Professor-preceptor meals threatened by changes to mentor fund

Any anthropologist or scholar of religion can tell you about the importance of commensality to societies old and new. From seders to Christian rituals of communion, from the ritual eating of the pangolin to what David Carrasco has described as the "we eat the gods, the gods eat us" religious economy of the Aztecs, the religious significance of eating together cannot be overestimated. In philosophy, Plato's Symposium thematized the contribution of a communal feast to philosophy. Immanuel Kant argued that because it acknowledges and rightly orders the legitimate physical needs of the body and the social needs of the soul, a dinner party represents the "highest moral-physical good."

Princeton is a good illustration of the powers of commensality — sometimes disturbingly so. Who you are is reflected by which meals you participate in. The residential colleges offer a multitude of language and other theme tables. Upperclass life is shaped by eating clubs. Even the Human Values Forum, the undergraduate ethics society, meets over a three-course dinner. The same goes for the faculty. We meet formally for receptions and dinners, and informally over lunch. In my impecunious department we kick off each year with a potluck dinner for faculty, graduate students and visitors, and pressure our seniors to meet their thesis-writing deadlines with pizza parties.

For reasons global and local, the Fund for Faculty Mentoring of Preceptors, introduced as part of President Shapiro's 250th Anniversary Fund for Excellence in Teaching, was a great idea. The fund allowed faculty teaching courses with more than 50 enrolled students to invite their preceptors to weekly meetings over meals. (It's not clear to me why it was not for all courses with preceptors.)

I can report from my experience that it was money well spent. As we explored the gamut of Nassau Street's cheaper eateries, my preceptors and I developed a real esprit de corps and learned to work together as a team. Precepts were enriched by our discussions of common problems and strategies. My lectures were able to respond to the concerns of students not in my own precepts. And we were able to compare approaches to evaluating student performance; grading was much fairer as a result. The preceptors learned something about course development for their future careers, but, no less importantly, also felt acknowledged as valued parts of Princeton's educational mission here and now.

The continued success of the fund is in jeopardy. As of this semester, we may no longer take our preceptors to restaurants. The fund now offers a limited food credit per week for each preceptor, usable only in the Frist food court. Alternatively, we can order box lunches for use in another room in Frist, or send someone to pick them up for use elsewhere. What is no longer permitted is taking preceptors to restaurants off campus, or using the fund to defray the costs of meetings at professor's homes, though these often cost less than a meal at Frist.

I suspect the fund was not introduced for those of us who would meet with our preceptors anyway. The lecture-precept system works a lot less well when there is no regular communication between professors and preceptors; apparently some professors needed additional incentives to make this communication possible.

Will they still take the bait? No offense to its designer and chefs, but lunch at Frist's food court falls somewhat short of the "highest moral-physical good." Trays and lunch-boxes offer a low-grade experience of commensality, if any. I think faculty are likely to can the whole thing. This will be bad for teaching, and for students.

But I worry also for our preceptors. Preceptors, whom many undergraduates seem to regard as the Oompa-Loompas of Princeton, bear much of the burden of providing the high quality education for which Princeton prides itself, often for very little — or, in some cases, no — pay. The least they deserve is a place at the table. Mark Larrimore is a professor in the Department of Religion. He can be reached at larimore@princeton.edu.