Notebook - April 7, 1999
Faculty approves new finance program
University will hire new faculty members, add courses
At its March 1 meeting, the faculty approved a new certificate program
in finance, which starting next fall will be offered through the economics
department under the auspices of the Bendheim Center for Finance.
The economics department established the program partly in response to
student interest in taking courses in the rapidly developing field of finance,
said Yacine Ait-Sahalia, a professor of economics, who will serve as the
program's director. In recent years, a significant percentage of the graduating
class has gone on to work in the financial world. According to Associate
Director of Career Services William H. Corwin, of the members of the Class
of 1998 who reported being employed (roughly one-third of the class), 21
percent work in the financial-services industry. The program will also feed
the "vibrant" research being done in finance, said Ait-Sahalia.
Of the Nobel Prizes awarded in economics this decade, he noted, five recognized
research in finance.
The field of finance focuses on the pricing of financial assets, including
equities, bonds, and currencies; portfolio management and the evaluation
of financial risks; and corporate governance, among other topics. Knowledge
of modern finance is essential to the proper understanding of many areas
within economics and public policy, including the determination of exchange
rates and international capital flows, the making of monetary and fiscal
policy, and the role of financial reform in developing economies.
Students likely to apply to the program are those majoring in economics,
engineering, mathematics, and physics, said Ait-Sahalia, who hopes the program
will attract about 50 students each year. The university will hire four
new faculty members to teach in the program and offer seven new courses
next fall.
Princeton is unique among its peers in offering a finance program within
the context of a liberal arts education, said Ait-Sahalia. Most other institutions
that teach finance to undergraduates do so through a business school. Professor
of Economics Burton G. Malkiel *64 told The Daily Princetonian that
the program will provide financial training on a par with that of business
schools such as Wharton.
Undergraduates who wish to earn a certificate in finance must take prerequisites
in mathematics, economics, and probability and statistics, as well as two
required core courses, Financial Investments (Economics 317) and Corporate
Finance (Economics 318), and at least three additional electives offered
through the departments of economics, civil engineering and operations research,
computer science, history, mathematics, and the Woodrow Wilson School. A
substantial component of the students' senior theses must relate to issues
or methods of finance. Students may also follow one of four suggested tracks
focusing on mathematical finance, corporate finance, derivatives pricing
and risk management, or investment management.
Students rally to end sweatshop
labor
"Sweatshop labor's got to go," chanted some 200 students who
held a rally on Firestone Plaza before marching to Nassau Hall on February
16. Princeton Students for Progressive Education and Action, which organized
the protest, called for the university to put an end to sweatshop labor
in factories where clothing with the Princeton insignia is manufactured.
The protesters urged the university to develop a code of conduct that would
require contracted apparel manufacturers to prohibit child and forced labor
and unsafe working conditions, pay workers a living wage, allow unannounced
inspections, and publicly disclose the location of factories. The Princeton
rally was one of a number of antisweatshop rallies and sit-ins staged by
students on college campuses this winter.
On March 15 the university announced its intention to affiliate with
a new nonprofit entity, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), which will monitor
company compliance with a workplace code of conduct to ensure that products
are not being produced by sweatshop labor. Princeton also confirmed that
it will require all companies licensed to manufacture products bearing its
name to publicly disclose the locations of the factories where those products
are made. As soon as the FLA is operational (probably later this year),
the university will require its licensees to abide by its code of conduct,
participate in its monitoring and enforcement procedures, and achieve FLA
certification.
"Whatever
I am now -- it happened here"
In the autumn of 1948, Paul Benacerraf '52 *60 entered Princeton as
a freshman. Today, the philosophy department chairman and former provost
can boast 50 years of study, teaching, and administrative service, all on
this campus.
"I arrived here as nothing," he says. "I became what philosopher
I may be in response to Princeton teachers and, importantly, later, Princeton
students. Whatever I am now -- it happened here."
