One of the few schools to focus on undergraduate education and the undergraduate experience, Princeton allows our academic exploration to seem almost unhindered by our ability to pay. If you don’t have the grades to study abroad, your department might stop you. If you don’t have the money, they’ll do what they can with the financial aid office to find some way to pay for you. And undergraduates doing research in the E-Quad or Lewis Thomas Lab is more than commonplace; we get to spend individual time with advisers with large grants and gain access to advanced equipment.
It is no wonder we have the highest alumni giving rate — the University loved us, and we love it back. We hold a whopping 60 percent, while Harvard and Yale come in second and third at 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively. If Princeton were an elderly parent, we would bring him or her to live with us at home; Yale and Harvard would be left playing bingo at the Ivy League retirement center.
But I think that our happy lifestyle is taken for granted. Sometimes I fear that the University is like a caring mother that pampers us and spoils us and causes us to develop into self-important beings that focus on the events and issues within our own little worlds. While we face certain challenges — like grade deflation and Bicker — our lifestyle generally takes it pretty well. It makes me wonder whether the impermeability of the Orange Bubble is not just a result of Princeton’s geographical isolation in the middle of New Jersey but also a result of our comfortable lifestyle.
Our culture is defined by entitlement; we do pay more than $180,000 to attend, and that allows us to verbalize what we want at our University. On the other hand, we stubbornly refuse to accept things that inconvenience us. Many times we take issue with University plans and make critical demands of our USG to serve us better. We are really defensive about changes to the length of Reading Period, we work on amending an already lenient pass/D/fail policy, and we get edgy about the possibility of a printing quota. When we don’t get what we want, Princetonians are less likely to accept it and more likely to just blame the University.
This spoiled nature affects our relationship with others outside our undergraduate world. A lot of us focus on our own issues at Princeton rather than on those outside it, creating the Bubble. We obstruct moving traffic as we cross Washington Road during a green light at all times of day. We marginalize our grad students, forgetting that they are students at a top university just like us. We like to secure our high-salaried jobs in New York — jobs that, while acceptable at Princeton, have more recently drawn the ire of the rest of the nation. This relationship with the outside world adds to an image of elitism, something we don’t want to be quintessentially Princeton to everyone else.
Is our comfortable lifestyle a result of pressing for change and gaining what we want? Through the USG we have successfully implemented many changes to our campus lives. But I am also inclined to think we want things our way because of our already comfortable lifestyle. The University already gives us so much, and perhaps, like spoiled children, we expect it to give in and give us more. But we can’t take for granted everything handed to us: After we graduate and take jobs, we’re all going to miss daily “necessities” like free secure Wifi, infinite toner and paper and clean, spotless toilets.
As we all leave this University with a diploma and (hopefully) a thorough understanding of an academic discipline, for some reason we tend to forget all the bad things and remember only the good times we’ve had as college students. We should also realize the University has provided for us quite well, and we should think about the people in our eateries, our dorms, our study spaces and our classrooms who have allowed this to happen. While we’re still living and studying here, I suggest that we reflect on the attitudes we have toward the way the University has handled our everyday lives. After all, our gratitude toward our University after we leave is something that is “quintessentially Princeton.”
Ben Chen is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Los Altos, Calif. He can be reached at bc@princeton.edu.
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