Princeton's past

Our conversation took place in Small World Coffee, one of several places in town where you can buy a good cup of anything from espresso to chai latte. Back in the day, you’d have drunk your cup of what a colleague of mine calls “hot-and-brown”— all there was — in Harry’s Luncheonette. New arrivals from Berkeley were bewildered until they acclimated. The Princeton in which University dining halls serve locally sourced vegetables and reject ice creams with high fructose corn syrup was not even a mirage on the horizon. Most of us locals weren’t aware that we wanted more: the Viennese cafe that opened on Witherspoon Street didn’t last very long.

Neither of us felt much nostalgia for those particular old days — or for a student body that was mostly male and mostly Northeastern. The new financial aid system has great social and moral advantages over the old one. But we did find ourselves recalling some other lost institutions with real regret: the old array of options for undergraduate life, for example, that existed before the Committee on University Residential Life plan reordered things in 1982-83.

I don’t know the colleges as they are now as well as I wish I did. They clearly offer healthier food and many more activities than the University provided for underclassmen in the old days, and it’s good that they can accommodate some upperclassmen who like the collegiate lifestyle.

But the older institutions — Wilson College, Stevenson Hall (at 83 and 91 Prospect Avenue), and Princeton Inn College, ancestor of the modern Forbes — had their qualities. Each had a distinctive character, much as the 2 Dickinson St. and Brown Co-op still do. Wilson offered what looked from the outside like a lively mix of intellectual, artistic and athletic events, with unofficial courses on everything from car repair to Yiddish, and threw some memorable parties.

Stevenson seemed to be all about politics — from the American policies against which it generated some memorable protests to relations between Israel and Palestine, an argument about which was never hard to find. Princeton Inn resembled a shabby single room occupancy on the upper West Side of New York: it gave its inhabitants space and they went their own way. Mentally adding these quirky institutions to the clubs (which were, by then, mostly coed, and each of which had its own culture, as they still do), we found ourselves wondering if that older Princeton actually offered a richer range of social options — and more ways of finding refuge from the larger university — than the Princeton of 2011.

We also found ourselves missing some of the places that used to support Princeton’s sense of community, faulty as that often was. As we walked past the empty storefront where Lahiere’s recently closed and the new sign that advertises the Princeton Sports Bar and Grill, we found ourselves missing the old, quiet Lahiere’s with its atmosphere of immemorial calm that fostered long nights of talk, and the old, noisy Annex, where faculty and students could have a cheap beer together if they didn’t feel like sharing a pitcher in the old Chancellor Green pub.

You can find a better beer now, of course, and more elaborate food than you could then. The feeling of community nourished by regular encounters, though, is harder to replace — especially now that campus, faculty and student body have all grown so much. It’s a bigger place, and sometimes seems more impersonal.

And yet, for all the changes, the underlying continuity on essential issues struck both of us more strongly. Arriving at Princeton from Cornell, where I had taught for a year, I was struck by how closely students here worked with faculty and how well they knew them. Many institutions supported that closeness, from the preceptorial system (in those days precepts were still small enough to meet in offices and usually led by faculty members) and independent work to the fact that both students and faculty spent most of their time on campus.

Nowadays, precepts have become discussion sections by another name, and both faculty and students constantly roam the world. But seminars and other, newer forms of class have proliferated, and e-mail makes it possible to work surprisingly closely with students who are off campus. The community is bigger, but the interest and affection across generations remain — even if faculty send e-mails or messages rather than cornering one another in the department lounge to recommend a student to a potential adviser or to spread the news of a happy outcome.

In the old days, when I heard about all the things that any particular student was doing — academic, artistic, athletic, whatever — I suspected that he or she could not possibly have much time for sleep. Time-stamped e-mails confirm the same suspicion now — and the continuity of so much that is of value. My friend left contented with what he’d heard, I think, and rightly so.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.