Benacerraf has seen so many changes in Princeton that it is "almost
impossible to point to single instances." Coeducation, of course, is
one of the differences between Princeton in 1948 and Princeton in 1999 --
but only one, he says. Today's Princeton "feels vastly different from
the one I came to as a freshman. Academically, it has grown from what was
really a small college into a major university. It is also much more richly
textured. Princeton students of today have the benefit of contact with students,
faculty, and staff of both genders and of many racial, religious, and socioeconomic
backgrounds. Even if we are not yet where we should be, it is a huge change,
whose importance for Princeton cannot be overestimated."
The son of a Moroccan-Venezuelan father and Algerian mother, Benacerraf
was born in Paris, where his father was a textile buyer for the importing
business he had established in Caracas. (The family name, says Benacerraf,
"is Sephardic, and translates as 'Son of the Fiery Angel.' Others prefer,
'Son of a money-changer.'") His father was eager for Benacerraf and
his older brother, Baruj, to join the textile-importing business. Neither
did. (His brother went on to win a Nobel Prize in immunology in 1980.)
The Benacerrafs lived in Paris and moved to Caracas in 1939, as war threatened,
and to New York City when Paul was nine. He spoke only French and Spanish,
but "learned to speak English at P.S. 6." When the elder Benacerrafs
decided to return to Caracas, 11-year-old Paul was sent to board at the
Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey.
Come senior year, he applied to Princeton and was initially rejected.
"My headmaster told me the dean of admission had explained, 'The Jewish
quota has already been filled,'" Benacerraf says. "But the headmaster
talked Princeton into accepting me."
As a freshman and sophomore, Benacerraf recalls, "I was immature,
rebellious, and convinced that no one on campus shared my intellectual interests."
Unconventionally attired and sporting "the only beard on the Princeton
campus," Benacerraf felt out of place among "all those guys in
khakis and button-down shirts." Consequently, "I spent most of
my time in New York City, and by the end of junior year I was on the verge
of flunking out. The dean and I agreed that Princeton and I would both profit
from a brief separation." During this nine-month hiatus, Benacerraf
took courses at Columbia's School of General Studies; he returned to retake
the spring of junior year, "considerably wiser and more committed to
study." Still not a dedicated scholar, he had chosen to major in philosophy
"only because I had good enough grades in the necessary courses."
But intellectual lightning struck in the fall of senior year. Benacerraf
took an introductory course in the philosophy of science, taught by John
G. Kemeny '46 *49, later president of Dartmouth, and one in the philosophy
of religion, taught by Robert Scoon. "Both courses captured me in a
way that nothing else had." Another force during his undergraduate
years was Professor of Philosophy (now emeritus) Arthur Szathmary: "More
than anyone else, he helped me grow, to see myself as a part of Princeton,
and to see in Princeton some of the things that I valued but to which I
had been blind before."
The disaffected loner had found what was to be his intellectual home:
the philosophy department at Princeton. He graduated in 1953 (though he
affiliates himself with the Class of '52, his entering class), determined
upon a career as an academic philosopher.
Philosophy of mathematics
Graduate school at Princeton proved "wonderful," studying with
professors Hilary Putnam (now Cogan University Professor at Harvard) and
Paul Ziff (now professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill), among others. "It was a very close department," says Benacerraf,
who received his Ph.D. in 1960. "There were only 15 graduate students
and 12 faculty members."
In graduate school, he refined his philosophical interests to concentrate
on the philosophy of mathematics, a field in which he has, according to
a colleague, exerted a "profound and continuing influence." Benacerraf's
interest in the philosophy of mathematics grows, he says, from "a rather
traditional philosophical concern with the nature of human knowledge --
what it is and how we acquire it."
It seems obvious, he says, "that we have knowledge of the subject
matter of mathematics -- but how? For it seems equally obvious that we have
no direct or indirect sensory contact with that subject matter."
Philosophers have struggled for millennia to answer such questions, he
says, along with many other questions. "Mathematics is where we study
the infinite, both the infinitely large and the infinitely small,"
he points out. "How can the finite beings we are have knowledge of
the infinite? That's a real, not a rhetorical question."
