The culture of conversation

In the end, though, it’s not the adviser or the system of advising that determines how many fellowships Princetonians win. To compete in this league, a college must attract a large number of students with strong intellectual gifts. It must then offer them a rich curriculum, a wide range of extracurricular possibilities and multiple opportunities for service. Princeton, like its rivals, does these things regularly and well.

Though necessary to produce fellowship winners, these practices are not sufficient. Interviews for competitive fellowships — like most interviews — take the form of conversations. They are conducted under high pressure. Often they feel less like a seminar than the point-counterpoint exchanges a lawyer might hold with a sharply inquisitive panel of judges. But they are conversations nonetheless, and they require a particular set of skills: wide interests, speed on the uptake, an ability to see a few moves ahead and find effective ways to parry shrewd criticism.

To win in this game — so I have seen over the years — candidates need not only the knowledge and skills that courses and officially sanctioned activities provide, but also a much wider sense of what matters in the world and a honed ability to carry on discussion. They must follow the news — news of many kinds, on many levels. They have to know what topics are being actively debated, both in the mainstream media and, more and more, on the World Wide Web. Above all, they should stake out positions of their own, which they can propose and defend without seeming to grope for basic facts or fetching arguments too far.

These are the skills traditionally nourished by time at universities: both in classes and through the experience of continual, lively and more or less informed debate in dining halls and living rooms, corridors and elevators. But Princeton, as I have known it for 35 years, doesn’t foster this kind of conversation as effectively as many of its sister institutions.

Most conversation in courses takes place within the framework of the precept — a vital part of the University’s organization, but also one in which, as both faculty and students regularly complain, conversation too often drags and trickles from week to week. Even gifted teachers may despair of kindling a debate when only a few of those present have done the reading and they either lack convictions for which to argue or are unwilling to put them forward. At times, it seems as if students fear that eager and articulate participation in class will incur social penalties. The phenomenon isn’t new. According to Geoffrey Wolff ’61 (or at least to his novel “The Final Club”), in the 1950s, “Raising a hand in a seminar one time too many (which in a Faerie Queen class might be once only)” could destroy a student’s chances at Bicker. How much has changed since then?

Classrooms don’t exactly resound with brilliant repartee before sessions start or after they end. Years ago, a brilliant Princeton High School student explained to me why she had chosen Harvard over Princeton, after taking a number of excellent courses at the University in her teens. Hardly anyone at Princeton, she remarked, said anything in elevators or stairways or corridors on the way to class, or while seated and waiting for instructors. She couldn’t imagine going to college under such a pall of silence.

Any number of Princeton institutions, of course, work against these norms: seminars, Whig-Clio and the ‘Prince,’ and the eating clubs and residential colleges, at their best. At the moment, though, I still have the firm, and melancholy, impression that the forces that impose silence are often more powerful than those that promote speech. And in a culture like this one — as opposed to one more tolerant of strongly held opinions and a certain amount of noisy argument — it is hard for anyone to develop some of the skills that Rhodes and Marshall fellowships reward.

If this is the culture Princeton students want to build, inhabit and pass on, that’s their decision. But it won’t produce as many fellowship winners as the different cultures of comparable institutions will. To expect that expert advising can make up for the absence of organic and continual debate on campus makes as much sense as it would to think that in athletics, coaching could make up for an absence of practice and training. Excellent and devoted though our advisers have been, and will be, they can’t compensate for three years of neglect in fostering the skills that selection committees look for. In the end, Princetonians will do better not because the University makes technical improvements in the application process, but because students themselves demand and create a different local culture.