• Army Puts ROTC on Probation
  
• From the Lab to the Marketplace
  
• Class Act: Nell Painter Fills Gaps in American History
  
• Eating Clubs Draw New Members
  
• In Brief
  
• In Memoriam
  
• Research Shorts

ARMY PUTS ROTC ON PROBATION
The number of cadets commissioned is dropping as the Army downsizes

At the same time that the Army is downsizing, Princeton's Reserve Officers' Training Corps is finding it difficult to recruit students. Because it has not met the Army's goal of 15 seniors commissioned each year, the university's ROTC program has been put on a two-year probation, said Lieutenant Colonel Jerry R. Bolzak, Jr., Princeton's ROTC director, adding, "The Army is looking for the most efficient programs."
Nationwide, the number of colleges and universities with ROTC programs has dropped from 413 in 1989 to 316 last year, said Bolzak, who adds that the Army "doesn't want to walk away from a school like Princeton."
The number of Princeton seniors commissioned second lieutenants has dropped from 16 five years ago to a probable 11 this year. The decline, said Bolzak, is due in part to the difficulty students have in making up the difference between an Army scholarship, which for 1995-96 ranged from $2,000 to $12,000, and the cost of a Princeton education, which this year is $27,076. Unlike Boston University and Cornell, Princeton doesn't offer financial incentives to ROTC students to help them make up the difference. According to Dean of Student Life Janina Montero, some students may have decided not to join ROTC because they could have received more aid through financial-aid packages than through ROTC scholarships.
Bolzak also attributed the drop in commissioned officers to a public perception that the Army doesn't have many jobs. Also, he said, "the propensity for national service is down," and the military isn't a first choice of careers for most Princeton students.
Last fall, President Shapiro asked an ad-hoc committee of trustees to look at what the university is doing to assist ROTC in its recruiting efforts and to consider Princeton's commitment to ROTC's existence on campus. The trustees and the university, said Montero, "feel it's important to offer that opportunity to Princeton students."
In its report to the president, the committee affirmed the university's policy of awarding aid on the basis of need and therefore not providing financial incentives to ROTC students, and its policy of not awarding academic credit for ROTC courses.
ROTC has intensified its recruiting efforts by working with the dean of student life to increase the program's visibility on campus, said Bolzak. The Army's recent decision to offer more in scholarship money to students at a select group of colleges, including Princeton, has also helped Bolzak attract students. Cadets in the Class of 2000 may be awarded scholarships of up to $20,000, he said.
If the Army decides to phase out ROTC at Princeton, students currently enrolled would still graduate from the program. After that, students interested in ROTC would have to join a program at some nearby college, probably Rutgers, said Bolzak.
The university has asked for an extension to its probation period, said Montero, to give ROTC more time to improve recruiting. The university hasn't heard yet whether it will be granted a grace period.

FROM THE LAB TO THE MARKETPLACE

• Licensing Income and Patents in Fiscal Year 1994

Licensing Income and Patents in Fiscal Year 1994

	Royalties Received	Licenses Generating Income	Patents Issued
1. U. of California System	$50,210,000	481	126
2. Stanford	$37,700,000	200	60
3. Columbia	$26,746,141	104	20
9. Harvard	$5,817,671	99	28
26. Yale	$1,650,000	56	13
37. U. of Pennsylvania	$1,200,000	44	45
67. Princeton	$359,000	11	9
68. Brown	$295,841	9	5
80. Dartmouth	$169,119	27	7

In the fiscal year 1994, Princeton ranked 67th out of 114 colleges and universities in royalties received from licenses on patents, according to a report by the Association of University Technology Managers. Those institutions earned a total of $244 million in royalties, a 10 percent increase from 1993. The University of California system ranked first with $50.2 million in royalty income and 126 patents issued. Stanford was second. Columbia ranked third and at the top for Ivy league schools, with more than $26 million in royalties and 20 patents issued. Princeton earned $359,000 and had nine patents. "The schools high in royalties usually have one or two big hits," said Jean A. Mahoney, the manager of Princeton's Office of Technology Transfer and Trademark Licensing, referring to inventions that are relatively easy to patent and commercialize. They also tend to have more mature technology-transfer programs than Princeton's and inventions that were developed quickly, such as medical and biotechnology products. Because of the lag time between disclosing an invention and commercializing a product (7-10 years), Princeton hasn't yet received royalties from most of its inventions during the last decade, said Mahoney.