Support for Coeducation
Benacerraf has taught continuously at Princeton since his first year
as a graduate student. Currently James S. McDonnell Distinguished University
Professor, he chaired his department from 1975 to 1984 and again beginning
in 1992.
He has also served the university in an array of senior administrative
positions, including associate dean of the Graduate School (1965-67), associate
provost for special studies (1968-70), and provost (1988-91).
He has observed Princeton in crisis and in calm, and he has been closely
involved in events that decided the course of today's institution. Reflecting
on these experiences, he points to his years as associate provost under
Provost (later President) William G. Bowen *58 as particularly satisfying.
At that time, he says, he "worked on a demonstration project on
resource allocation in universities, led by Bowen and funded by the Ford
Foundation, that revamped the university's budgeting system." A critical
part of that study, in the spring of 1968, "was the feasibility portion
of the Patterson Report on coeducation, which demonstrated that adding 1,000
women to the student body -- then 3,200 strong -- would actually be cost-effective.
It proved persuasive to a number of people, trustees included, who had opposed
coeducation, in part because they feared it would be financially disastrous."
Other high points for Benacerraf have been "helping to move the
institution from one that was administered from 'the back of an envelope'
to one that makes more efficient use of its vast resources." He contributed
to this effort by reorganizing the graduate fellowship program (as associate
dean), and by "helping to design a budgeting and information system
to respond to the university's priorities" (as associate provost).
And, as provost, he "participated in a number of truly exciting academic
developments, the growth and diversification of the faculty, and helping
to develop policies regarding harassment, sexual and other, and to implement
them university-wide."
He also cites "the privilege of seeing the administration of three
Princeton presidents close-up -- Robert Goheen ['40 *48], Bill Bowen, and
Harold Shapiro [*64]; I can say without hesitation that we have been extraordinarily
well served." And he treasures, both personally and professionally,
his association with the teachers and scholars who have constituted the
philosophy department over the course of his tenure at Princeton.
Benacerraf's greatest satisfaction, however, remains in the classroom,
where the flame of philosophical truth ever beckons. "To be present
as students unfold philosophical mysteries for themselves, struggle to push
back the darkness, and, in whatever measure, succeed," he says, "is
truly delightful."
-- Caroline Moseley
Teaching with Websites
By William Howarth
For the past six years I've signed my e-mail with the Web address http://www.princeton.edu/~howarth,
which leads the curious to a home page listing Websites for eight online
courses I teach or have taught. These Websites are modest, with limited
graphics and no whirling GIFs (graphic image files), but they try to use
information technology to reach today's students. Mostly they are text,
blue oceans of it, listing Web links for hundreds of other sites that offer
research information, online texts, and collections of relevant images.
These linked sites are mainly reference desks, organized to complement the
readings I have assigned for classes.
When I first began to compile these sites, my colleagues were baffled,
and the only campus support came from the Office of Computing and Information
Technology, which gave money to fund a summer graduate assistant. I taught
her to surf the Web, using "crawler" engines that now seem antiquated,
and she brought me bookmarks, which I organized in an outlining word-processor.
Then I tediously coded in HTML (the computer language for creating Web pages),
learning by trial and error how to set type in the cyber-equivalent of a
hand letterpress.
Today, the business of writing Web pages has vastly speeded up, and I
am no longer an anomaly among Princeton professors. Many faculty members,
as well as academic departments, sport their own Web pages and list online
courses. The tools for searching and writing have greatly improved: now
I search with my own engine, appropriately named "Sherlock,'' and I
store thousands of bookmarks in a private database, called ''Surf Scout."
In practical terms, these tools let me quickly look for topics, secure Web
addresses, and build pages in an HTML editor. In about three hours, I can
prepare a complete set of links for a lecture or seminar.
Yet efficiency of production does not make teaching any easier or less
daunting. How should we use the Web in our classrooms? Over the years, I've
conducted various teaching experiments. Sometimes in lectures I project
Websites to show images or texts -- but in truth, a 35-mm slide projector
does a better job. In seminars I have also displayed Web pages, mainly to
make brief discussion points. The Web is less useful in these situations,
because it interferes with the high bandwidth of human conversation, distracting
us with a technology that can at times be slow, cumbersome, and all too
prone to system bombs.
