Last Saturday’s Princeton Future session about the Dinky (see “Town residents debate Dinky replacement,” Monday, Sept. 27, 2010) brought out a single crucial message: We need to defend the Dinky as it is.
The fate of the Dinky will hang in the balance this Thursday. The Princeton Regional Planning Board will decide whether to recommend a bus rapid transit system that will begin by tearing out the Dinky tracks, subjecting riders to years of delay-prone conventional bus trips as the BRT plan creeps forward.
BRT schemes attempted in large high-density population centers have already proven costly failures, attracting only a miserable fraction of the ridership originally projected: Pittsburgh estimated 80,000 daily riders but got only 28,000; Los Angeles hoped for 74,000 but only 3,000 showed up.
A BRT system shoe-horned into Princeton’s narrow colonial-era streets and dispersed population will fail even more quickly, and the cost of its failure will be counted in lost convenience, increased traffic congestion and carbon dioxide emissions, and the reckless destruction of one of Princeton’s most beloved traditions.
Powerful interests have quietly aligned themselves against the Dinky. Flyers announcing this Thurday’s all-important Regional Planning Board meeting have mysteriously disappeared. This meeting, at 6 p.m. in Township Hall, may be our best — perhaps our only — effective chance to make our voices heard in defense of the Dinky.
Linda Dowling
Adding the Theory Kid to Nunan’s taxonomy
Regarding “Avoiding navel-gazing and idolization” (Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2010):
As I love Tim Nunan ’08 to death — and regret only that he has not published his guest column in the Nassau Weekly — I hesitate to dip my oar in, but I must say there’s another category missed altogether, or perhaps included in the penumbra of the self-identity cloud: that of the Theory Kid. Too much ink has been spilled on the subject of literary theory and its relation to the academic rigor of the humanities, but I admit it: I love the stuff, I read it first and foremost at Princeton, I still read and love it, and I’m fairly sure it made me insufferable at points throughout my academic career. Undergraduate course selection is something like playing tennis with the court lights off, and what I regret was not that I plowed through Barthes and Balzac but that I did so in the wrong order. Whether the world is better served by continental philosophers, devotees of emergent world literatures, or international political economists has yet to be determined, but I suppose that I, like Tim, will always privilege those who have at least skimmed a canon they go on to reject.
Chris Schlegel ’09
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Princeton’s administration of justice is Trumpian
Frances BroganThe disparity between the University’s approach to Giberson and its approach to pro-Palestinian protestors reflects a concerning trend of appeasing an increasingly emboldened right rather than resisting the threat it poses to academic freedom and the wellbeing of Princeton students.
Secular Opening Exercises? Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water
Frank StrasburgerThe secular makes no room for the spiritual. What Opening Exercises are meant to convey is the spirit of the institution so that it may be kept alive from generation to generation.
The secular makes no room for the spiritual. What Opening Exercises are meant to convey is the spirit of the institution so that it may be kept alive from generation to generation.
Return Pete Hegseth’s educational ideologies “to sender”
Lily Halbert-AlexanderHegseth believes students are being raised to “see America as an evil place” because his confining approach to education leaves no room for admiration and criticism, hope and horror, to coexist. He treats American history, patriotic ideals and the “pillars of Western civilization” as if they were made of glass, as if “cross-cultural encounters” and critical race theory, the “cornucopia of diversity” he criticizes, could shatter them.
Hegseth believes students are being raised to “see America as an evil place” because his confining approach to education leaves no room for admiration and criticism, hope and horror, to coexist. He treats American history, patriotic ideals and the “pillars of Western civilization” as if they were made of glass, as if “cross-cultural encounters” and critical race theory, the “cornucopia of diversity” he criticizes, could shatter them.
