Recruiting geeks, nerds and wonks

Just as our discussion of the intellectual climate on campus was speeding up to the tempo of a saraband or perhaps the pace of a gun-carriage at a royal funeral, we had to down tools for Fall Break. I wonder how many students know, and how many faculty colleagues can remember, the ideological origins of Fall Break? It was a radical innovation instituted in response to student activism, in order "to encourage Princeton students to participate in the political process." That was the good intention. There were two unintended "real world" results. First, it became immediately apparent that students in large numbers elected to participate in the political process in places like Fort Lauderdale and Acapulco. Then the faculty, for their part, soon discovered the educational advantages of the Fall Break for our own jet-setter agendas. I myself am absolutely dependent upon the Fall Break to do the writing that, with disciplined planning, I could have completed in the previous six weeks. So despite the fact that it exacerbates the inconveniences of our already antediluvian academic calendar, Fall Break is now a sacred and probably necessary entitlement. Our president or our registrar would have as much luck trying to abolish it as they would Social Security or varsity basketball.

One lesson of all this, I suppose, is the limitation of the legislatable. This particular social computer does not respond to the command "Thou shalt be politically active," and it tends actually to crash when given the command "Thou shalt be intellectually active." So let me make it clear that I am not trying to type in any such command. A column by Aileen Nielsen '05, who describes the Princeton I recognize, elicited some intelligent and constructive but also possibly touchy responses. Katherine Reilly '06 wrote a beautiful piece about "refusing to sell short the undergraduate population." So disinclined am I to sell them short that I am taking valuable time away from finishing my essay on "Asyndectic Parataxis in Middle English Stanzaic Romances," which might finally get me a raise, to participate in what Joshua Schulman '04 calls a misdirected "anti-anti-intellectual campaign" that provokes Eric Linstrum '06 to say that "although you wouldn't know it from reading the 'Prince,' Princeton is closer to an intellectual utopia than an intellectual wasteland." The principal clause in his sentence is undoubtedly true, but I would have to put it in the same logical category with St. Paul's opinion of marriage: "It is better to marry than to burn." There are a whole lot of things that meet the standard of being preferable to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick without approaching the category of the desirable.

My own columns on the theme won me my first anonymous letter of the current season. Last year, when I had the temerity to give public expression to my disapprobation of Muslim terrorism, I got quite a few of them, mainly though not exclusively of the electronic variety. But this one was actually pinned to my door. The mode of delivery, I assume, made conscious allusion to the famous theses of Martin Luther, which it somewhat resembled in its polemical spirit. Unlike last year's, this anonymous letter was characterized by a pleasing dignity and courteous civility, to say nothing of a marked brevity that allows me to share its text in full. " Professor," wrote my unseen correspondent, "When you write about the Princeton intellectual community, remember the engineers [Mech/Aero, Chem, Civ, Comp, Ele]. We work really hard. Much harder than anyone getting a BA — and everybody knows it. But we're loving it! We make engineering jokes! We work on our projects in the middle of the night. The engineers are a vibrant, dynamic and enthusiastic intellectual community. Sincerely, The Engineers."

Even without the welcome prod I would have been unlikely, on the basis of decades of experience, to forget the engineers. I am a professional medievalist, and I tend to teach some pretty obscure stuff from time to time: "Ovid in the Middle Ages," "Franciscan Poverty," Old English grammar. Every time I have taught such a specialized and challenging course there have been a couple of engineers among the takers — and among the most brilliant performers. On two occasions the guys even had the generosity to wear their statutory little plastic pocket guards for the matching pen and mechanical pencil sets. For this professor in the humanities the experience is exhilarating but also a little shaming, since my own idea of down time is not necessarily fluid dynamics.

Of course it is no more possible to generalize about Princeton engineers than about any of our other wonderful students. Yet one can observe that in comparison with arts students, engineers are selected somewhat less for a supposed " well roundedness" and somewhat more for a supposed demonstration of a mastery of hard brain skills. Yet even at Princeton one will frequently hear echoes of a national culture that rewards people with an undisguised passion for knowledge and exact intellectual application with such appellations as nerd, geek and wonk. Look up the word "geek" in your unabridged. It fortunately never occurred to me to do so during my long high-school years of geekdom. It means somebody who bites off the heads of live chickens in a freak show. Is there any other nation on earth, even in the dreaded Axis of Evil, that so regards its young intellectuals?

At Monday's faculty meeting there was a brief conversation about what kind of students will be selected to make up the increment in our proposed expansion of the undergraduate body. The suggestion from the Provost was that they would be pretty much like the students we have now, though there might be a little more emphasis on "depth" as opposed to "breadth" — "not that we are against depth," as she added in a quip. It's probably too much to hope for that we'll do the right thing and establish a category of recruited nerds, geeks and wonks. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.