The Web works best as a supplement that students read before or after
class, especially when preparing to write. In most of my courses, I ask
students to submit e-mail responses to each week's reading, due a few hours
before class. These I print and annotate, using them as a basis for guiding
our discussion. I thus know in advance what students think about the reading,
where they have problems and blind spots, and what points of disagreement
may be useful to explore. I also have something in prose from every student,
including all those sphinxes who refuse to speak in an open forum.
At first, I ask the students to write privately to me, and I give them
encouraging feedback. Then, after a few weeks, I direct their mail to a
class "e-list," in which all subscribers read all the postings.
As they read and react to what their peers think, the conversation grows
more intense and collaborative. Using the Web, I then ask the students,
either alone or in small groups, to explore links and compile evidence for
comparative discussion: What about that review in the Los Angeles Times?
Who remembers the portraits of Walt Whitman? Did anyone find a map of Wounded
Knee?
PROVIDING HISTORICAL CONTEXT
A major recurring motif in American writing is the inscription of reality,
the imaginative recasting of what Emerson called "the common...the
familiar, the low" ("The American Scholar," 1836). To comprehend
the figural drift of Melville, Dickinson, or Faulkner, it's valuable to
see the literal content of their times and places. The Web creates a series
of paths into that history, the better to grasp why many years later a text
reads as literature. Perhaps the author has made a significant change or
omission, a slight rearranging of the past for effect. Or perhaps we must
drop our contemporary blinders and learn to gloss a word or phrase as the
author did. The Web provides a dynamic means of annotation, not fixed in
marginalia but adapting to each reader's needs. It's also faster to search
electronic links than offprints or clippings, let alone copy and circulate
them. I used to make a "green" argument for the Web, claiming
it saved us tons of paper -- until I found my students were laser-printing
the sites they found, at exorbitant cost.
Today's students are bright, ambitious, yet intellectually cautious.
Faced with the vast sea of Internet data, they hesitate to venture beyond
rote assignments. They offer many excuses: no workstations available, the
network was down, can't remember how to log on, and that old reliable: you
never said this was required. So I began to require Web use: every paper
must have both Web and library citations; review these five links and write
a 500-word evaluation of them; test the online concordance of Moby-Dick
by searching for words describing paternity and maternity. In time, the
fear of learning new skills faded, especially after my English majors began
to find post-collegiate jobs in the fast-growing field of Web publication.
One spring I ran an entire American Studies seminar, Race and Region,
as a course in Web-based research and writing. We met on Tuesdays to discuss
the readings; on Wednesdays the students surfed madly, trying to solve a
set of research problems: Trace the route of Frederick Douglass's northern
journey. Locate images of the Sonoran Desert. Who sponsored the Dawes General
Allotment Act? On Thursdays, we discussed these findings and their implications,
which helped us grasp the relation between physical environments and histories
of racial injustice toward American minorities, from Indians to Asians.
Far from regarding the research problems as trivia, students saw them as
multiple contexts that framed their primary readings. They also reported
to me that their parents were logging onto the course from far away and
reading over our shoulders.
Perhaps the greatest challenge I had was creating the course American
Literature Before 1825. Uncertain how much ancillary material I could locate
on the Web, I was amazed to find data for more than 90 percent of the works
assigned. The students' responses to the course were enormously positive,
and in their written evaluations they said how the past came vividly alive
for them, thanks to the Website materials. In an American Studies core course,
American Places, several students chose to create Website papers that demonstrated
a superior grasp of course themes (the way places shape and represent cultural
history) and of clear, effective presentation. These students benefited
from using the course site, which taught them how to research and write
in a mode of publication that will dominate international discourse in the
21st century.
For the last two years, I've conducted a seminar for graduate teaching
assistants, entitled Teaching with Technology and supported by the A. V.
Davis Foundations. With the help of colleagues from the faculty and the
library staff, we work with students with a wide range of technical skills.
