In 1910, University President Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, proposed that the new Graduate College be built near Prospect House. Dean Andrew West, Class of 1874, the founder of the Graduate School, refused to expose grad students to the rowdy undergraduates on the Street. Instead, West chose to build a shining “tower on the hill” across the golf course, condemning generations of grad students to a half-mile trek to campus and driving an even larger chasm between undergrads and grad students.
Upon my arrival, I was unaware of the status quo between undergrads and grads until I read “The Graduate Student’s Guide to the Universe,” a document that the Graduate College House Committee publishes for new grad students. I found it curious that an entire chapter was devoted to the subject of “The Undergraduates,” as if undergrads were some rarely encountered species of exotica that requires exposition.
It soon became clear that it was I, the grad student, who was the exotica on campus. I had become a mythical creature. Upperclassmen whisper about me to scare wide-eyed freshmen. I am sketchy by the very nature of my being, unloved by the University and exiled to the deepest dungeons in Firestone or the farthest reaches of the E-Quad. Fortunately, outside of the odd preceptor or the crooked fingers that grade problem sets, grad students are rarely encountered —except that we are all around you.
According to the Office of the Registrar, in 2009-10 there are 2,479 graduate students enrolled at Princeton, compared with 5,113 undergrads. So if grad students comprise nearly one-third of the overall student population, why don’t undergrads seem to meet us outside of the classroom? The simple answer is that the fully immersive undergrad experience at Princeton has little space for grad students. Apart from a small number of resident graduate students living in the residential colleges, the historical segregation of grad students from the main campus has persisted to this day. All the graduate housing seems to be beyond a 10-minute buffer zone from campus, thus making “Where do grad students live?” one of the biggest mysteries of the Princeton undergrad experience.
This physical segregation of grad students is mirrored by the social ostracism we face. From the very first campus visit during which we hear undergraduates refer to grad students as “sketchy,” the mild opprobrium toward grad students from our younger colleagues is ever-present.
I have often wondered about this attitude. My guess is that it has its origins in the early 20th century: The Princeton undergraduate from that era is quite possibly the archetype for the stereotypes of elitism, snobbishness and exclusivity that dog Princeton to this day. Independents from those days were socially excluded and even actively humiliated by eating club members. One can only imagine the mockery and bullying faced by any early graduate students who dared to venture outside the Graduate College. Being called “sketchy” was probably the least of their worries.
Our present-day “sketchiness” is to some extent an image problem. Grad students are usually admitted purely on the basis of academic and research potential, so some of us may lack the polish expected of most Princeton undergrads. A few might even be positively eccentric, though those students are sometimes the most brilliant. Yes, there are stories about some seriously creepy grad students, but I wager that worse can be found on the Street during a typical Thursday night. It’s just easier to talk about transgressions committed by the other.
From some of the infamous comments on the ‘Prince’ website, I think there is another, subtler reason we are ostracized. Princeton prides itself on its emphasis on undergraduate education, often unofficially phrased into something along the lines of “Princeton undergrads are given more attention from faculty than peer institutions, where grad students get all the attention.” The unspoken corollary: Princeton grad students are second-class citizens, and we have to remain second-class citizens in order for undergrads to get the education promised by the recruitment blurb.
Yet, Princeton would hardly function well as a research institution if it regards as pariahs the demographic from which it claims 13 Nobel Prizes. The idea that grad students have to be an underclass in order for undergrads to thrive in some sort of zero-sum game is utterly laughable. Princetonians who have spent time studying abroad in Oxford or Cambridge will attest that undergrads and grad students there live together within the colleges, resulting in a truly rich scholarly environment.
Graduate students potentially have much more to contribute to campus life in Princeton, but this would be difficult to achieve so long as we remain “sketchy”. A dialogue needs to take place within the campus community to recognize that this is an unfair and destructive stereotype that shouldn’t exist anymore.
Khee-Gan Lee is an astrophysics graduate student. He can be reached at lee@astro.princeton.edu.
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