Granted, one might interject that Princeton’s fellowship winners can’t fairly comment on the advising system; by definition, theirs was a positive experience. But I believe I write with a unique perspective. I went through the advising experience twice: once as a postgraduate in the fall of 2009, eventually winning the Rhodes, but also as a senior, not winning any of the major fellowships for study in the U.K.
My conversations with Ordiway about fellowships started in earnest in January of my junior year: I was applying for fellowships to fund my senior year of college and to fund a year of research in Germany after graduation. Neither of those applications was successful, but in the course of the process I had met someone who would seriously discuss my intellectual aspirations with me. This was, at the time, unusual: My interests (German and Russian history) were hardly chock with relevance to the present day. I had never won a Shapiro Prize. I wasn’t an early inductee to Phi Beta Kappa. I even had B-pluses on my transcript! Having Ordiway criticize an argument I had made in an essay for the importance of studying history — but learning to fire back — ignited my sense of intellectual mission. I began to believe that I had as much of a right to recognition as students who had, it sometimes seemed, merely continued their boarding school education at Princeton while I had taken intellectual risks, sometimes at the expense of grades.
I went on, with this new sense of confidence, to apply in my senior year for the Rhodes, Marshall and other scholarships to study in Britain; I was not invited to interviews except for one. While Ordiway naturally focused his attention at the time on the students with interviews, I stopped by his office after graduation to discuss reapplying: He was encouraging, while still helpfully critical of my reasons for wanting to reapply. Throughout the summer, Ordiway (and Professor Joshua Katz) took many hours, often on summer weekend nights — I was at a Russian language camp and could only sneak away with my cell phone at those times — to discuss drafts of my revised essay. As I moved from Princeton to Vermont to California to Germany, Ordiway took the lead to remain in touch with me to discuss my Rhodes essay and CV. I remain impressed that he staked his time and energy on me after I had already been unsuccessful at applying the first time. My most vivid memory of the whole experience is that of returning, after having won the Rhodes, to West College and exchanging high-fives after so many hours spent together: that and, in the light of the timing of this firing, the bottle of champagne given to Ordiway by the dean of the college for what was then regarded as a good year.
Why ought Princeton care about winning fellowships? Practically speaking, winning fellowships improves the way people see Princeton. Less cynically, however, Princeton should encourage students to dream big: not of winning the Rhodes, but of professional, personal or scholarly journeys that debt-free education abroad can facilitate. In my “class” of Princeton Rhodes winners I see men who want to solve climate change, who seek to reconcile their sense of duty to their country as a soldier with their ethical commitments as a Christian. These are different journeys, but ones that they could aspire to because Princeton gave us a strong education and the advising to continue that education. That, I think, is a worthy use of Princeton’s resources.
Where to go from here? I’d offer three suggestions for how the process might be improved for future applicants — only one of which needs to happen in students’ senior year. For one, have more than one fellowship adviser: At times in the fall of my senior year, I was told that I was literally “not allowed” to consult with Ordiway because I had “exceeded” an arbitrary number of visits — understandable for a two-person operation, but still potentially discouraging to applicants.
Second, Princeton ought be more creative about how to encourage sophomores and juniors and remind them not to doubt their own intellectual vision. I remained confident about my chances for fellowships despite never having won a major University prize (only a letter from the master of Wilson College), but some students might feel excluded from the academic aristocracy without encouragement from University organs — especially if experimenting with new disciplines or hard foreign languages kept them from the 3.9+ GPA necessary for a Shapiro.
Third, administrators and professors should remember that winning fellowships is partly the result of bringing together smart students and established scholars, something that Princeton sometimes seems to try to hinder. True, some students will find ways to find their way into professors’ precepts, arrange independent studies and discover the smaller departments. But writing seminars and, in some departments, junior seminars, are simply not taught by professors, while the lecture course sequences for certain intellectual paths (medicine, the physical sciences) keep students in the lecture seat and, often, away from the professor. In some cases, administrators and department chairs will have to seriously rethink the way classes are taught at Princeton.
The test of leadership here is whether the dean of the college can propose a brave and creative plan after making the unpopular and, in my view, unjustified decision to let Ordiway go.
Tim Nunan ’08 is a Rhodes Scholar studying for an M.Phil. in social and economic history at Oxford. He can be reached at timothy.nunan@gmail.com.
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