Their goal is to practice collaborative strategies for teaching and learning,
and to build Websites for their courses. We are also advancing their dissertation
research by teaching them about online resources and how to use software
as a powerful writing tool. Our aim is to develop productive scholars who
are also versatile teachers, well-prepared to meet the next generation of
college students.
In 1997, the Claremont Graduate School published a national survey indicating
that e-mail is now used in one-third of college courses, but chiefly for
posting syllabi or providing limited encyclopedia and site links. Many American
campuses still do not provide full access to computing for all students,
or guidance to their faculty on how to use these tools for learning. My
work suggests several practical ways to connect information technology with
intellectual content. Literature is the field that examines a broad range
of issues in cultural history, the factors that have the most potential
for creating a sense of community in today's divisive, confusing America.
I believe that imaginative use of the Web teaches us how to engage with
the past, find and connect information, and disseminate it democratically.
These experiences have helped me provide both students and their teachers
with a new form of literacy, one that may improve our chances to preserve
the natural environment and sustain our rich multicultural heritage.
Professor William Howarth teaches courses in literature and cultural
history, chiefly for the programs in American and Environmental Studies.
He is completing a book entitled What Nature Knows: The Cultural Study
of Environment.
Clubs open doors, not taps, for
bicker
Even though the booze didn't flow on Prospect Street as four of
five selective eating clubs experimented with a dry bicker, the clubs conducted
a successful bicker/sign-in process in February. A total of 891 sophomores
-- about 80 percent of the Class of 2001 -- joined eating clubs. Of the
11 clubs, only Colonial didn't fill. Students found dry bicker "more
fair and less intimidating," said former Inter-Club Council President
Clark Lauritzen '99.
According to figures compiled by The Daily Princetonian, among
the five selective clubs Tower was the most popular choice, with
157 students bickering and 95 receiving bids. At Cottage, 148 students bickered
and 86 were accepted. The other three selective clubs, Ivy, Cap and Gown,
and Tiger Inn, had 130, 103, and 90 bickerees, respectively. Ivy
accepted 67, Cap and Gown 70, and Tiger Inn 65.
Of the sign-in clubs, Quadrangle and Terrace filled in the first round.
Quadrangle accepted 111 students and Terrace 94.
Campus accepted 66 members in the first round and 30 in the second round.
Cloister accepted 89 in the first round and five in the second. Charter
attracted only 25 in the first round but rebounded with 62 in the second.
Only 34 students joined Colonial, which accepted 24 in the first round and
10 in the second.
Graduate School to celebrate centennial
With a new centennial logo in hand (left), the Graduate School is making
plans for a yearlong celebration of its 100th anniversary in 2000-2001.
Designed by the firm ChingFoster, the logo is adapted from a stone relief
found on the outside west wall of Procter Hall, at the Graduate College.
The Graduate School, which was established December 13, 1900, is planning
various events, symposia, and lectures to commence at Reunions 2000 and
conclude at Reunions the following year. Activities include a gala on December
15, 2000, a conference on graduate education, and a public-lecture series
featuring graduate alumni in cutting-edge research.
In conjunction with the 100th anniversary, the university is seeking
to raise $100 million for the Graduate School as part of the Anniversary
Campaign. To date, Princeton has raised more than $60 million.
Short takes
Stubborn old people?: Research by a Princeton professor has put
a dent in the stereotype of stubborn old people stuck in their ways. Penny
S. Visser, an instructor in psychology and public affairs, found that both
old and young people were more willing to change their minds than middle-aged
folks. In one national survey, supporters and opponents of military action
in a hypothetical example were asked if they would change their minds if
the United Nations urged an opposite approach. Fifty-six percent of 18-year-olds,
and 50 percent of elderly respondents, said they would, compared to only
42 percent of those in their late 50s. Visser and her research partner,
Jon Krosnick of Ohio State University, suggested that younger people were
more willing to change their minds because they tended to be less sure of
their views. The researchers speculated that as people reach adulthood,
they become more knowledgeable and more sure of their views. But as they
age, "declines in cognitive skills may cause people to become less
able to store and retrieve issue-relevant knowledge from memory" --
and less likely to hold firm in their views.
