Club hopes to buy Cannon from the university and reopen in early 2001
The tap room is locked, the dining hall is boarded over, and two students now live in the pool room. Even the Ms. Pac-man machine, which used to welcome students to the second floor, is gone. As Bluto said in Animal House, "They took everything! Even the stuff we didn't steal!"
DEC, the unlikely eight-year-old conglomeration of the Dial, Elm, and Cannon clubs, exists today only as an option -- the option the DEC graduate board has to purchase the former Cannon building (now Notestein Hall, home of the Office of Population Research) from the university by June 30, 2000. Over the summer the board sold Elm and Dial to the university, leaving DEC's remaining undergraduate members clubless.
The DEC grad board has always been interested in moving the club back to the Cannon building, which with two tap rooms and large common areas is one of the finest facilities on Prospect Street. In contrast, the club's other two buildings have always been substandard: the Elm building is run down, and Dial is too small a facility to support the 150 members required to make the club economically viable. The university, however, has owned Cannon since 1975.
What made a deal between DEC and the university possible is the latter's long-standing interest in the area around Dial Lodge as a site for a future social-science building. During the late 1980s, when the university was constructing the Fisher/Bendheim addition to Corwin Hall, it tried to acquire the adjacent parking lot behind Dial, but the two sides couldn't make a deal in time. Both sides remained interested, however, and in May 1997 DEC and the university struck a tentative agreement under which DEC would give Princeton the Dial parking lot in exchange for either cash or an option to buy Cannon.
At the time, many of DEC's undergraduate members were enthusiastic about the possible move to Cannon, figuring it might revive their moribund club. After last year's membership drive, which yielded only 20 sophomores, then-president Jen Bello '98 said, "If we could have told [the sophomores about Cannon], we would have been flooded. DEC will be popular again."
What the undergraduates were not expecting was that the club would close completely -- leaving them scrambling to find another eating option this fall. Perhaps they should have been better prepared, for DEC has a history of not informing its undergraduates about impending changes. For example, at the time of the original merger of the three clubs in 1990 DEC's first treasurer, Jeanine Dore '91, remembers, "I didn't find out we had merged until I returned to campus." As for closing the club this fall, one former member says angrily, "The grad board looked us in the eye last spring and lied to us."
Still, the DEC grad board maintains that it had no option other than suspending operations until the club could move into Cannon. "We understand the disappointment and disgruntlement that some of our undergraduates might be feeling," says Warren Crane '62, president of the DEC grad board. "We were very interested in continuing operations, but the problem was the financial cost of remaining open with less than 50 members. We conservatively estimated our losses at half a million dollars."
Yet the prevailing feeling among undergraduates is that this move was just part of a long-term plan by Cannon alumni, who, they feel, never cared about DEC in the first place and are solely interested in reopening their own club. DEC vice-president Justin Kuczmarski '99 says, "What bothers me most is that all these decisions were predetermined before the membership drive." Crane, however, disputes the idea that Cannon alumni simply used DEC as a means for reopening their own club. He points out that the board, which is a mix of Dial, Elm, and Cannon alumni, voted unanimously to try to reacquire Cannon.
Changing Face of Prospect
The deals between Princeton and DEC ensure that the east end of Prospect Street will look very different in five years. The university plans to open the new Wallace Social Science Building (made possible by a $10-million gift from the Wallace family) on what used to be the Dial parking lot in the fall of 2000. At the same time, Dial Lodge will be refitted as an academic building. These two projects will give Princeton a centrally located, six-building social-science complex with abundant teaching and research space. The university has not yet decided what it will do with Elm.
The DEC grad board hopes to raise the funds necessary to purchase Cannon from the university before the June 30, 2000, deadline. If all goes according to plan, Cannon could open in the spring of 2001. Crane expects that despite DEC's struggles in Elm and the opening of the new student center in 2000, the new club will have no trouble attracting members. "We understand that the student center will create a new environment on Prospect Street with an effect on student membership," Crane says, "But we believe that we will be one of the stronger clubs."
