With the amount of material to be covered, one can easily understand the desire to linger more thoughtfully on four courses, but students' activities don't end in the classroom. When I was an undergraduate, every student I knew was deeply involved in theater, music, dance, athletics, politics, or cultural clubs, often to the point of conflict with their courses.Students' options have changed. The academic requirements at Princeton are still strict, but with leeway to allow greater activity outside the classroom. Students make their own decisions, semester by semester, on how to balance academics with (equally important) extracurricular activities. R. Alexander Reutter '94 Durham, N.C.
Statistics don't lie, but people who interpret them can distort their meaning. Your article "Are Students Getting Smarter?" (Notebook, March 6), particularly its assertion that "Princeton saw grades inflate in the late 1960s and early 1970s," misinterprets the statistics on grades as presented in the graph accompanying the article.
Double Talk on FeesIt was with shock, amazement, and some sadness that I read your lead Notebook article of February 21. "For the fifth consecutive year," it states, "the trustees reduced the rate of increase for undergraduate tuition and fees." This is the kind of political double talk we have come to expect from the nation's capital. It is a sad day when the administrators of a great university must claim credit, where none is due, by putting a positive spin on a poor record of ever-escalating tuition.Alumni aren't fooled by such politically contorted speech. It's clear that Princeton has yet to find a solution to controlling the inflation of student fees. Jay H. Lehr '57 Columbus, Ohio
Trendy ComputingPrinceton has long prided itself on the learning experiences offered by junior independent work and the senior thesis. During my 12 years in the economics department, I have supervised many fine JPs and theses on such topics as welfare reform, the choice of college major, malefemale wage differences, and baseball salaries. A common thread running through many of these projects is original, quantitative research conducted with the help of two unique resources-our extensive data collection and the intensive support of the Computing Center's staff responsible for getting the data into the hands of students.Both these resources have now fallen under the budgetary axe as part of cutbacks announced for the next academic year. Thus, it was with some skepticism that I read the March 6 President's Page outlining a program for innovative teaching initiatives. For three decades, Princeton juniors and seniors in economics and sociology have been able to do the kind of research that even advanced graduate students in other schools could only dream of. In the trendy "new" computing environment evolving on campus, we may have computers in the classroom for learning about Shakespeare and Mozart, but the mundane task of analyzing quantitative data-the bread and butter of the social sciences-is old news. I'm not sure what impact the new teaching initiatives may have in other departments on campus. Perhaps Brahms does sound better through a soundblaster card. But in the economics department, at least, I can only lament the passing of an era of innovative teaching and unique learning opportunities. David Card *83 Thomas A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics Princeton, N.J.
Only Connect!In his January 24 President's Page on the university's Advanced Technology Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials (POEM, for short), President Shapiro misinterprets the epithet "Only connect!" in E. M. Forster's Howard's End. By this phrase Forster would never have meant, as Shapiro states, that we should "take advantage of what has been described as the most important technological revolution since the invention of the transistor." Forster actually meant just the opposite. The connection he urged was between the outer life of materialism and the inner life of personal relations, art, and the spirit. Shapiro's celebration of POEM has nothing of the inner life about it. In Forster's terms, POEM belongs to the arena of the Wilcox family of Howard's End, who succeed in business and destroy lives in the process.As a type, the Wilcoxes could very well turn such a center into an acronym like POEM to show their superiority over those who would rather read a poem than transmit information at the speed of light. They wouldn't hesitate to wrench a phrase from a book and fit it to their own purposes. The Wilcoxes, wrote Forster, have "their hands on all the ropes." In Forster's view, there are "thousands of men" who thrive in the Wilcox arena, and they belong to "the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age." Forster knew they would win, but he wrote Howard's End as a protest against their victory, and "Only connect!" is the theme of that protest. It is a wonderful book. Before sending Princeton further in the Wilcox direction, President Shapiro should give it a try. Scott McMillin '56 hsm3@cornell.edu Ithaca, N.Y.
John WitherspoonProfessor John Murrin's elegant essay on John Witherspoon (paw, January 24) calls for several comments.First, the Popular Party in the Scottish church was so named, not because most people agreed with it (we don't know whether they did or not), but because it believed that the congregation rather than a lay patron should have the right to fill a vacant parish. Lay patrons (the crown and landowners) had the right of presentation in 85 to 90 percent of Scottish parishes in Witherspoon's day. Second, Francis Hutcheson agreed with Witherspoon on the right of a congregation on this point, and he published a famous anti-patronage pamphlet in 1735. In other respects he might be classed with the Moderates, who opposed the Popular Party. Third, I don't think William Robertson should be lumped with Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith as a man for whom "Traditional religious values had almost no place in [his] intellectual world." Unlike the others, Robertson was the leading member of the dominant Moderate Party in the church and moderator of the General Assembly from 1762 to 1780. If traditional religious values had almost no place in his world, he must have been both Scotland's greatest hypocrite and its greatest actor. Maurice Lee, Jr. '46 *50 Professor of History, Rutgers New Brunswick, N.J.
John Murrin replies: When I lumped William Robertson with Hume and Smith, I was trying to see the world through Witherspoon's eyes, not my own. Robertson was a major target of Witherspoon's 1753 satire, and Witherspoon did fear that Robertson and other Moderates were seducing young minds away from orthodoxy. But everything else that I have ever read about Robertson accords with Professor Lee's description. Unlike Hume and Smith, Robertson thought of himself as a sound and upright Presbyterian spokesman.
Member of the ClubRegarding your February 21 review of Lawrence Otis Graham '83's Member of the Club: unlike the reviewer, I'm not the least surprised at Graham's "excessively dark and bitter" world view. What does one expect from a black man in today's world, cheery optimism? And how can the reviewer wonder why Graham would want to be a member of a "club" that Graham believes will never want him? What would Jackie Robinson have said if asked that question in 1947?Kevin Warner '71 New York, N.Y. |