-- Frederic J. Frommer
Plane on mars: NASA has agreed to fund a project that will culminate
in a flight of an airplane in the thin atmosphere of Mars on December 17,
2003, exactly 100 years after the Wright brothers' historic first flight
at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The idea for the project was proposed by
Edgar Yazio Choueiri *91, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering, in a May 1997 document he circulated among his
department and some outside colleagues. Since the Martian atmosphere is
devoid of air (it is mostly carbon dioxide), the term "airplane"
is not very suitable. Instead, Choueiri calls the craft an "Aresplane,"
in reference to Ares, the Greek name for the Roman god Mars. The project
would force researchers to urgently seek solutions for problems related
to materials, airfoil design, dynamics and control, and propulsion. These
problems correspond to research areas in which the MAE department has made
numerous contributions. The project could also lead to a better understanding
of geological processes that shaped the red planet and its vast canyons.
Light gaps: A painstaking effort to track every square inch of
plant life in large patches of tropical forests has started to produce significant
discoveries in ecology. Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Stephen
P. Hubbell, a founder of the project, is using the research to answer fundamental
questions about what factors come into play in maintaining the diversity
of life on Earth. Hubbell's latest finding, reported in Science,
overturns one of the bedrock beliefs among ecologists about what allows
tropical forests to maintain such a dazzling variety of tree species. The
common thinking was that when a tree dies or is blown over in a storm, the
resulting infusion of direct sunlight, called a light gap, allows new species
to flourish and compete to fill the open slot in the forest. The frequency
and size of light gaps was, therefore, thought to predict the type and number
of species present in the forest.
Hubbell found, however, that no such correlation exists. Using vast amounts
of data generated from the tracking project, he showed that areas with many
light gaps are no richer in species than areas with few pockets of sunlight.
The mix of species also was not notably different. Although some species
do depend on light gaps to survive, they are such a small minority that
they don't change the results.
In brief
Graduate rankings: U.S. News & World Report ranked
Princeton's graduate programs in mathematics, physics, the biological sciences,
and computer science among the top 10 in the country. The rankings of Ph.D.
programs are based on the results of a survey sent to academics in each
discipline. Princeton ranked second in mathematics and physics, seventh
in the biological sciences, and eighth in computer science. The School of
Engineering and Applied Science was ranked 17th in U.S. News's annual
rating of the best graduate schools. MIT topped that list for the 11th time.
Nudist Help: According to a story by Richard Just '01 in The
Daily Princetonian, the Tri-State Metro Naturists -- a New Jersey-based
group that promotes "family-oriented clothing optional recreation"
-- has offered to help undergraduates reform the Nude Olympics without ending
it. According to its president, Dan Speers, the group has experience planning
safe nude events and e-mailed Undergraduate Student Government President
Spencer Merriweather '00 offering its expertise in fighting to save the
annual ritual. "One of the things that I had read...was that a lot
of students this year were becoming comfortable with being nude during the
event. That's what our club's all about."
Appointments: Jacqueline Mintz, the founding director of
the GSI Teaching and Resource Center at the University of California at
Berkeley, will become director of Princeton's new Harold W. McGraw Jr. '40
Center for Teaching and Learning next fall. Mintz has led the Berkeley center
for 10 years, working particularly with graduate student instructors (GSIs)
and with faculty members to enhance teaching and learning on that campus.
The McGraw Center, which will be housed in the Frist Campus Center, is intended
to serve as a laboratory for new ideas and a place to share, across departments
and disciplines, teaching discoveries that have proven successful in individual
classrooms at Princeton and other colleges and universities.
Kathleen Mulligan, formerly the director of facilities services
at Oregon State University, has become vice-president for facilities at
Princeton. Mulligan had worked as director for facilities at Oregon State
for more than 10 years, overseeing the physical plant, environmental health
and safety, and facilities planning, and managing the construction program
for the 420-acre main campus.
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