NELL PAINTER FILLING GAPS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Nell Irvin Painter didn't want to have anything to do with U.S. history when she was a student at Berkeley 30 years ago. "I thought it was a pack of lies," says Painter, who was interested in segregation and racial oppression, but found nothing in U.S. history on those topics. African-Americans were portrayed only as slaves who had had their freedom "given" to them by the U.S. government. She found no blacks who were free or who were thinkers or actors, for instance. So she majored in anthropology, the closest she could get to Afro-American studies. Eventually she did become a historian. By the early 1970s, she says, historical scholarship had changed enough to accommodate her version of U.S. history.
A professor of American history specializing in the U.S. South in the 19th and 20th centuries, Painter earned a doctorate in American history from Harvard in 1974 and has since helped to fill in some of the gaps she had found in her field. She's written books on black migration to Kansas, black Communist Hosea Hudson, and most recently a scholarly biography of the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, to be published in September by W. W. Norton.
Painter grew up as an only child in Oakland, California. Her mother is a retired educational administrator, her father a retired chemist. She smiles a lot and has an easy temperament. Dressed in gray slacks, a black shirt, and purple socks, Painter sits in front of her desk, littered with stacks of papers and books. A figurine of Sojourner Truth, in a shirt-waist dress and holding a Bible, rests on top. Born in 1797, she was the first black woman orator to challenge slavery. She began life as a slave in New York, escaped to freedom at age 30, then worked as a domestic before setting off to preach emancipation and women's rights, at age 54. Painter began her work on Sojourner Truth in the late 1980s. At the time, no scholarly biographies of her had been written, and few biographies of black women in general existed. Women, particularly African-American women, says Painter, have been overlooked by historians.
What motivated Sojourner Truth, who was illiterate, was the power of the Holy Spirit, says Painter. Today she would be called a Pentecostal, and "Pentecostalism is very attractive to people who don't have power in this world." So central was religion to Sojourner Truth's life that her narrative was saturated with Biblical imagery. To better understand her story, Painter, who says she's not particularly religious, read the Bible "a lot. And if I had my way, I would have American historians take a course in the Bible, because 19th-century Americans" were steeped in it.
In becoming a powerful voice in the abolition movement, Sojourner Truth triumphed over a childhood that was harsh even by slavery's standards. Isabella, as she was known when a slave, was an abused child, as were many slaves. "That's part of the territory with slavery. You get beaten up," says Painter. And "being beaten up as a slave is just as devastating psychologically as being beaten as a free person." As a slave, Sojourner Truth lived with the family who owned her longer than with her own parents. In studying her, Painter moved into the realm of psychology in trying to understand the extended family dynamics of slavery, which is the subject of her next project, on families and sexuality in the South during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Sojourner Truth was largely ignored by journalists of her day, until Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote an article about her more than 10 years after she had started speaking publicly. Painter sees certain parallels with today. "It's extremely difficult for Americans-and by that I don't mean just white Americans-to 'see' black women. It's a given for us that black women are invisible," she says. After Stowe's article made Sojourner Truth famous, people started treating her as something other than a real person, says Painter, who as a prominent academic can identify with this. "It's like you're invisible and then you're off the charts. Every time you open your mouth, things stop. And I discover this is happening to me now."
It took Painter about six years to research and write the biography, in large part, she says, because of the demands of teaching. She finds that she works harder preparing lectures for Princeton students than she did for students at the University of North Carolina, where she taught before coming to Princeton in 1988. Here, she says, students "expect not just information, but a performance." Next year she'll take a break from teaching-on a sabbatical in Paris, she will work on her project on families and sexuality. Topics she will explore include child abuse and slavery, the notion of Southern beauty, class dynamics and race, and homosexuality. "The thought that slave owners may have been gay or lesbian never has crossed anybody's mind," says Painter.
While in Paris, she also hopes to work on a biography of Walter White, a former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She says that White, although relatively unknown today, was one of the most important black leaders of the 1930s and 1940s. As in the case of Sojourner Truth, there is no biography of him, so once again Painter will be filling gaps in American history.
-Kathryn F. Greenwood

EATING CLUBS DRAW NEW MEMBERS
Quadrangle had an unusually low turnout for February sign-ins, attracting only 28 students. The club had since admitted 15 additional new members as of early March, but still had room for 60 more, said Quad president Charles F. Scott '97.
Cloister, on the other hand, turned away about half of the students who signed in. The club admitted 85 sophomores and 15 juniors from a total of 202 sign-ins, according to figures in The Daily Princetonian. For the second year in a row, Cloister held an early sign-in, four days before the other clubs.
The other four nonselective clubs filled up. Charter welcomed 101 new members. Colonial admitted 94 students. Terrace and Campus Club accepted everyone who signed in the first round, admitting 95 and 81 new members, respectively. In the second round, Terrace added an additional 15 students.
Of the five bicker clubs, Ivy was the most selective, admitting 61 percent of those who bickered, or 62 students, according to Interclub Adviser David T. Partridge '66. Tower was the most popular: 121 students bickered, and the club welcomed 93 new members. Cap and Gown accepted 73 students. Cottage Club admitted 75 new members. And Tiger Inn welcomed 67.
The combined Dial, Elm, and Cannon Club, in the fourth year of its hybrid system of bicker and lottery called "snicker," admitted all 67 students who applied.

