Accentuate the Positive

I wanted to be teed off in a major way when I was unable to eat in the GC dining hall the final Friday before intersession break. Eating tofu cutlet under the stern gaze of early twentieth century neo-Gothic gargoyles, after all, is the only activity that regularly brings otherwise isolated, antisocial and often even smelly Princeton grad students together as something vaguely resembling a normal human community. And I wasn't going to have another chance to engage in such joys for over a week, all because the trustees of the University decided that they had a greater claim to that night's tofu than I and my beloved peers.

The next day, however, I awoke to find the University homepage emblazoned with word of what the trustees had wrought while keeping me from my precious dining hall. My eye was drawn first to the news that all humanities and social science grads would be given essentially unconditional summer funding every year.

I was immediately visited by visions of endless Augusts spent studying Rousseau in some secluded Alpine hamlet — a copy of Emile in one hand, a beer stein in the other and a naughty Swiss Miss on my lap. In my reverie, Lola (she was of course named Lola) whispered softly in my ear about how all science grads would now be receiving fellowships, and how undergrads on financial aid would be given grants rather than loans. I, however, was too taken by the subtlety of J.J.'s thought and the splendor of the Alpine countryside to notice what she was saying. What is more, my joy erased any memory of the cutlets I had been so cruelly denied the night before.

It's hard to stay mad at people who start throwing money at you unexpectedly. While grad students elsewhere are frantically unionizing to fight their oppression at the hands of their tenured masters, we here at Princeton have managed to work up about as much proletarian outrage as is seen in the average Old Navy ad. This is not to say we aren't mistreated — denied as we are both dental care and adequate housing, we are perpetually afraid that at any moment we may become the sort of toothless mendicants normally associated with the more garishly squalid passages of Dickens. But with so much cash sloshing around this place, a few vague promises on the part of the trustees and administration are enough to shut up the vast majority of us, leaving only a lunatic fringe of post-Naderite radicals to fight for our welfare. No offense, people, but considering your success in obtaining economic justice for the nation's underprivileged in the recent presidential debacle, I'm not trusting you with my teeth.

Of course, the Naderites and other Leninists have long argued that things must get worse before they can get better, for only the utter failure of the capitalist system will spark popular revolution. While this may offer some consolation when things (as they are so often wont to do) really do get worse, it leaves us in the rather odd situation of bemoaning our fate as it gradually improves. Each extra bit of stipend, each additional summer on the continent, only puts off the real solution to our woes: the mobilization of the oppressed academic classes to seize the means of instruction once and for all.

For all I know, this sort of dialectical mumbo-jumbo might have a grain of truth to it. Regardless, I'd rather have my gums bleed all over Europe this summer than stay here in Jersey confident that, someday, my sufferings will be so great that the pigs will be forced to pay for my root canals. Mind you, I would prefer dental care and adequate housing as well. But with the mountain air to soothe my lungs, Le Contrat Social to stimulate my mind, and Lola to stimulate the rest of me, I'll soon forget about such piddling concerns.

(Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu)