The first one has to do with money: more precisely, with the way in which Princeton's wealth has become so visible. Even in 1975, Princeton was a very rich university, perhaps even higher up the wealth ladder than it is now. The high administrators already spoke with pity about other institutions, like Columbia and my own alma mater in Chicago, which had to support teaching and research, pay their faculty and house their students on a shoestring.
In those days, though, Princeton regarded its money less as currency to be spent than as treasure to be husbanded. Salaries were miserable; I remember the look on the face of the chair of my department, as he explained how one senior job candidate after another had laughed at him when given a salary figure over the phone. Some graduate students had stipends that paid only part of their tuition and gave them no money to live on; undergraduate scholarships, though they may have been generous - I simply don't know - were awarded to fewer students by far than they are now.
Parts of the campus, such as Prospect Garden, were meticulously groomed. Others, however, looked as if no one had invested in them in decades. Campus paths, for example, consisted of broken flagstones. Like the neat expanses of blocks that have replaced them, they were graded absolutely level to ensure that they flooded during any rainstorm heavier than a drizzle. But the grading was the only thing about them that was neat.
And then there was the food. Princeton had not yet become the genuinely bountiful mother it is now: the place where any enterprising student can live from the extra sandwiches handed out at lunches and the brie and grapes left over after lectures. In those days, food was rarely provided, and when it was it didn't take the form of gourmet wraps and focaccia. When the Priorities Committee, in its heavy season, had to meet through dinner twice a week, we sat in a handsome room in Prospect, munching baloney sandwiches and pretzels - not the salad and fish that seem to come with every committee and task force meeting nowadays.
Nassau Hall did spend money from time to time, but it applied new funding to carefully chosen projects, like creating a department of molecular biology or residential colleges. And it paid for those big-ticket items without waste and with a sharp eye to where the funds for maintenance would come from, 20 years down the line.
Nowadays, Nassau Hall still develops and funds special projects - like the terrifically promising, and potentially very costly, bridge year program and the upcoming renovation of Firestone. But the money seems to flow everywhere else as well: in the salaries and research support provided for faculty, in the level of support offered to students and, of course, in the campus' endless construction zones.
The spending has done a huge amount of good. It has kept us competitive as a university. In the '80s and after, some observers thought Princeton was too small to compete in the big leagues; well, we're not small any more, except in student numbers, but we seem to compete pretty successfully. Our wealth has enabled us to attract a more varied student body at all levels and send our alumni away with little or no debt.
But it's also packed the campus with too many buildings for the available space, wrecking the park-like qualities of the old, less manicured grounds and packed the calendar with so many activities that you can hear a lecture that matters to you only by skipping another one you'd really like to go to.
Above all, it's changed us. In the old days, we weren't shocked in years when money was short, since we'd never had a lot to play with. We improvised activities among ourselves since we lacked resources to bring in people from all over the world. We were ready, or at least we weren't surprised, when trouble came (as it did, again and again). Everyone knew the drill: committee meetings, long hours, hard decisions, baloney sandwiches.
I wonder what will happen now if it turns out that the age of peace, prosperity and all the Belgian Block we can eat is winding down. Maybe our financial geniuses will save our river of gold. But what if they don't? Can we go back to Presbyterian austerity? Or are we spoiled, unable to talk coherently without a free focaccia? I'm very curious.
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.
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