Letters to the Editor: Feb. 10, 2011

Princeton is contributing to online education materials

Regarding “Recently published book evaluates advantages of public access to university materials” (Thursday, Feb. 2, 2011)

The article “Recently published book evaluates advantages of public access to university materials” of the Feb. 3 issue of The Daily Princetonian noted that the media website at Princeton contains “some archived lectures and streaming video of live events.” ‘Prince’ readers may have been left with the impression that Princeton is not making a significant contribution to the growing collection of online educational materials and thus may be interested to learn that this site, http://www.princeton.edu/webmedia, contains recordings of more than 700 public lectures dating back to 1998. Princeton was among the first universities to systematically record and make available its public lecture series. Among these recordings, you will find Martin Scorsese talking about film-making, Maurice Sendak discussing his drawings, Steven Pinker talking about the ingredients of language, Bernard Lewis talking about the Ottoman Empire, Robert Bork talking about the Constitution, Chuck Close talking about painting, Hillary Clinton, Ben Bernanke, Noam Chomsky, David Petraeus and many others.

In addition to public lectures, the site also contains recordings of entire conference series (under the “Special Events” link), including a 1999 conference on bioethics, a 2000 conference on human values, a 2006 conference on food, ethics and the environment, a 2007 conference on globalization and many more. There is very little that has happened in the world in the past 20 years that is not addressed in these lectures and conferences, and WebMedia may well be the richest and most diverse collection of public lectures anywhere. Public lectures are self-contained presentations, explicitly intended for general dissemination and viewing. Princeton’s WebMedia, as well as its iTunes U and YouTube sites, provide the public with a significant and valuable collection of material on a broad spectrum of topics, and we hope that these collections will be useful to anyone who seeks to better understand our world.

Serge J. Goldstein

Director of Academic Services

Office of Information Technology

What’s another 460 feet?

Regarding “University to abandon planned Arts and Transit Neighborhood” (Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011)

According to a study reported in the Road Engineering Journal, the average walking speed of pedestrians 65 years and older is 4.11 feet per second. At that speed, you would need a bit under two minutes to walk the 460 feet from where the Princeton Borough Dinky station stands to where Princeton University proposes to build a new station. If the location of the Dinky station is truly the deal breaker for the long debated Arts and Transit Neighborhood, then what’s the big deal? The members of the University community and the members of the surrounding communities would be immensely fortunate to have access to a superb new arts neighborhood in Princeton. “All art,” said Leo Tolstoy, “has this characteristic: It unites people.” Let us hope so. And let us all unite behind art.

Richard Trenner ’70