-- Wes Tooke '98
Sophomore helps edit Starr report
Dillon Teachout '01 planned to end her summer quietly. Ever since she was a child, Teachout and her family had traveled from their home in Norwich to spend a few weeks in a log cabin in northern Vermont. The cabin, which has no phone, overlooks Crystal Lake, "the second deepest and second cleanest fresh-water lake in the state," Teachout says.
But Teachout never made it to Crystal Lake or to her family's log cabin. Instead, she spent the final days of her summer vacation helping edit the Starr Report in the frantic days before it was sent to Congress.
Her summer began typically enough. Teachout, an English major, was one of three interns for the Washington-based Wilson Quarterly, a humanities journal "having nothing to do with politics, or for that matter anything happening in the present," she says.
At the Quarterly, Teachout wrote a book review for literary editor Stephen Bates. Unbeknownest to Teachout at the time, Bates, a lawyer, was splitting his time between editing the magazine and writing half of the 260-page narrative section of the Starr Report, which chronicled in lurid detail President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Surprise ending
As the Wilson Quarterly internship came to a close, Bates invited Teachout to skip her fall semester at Princeton and intern at the Office of the Independent Counsel. Teachout demurred, but because of the university's late start (registration was on September 14), she agreed to spend the last three weeks of her summer holed up in a lawyer's office rather than a log cabin.
During her first week in Starr's office, Teachout left the Quarterly at 6:30 p.m. and worked until well past midnight with Bates and Associate Independent Counsel Craig Lerner, the narrative section's other writer. When the magazine internship ended, she worked 16-hour days in Starr's office, offering suggestions on how to smooth transitions and cut material. In the two days leading into the report's release on September 9 ("at 4 p.m.," she adds), Teachout worked 54 hours straight, broken only by a two-hour nap.
"There really wasn't any swelling chorus as we were finishing the report," recalls Teachout. "Things were frantic, but I was so caught up in doing it that it didn't seem like the huge deal that it was."
While Teachout declines to speak about the specific details of her work on the report, she did say it was difficult to leave. "I really got close to people at the office," Teachout says. "But coming back to Princeton was more exciting then I thought it would be: I became a minor celebrity among my group of friends."
-- Daniel A. Grech '99
With apologies to the Modern Language Association, we asked some professors to give us a list of 10 books they felt every student should read while at Princeton. Here are our four favorite responses.
Harvey Rosen, Professor of Economics
· Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 (Eroica). Okay, I know it's not a book. However, I can't let pass an opportunity to urge every student to take a course in music appreciation.
· John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
· Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
· Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
· Friedrich Percyval ReckMal-leczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair (Translated by Paul Rubens).
· Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
· James M. McPherson (professor of history), Battle Cry of Freedom -- The Civil War Era
· Henry Rosovsky, The University
· Carl E. Schorske (professor of history, emeritus), Fin-de-siècle Vienna
· Thomas Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race
Josiah Ober, David Magie Professor of Ancient History
As I assume Princeton students will read more than 10 books in their four years, this is a more personal list that reflects what I hope they would read (at the minimum) in the field of classical Greek and contemporary political thought. I suppose that some of these works will have been read in high school, but I think that they should be re-read in college -- against the context of presumably much deeper thinking and reading that their college experience should be providing.
· Homer, The Odyssey
· Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
· Plato, Apology and Crito
· Aristotle, Politics
· J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
· Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
· George Orwell, 1984
· John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
· Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics
· Charles Taylor, et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (edited by Professor of Politics Amy Gutmann)
John Conway, Professor of Mathematics
I find this an awfully hard question. Although I read a lot of books myself, I don't think it would be sensible to recommend any of them for all undergraduates to read. Maybe there are books that I would think are a good idea for them to read, but I probably haven't read them myself!
In fact, I don't really think there's any book that all undergraduates should read. My own practice is to go into every bookshop I see and pick up a mixed bundle of (usually) secondhand books, and this way I usually get some nice surprises.