IN BRIEF
Librarian: Karin Trainer, the associate university librarian at Yale, will become Princeton's head librarian July 1. She worked at the university from 1972 to 1978, when she became director of technical and automated services at the New York University libraries. At Yale since 1983, Trainer holds a 1970 B.A. from Douglass College of Rutgers University, a 1972 master's in library and information science from Drexel, and a 1983 master's in liberal studies from NYU.
Awards: Toni Morrison, a professor in the humanities, has been named the 1996 Jefferson lecturer, the highest honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement. The 1993 Nobel prize winner in literature, Morrison was chosen by the National Council on the Humanities. She delivered the lecture March 25 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and received a $10,000 honorarium. Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture has won the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Edited by graduate students and published biannually by the Program in Women's Studies, Critical Matrix was founded in 1983. It has developed into what one judge described as "a sophisticated and attractive illustrated journal worthy of inclusion in virtually all academic collections."
Talmud: Herbert Freeman, a professor of computer engineering at Rutgers University, has donated a nearly complete set of the Babylonian Talmud to Princeton. The set comprises 10 of 13 volumes published in Frankfurt am Main in 1720-23 by Johann Koellner. The volumes have been in Freeman's family for several generations. "Only a handful of libraries in the United States hold this work," said James William Weinberger, curator of Near East collections at Firestone Library.

IN MEMORIAM
Maurice W. Kelley *34, a professor of English, emeritus, and an expert on the poet John Milton, died of pneumonia on February 5 in Princeton. He was 92. Kelley was one of the editors of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, published by Yale University Press (1953-82); he edited volumes six and eight and contributed to other volumes. He was the author of two books, Additional Chapters on Thomas Coop-er (1929) and This Great Argument (1941), a study of Milton.
Kelley twice served as the president of the Milton Society of America and was its Honored Scholar in 1971.
Born in what is now Okeene, Oklahoma, Kelley received his 1927 bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma, and his 1929 M.A. from the University of Maine. He joined the Princeton faculty as an instructor in 1934 and was promoted to professor in 1951. Kelley retired in 1971. A popular teacher of undergraduates, he was an honorary member of the Classes of 1938 and 1946.
During World War II, Kelley directed the university's War Service Bureau, which served undergraduates who had entered the armed forces before completing their courses of study. From 1951 to 1953 he was acting university librarian.
Milton lyon, the founding director of the McCarter Theatre Center for the Performing Arts, died in his sleep December 2. He was 72 and had lived in Princeton for 35 years.
A director, consultant, and teacher whose career in theater spanned more than 50 years, Lyon came to Princeton in 1955 to direct the Triangle Club's 64th show, Spree de Corps. Credited with having given pace, drive, and polish to the staging of the show, Lyon went on to direct nearly all the Triangle Club's spring shows through the 1980s.
In 1960 the university hired him as a consultant to a faculty advisory committee charged with proposing a plan for the operation of McCarter Theatre. It was Lyon's idea that McCarter should become a producing theater and an educational asset to the university and the community, as well as a place of entertainment.
In 1961 Lyon started Princeton Junction and Back (PJ&B), McCarter's professionally produced and community-performed annual musical production. He directed it for more than 25 years.
Roman Smoluchowski, a professor of solid-state sciences, emeritus, died on January 12. He was 85.
After a year at Princeton as an instructor, Smoluchowski continued his career at Carnegie Institute of Technology before returning to the university in 1960. He was involved in the study of the structure of the moon's surface during the Apollo lunar missions. In 1972 he explained how the sudden speed-up of visual, radio, and X-ray signals reaching the Earth from space confirmed his prediction of a starquake-the first time an event occurring outside the solar system was predicted accurately.
In 1978 Smoluchowski retired from Princeton and became a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Texas. Born in Sakopane, Austria-Hungary, he earned his master's at the University of Warsaw in 1933 and his Ph.D. at the University of Gronigen in the Netherlands in 1935.
Charles Scribner, Jr. '43, who served as a charter trustee from 1969 to 1979, died of pneumonia on November 11 at a nursing home in New York. He was 74. The longtime head of the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons, he was Ernest Hemingway's personal editor and publisher. A past president of the American Book Publishers Council, Scribner wrote two memoirs: In the Company of Writers (Scribners, 1990) and In the Web of Ideas: The Education of a Publisher (Scribners, 1993).