Il Gran Rifiuto and its cultural repercussions

The Anglican confession of sins includes the dual category of "things done and left undone," for inaction can be as fatal as malfeasance. The relevance of this to our theme of the campus intellectual climate was revealed by Dante at the very gate of hell, home of the "wretched people who have lost the good of the intellect." There he spotted among the do-nothing residents of limbo one "who made il gran rifiuto" — the great refusal, great abdication. That probably was the rare papal refusenik Celestine V, who, concluding that the pope's palace was no place for a saint, after only months on the job in 1294 threw in the apostolic towel to return to full-time asceticism. The Church later canonized him; but Dante, who thought that vigorous Church reform was more pressing than further private navel-gazing, put him in hell.

As I never tire of explaining to students, history has consequences. We cannot approach the questions raised in the student letter about Princeton's current intellectual climate without confronting the legacy of institutional history. That to a considerable extent undergraduates suffer the lost good of the intellect is in large measure the result of an historic, institutional gran rifiuto. For the hundred years that we have been a university, as opposed to a college, our well-intentioned guardians — trustees, administrators and faculty alike — have abdicated the responsibility, or ignored the opportunity, of maximizing the intellectual potential of a residential academy. They didn't do anything wrong, exactly; they just didn't do anything.

In terms of the thoughtful development of the educational potential of our halls of residence, Princeton until recently could have been an urban commuter school, where students come to lectures via subway bringing their lunches in paper bags. So reluctant has the University been to take initiatives in the "social" arena that we have only had a decent campus center for two years! Hence the antipodal undergraduate worlds of classroom and club. Hence the crippled ethic of "Work Hard, Play Hard." Labor in the laboratory; play in the foamy playground of Prospect Street. Piously eschewing a role in loco parentis as condescending and anachronistic, Princeton in fact behaved like a parent whose best notion of childcare is the television set.

A cognate rifiuto dates from the founding of the Graduate School and involves the relationship between undergraduate and graduate education. I must again invoke my most recent Saturday, another twin bill. In the afternoon beneath a spitting sky I watch the Tigers defeat Brown — this time a clear victory, beyond cavil. In the evening, as a newly installed member of the board of APGA (Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni) I am a subaltern host at a dinner party thrown for the graduate winners of honorific fellowships. Its highpoint is an hour's worth of brief talks about their intellectual work. You want diversity? You got diversity: A puckish philosopher, about 14 years-old by the look of him, a thick-lensed Asian boffin from Central Casting, a card-carrying French Intellectual in caps and into queer theories of architecture, altogether about 20 brilliant oddballs, not a decent linebacker among them, absolutely fixated on the excitement of ideas. Where do these Saturday worlds meet, maybe even collide?

This is not the place to pursue the subject of the larger relationship between our admissions policies and the campus intellectual climate, a subject reserved for a separate column, but I note a salient distinction between graduate and undergraduate admissions. Graduate students are searched for and admitted by professional scholars whose criteria in choosing them are — in comparison with those that guide undergraduate admissions — simple and transparent. I cannot claim that there is no motive of social engineering in the composition of the postgraduate classes, but it is, again comparatively, slight. We — and I can use the first person pronoun because here professors control the process — are looking for demonstrated academic excellence and the promise of intellectual vitality.

Readers disinclined to agree with my ideas will find plenty to dislike here without recourse to the false inference that I ignore essential differences between graduate and undergraduate education. They exist. But why the intellectual apartheid? Our graduate students are necessarily closer in age and immediate experience to our undergraduates than are our senior faculty. Many of them are yesterday's undergraduates and tomorrow's assistant professors. Why did Dean West put them into a Gothic ghetto with a hilltop view of a golf course? I spent two years here getting a Ph.D. in the early sixties and never once had a conversation with an undergraduate! In those same years undergraduates joked that GC stood for "Goon Castle."

History has consequences, but it need have no permanent franchise on the future. There are signs that the age of abdication is over. I already mentioned the Frist Center. It was haphazard economic necessity that first brought graduate student preceptors to the classroom; but necessity being the mother of invention, we have at least begun to rethink an ancient, unhelpful division. Our system of residential colleges, while tardy in its arrival and timid in its ambitions, has nevertheless had a measurable ameliorating effect on the intellectual quality of the underclass experience. And, as the politicians say, we now stand at a crossroads. If we seriously and intentionally give a priority to intellectual life as we expand the student body and build our first real undergraduate colleges, Princeton could be the even better place it wants to be.

So much for il gran rifiuto. In terms of discussing impediments to a more vigorous intellectual climate on our campus that's one down, 27 to go, including the admissions system, the club system, the athletic behemoth, socially sanctioned philistinism, faculty fecklessness and such powerful local special interests as the Future Alcoholics of America and Morgan Stanley's four-year apprenticeship program — leaving aside all such controversial and sensitive topics as might in their discussion occasion embarrassment or offense. As the man said, "Give me a break." Please enjoy yours. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.