That's not to say that I have no opinions on the type of books students should be reading. I do -- every type. My own bundles usually include a biography, something scientific, some light reading, and one of these many classics that I just never got around to reading.
Andrew Plaks, Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature
The following sampling of the greatest classics of the non-Western literary traditions is offered not as a statement in multiculturalism (we are indisputably a "Western" center of learning), but simply as a supplementary list of books every undergraduate might want to read before graduating. In order to hold the list down to the impossibly inadequate number of 10 titles, I am passing over the obviously obligatory canons of the Confucian Classics, the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu scriptures, and the Koran, and limiting myself to the most towering literary monuments. No room for poetry either. As long as these primary texts remain for the most part outside the assumed cultural baggage of the Princeton graduate, there is little point in including here any of the great works of secondary scholarship in these traditions and in modern Asia.
China:
· Writings of Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi)
· Records of the Historian (Shiji)
· Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone
(Honglou meng)
Japan:
· Tale of Genji
· No Dramas of Zeami: Matsukaze
India:
· Mahabharata
· Plays of Kalidasa: Shakuntala
Near East:
· "Epic" of Gilgamesh
· Thousand and One Nights
· Shâh-nâme
Margaret Cauler Wilson, Stuart Professor of Philosophy, died August 21 at the Princeton Medical Center after a prolonged illness. She was 59. A specialist in early modern philosophy, she was the author of Descartes, and a coeditor of Philosophy: An Introduction. She had recently completed a new book, a collection of essays entitled Ideas and Mechanism.
Wilson graduated from Vassar College in 1960 and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1965, spending one of her graduate years at Oxford University on a Marshall Fellowship. She joined the Princeton faculty as an associate professor of philosophy in 1970 and became a full professor in 1975. In addition to teaching classes, she was active on the faculty, serving as the director of graduate studies and as both vice-chair and acting chair of the philosophy department.
In addition to her work in early modern philosophy, Wilson was interested in environmental ethics, conservation, and wildlife preservation. These interests took her, in the last year alone, to Brazil, Arizona, Antarctica, Baja California, and Florida. What many of her friends and former students remember best about her was her quiet passion about the things she loved -- perhaps best symbolized by the fact that despite all her commitments she still managed to read 300 mystery and detective novels a year.
Carol kay, an assistant professor of English at Princeton from 1973 to 1979, died September 12 from an illness; she was 51. Although she left the university almost 20 years ago, she made an indelible impression during her years on campus. Professor Claudia Johnson, a former student, says, "she was a generous and devoted teacher who was unforgettable to her students and who inspired them by the depth of her erudition and the sheer brilliance of her conversation."
Outside the classroom, Kay was involved with Princeton's early efforts to establish affirmative-action policies for university employment. After leaving Princeton, she served on the faculty of Amherst College, Washington University, New York University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Her 1988 book on 18th-century fiction, Political Constructions, is considered one of the best in its field.
Rankings: It's getting crowded at the top. This year, Princeton tied for first with Harvard and Yale in the annual college rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. The schools were followed in the rankings by MIT and Stanford, which tied for fourth, and Cornell, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania, which tied for sixth. Last year, Harvard and Yale tied for first, and Yale and Duke tied for third. The rankings are based on aggregate performances in seven categories. Princeton ranked first in alumni giving, tied for first in academic reputation, and third in faculty resources.
Prize: At its quadrennial meeting in Berlin on August 18, the International Congress of Mathematicians awarded Professor Andrew Wiles a silver plaque for his celebrated proof of Fermat's last theorem. The plaque was presented in lieu of a Fields Medal, considered the highest honor in mathematics; the 45-year-old Wiles is ineligible for the medal, which is given only to mathematicians age 40 or younger. (Four others at the congress were awarded Fields Medals.)
Honored: The Princeton Task Force on Ethics honored the university's Student Volunteers Council at its second annual Community Recognition Break-fast on October 14. The Student Volunteers Council is home for a wide variety of student-led community action projects including: big brother and sister programs, tutoring, elderly outreach, and the Urban Action program.