12 faculty join emeritus status

At the end of the 2010-11 school year, 12 faculty members from a range of departments were transferred to emeritus status by the University’s Board of Trustees.

These faculty members included: James Boon, professor of anthropology; Garry Brown, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering; Peter Brown, professor of history; Ronald Davidson GS ’66, professor of astrophysical sciences; James Gunn, professor of astronomy and astrophysical sciences; Lincoln Hollister, professor of geosciences; Henry Horn, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; Simon Kochen GS ’59, professor of mathematics; Burton Malkiel GS ’64, professor of economics; Ricardo Piglia, professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures; Kenneth Steiglitz, professor of computer science; and Lynn White III, Wilson School professor.

Despite their changes in title, the professors continue to travel, research and shape programs within their respective departments.

“Retirement is not death!” White said in response to a question about his feelings regarding the transfer to emeritus status. “Fortunately, Princeton now can dub emeritus professors ‘senior research scholars’ if they are in fact continuing with their research, as I am doing.”

A graduate of Williams College who earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, White specializes in Asian development with an emphasis on China. He joined the Wilson School, Department of Politics and Program of East Asian Studies in 1973 and has also served as an associated faculty member of the Department of East Asian Studies.

He is currently at the University of Hong Kong, where he is engaged in research at the Centre of Asian Studies and preparing to give a paper at a conference in Hangzhou in October. White, who said he believes that “any researcher’s favorite projects should be the current ones,” is investigating the future of the Chinese constitution and the factors that led to the stagnation of Philippine politics, as well as possible solutions.

In discussing his advice for current students, White stressed the importance of studying abroad.

“The undergraduate college that I had attended at that time offered no Chinese language courses,” he wrote. “I had been studying China as a graduate student, and then teaching about the country as an assistant professor for more than a dozen years, before my U.S. passport could be used for travel in mainland China ... Young people today do not realize how lucky they are. When they want to study East Asia, they can go there readily. Well, in retirement, I am taking advantage of the present situation.”

“My initial thought on leaving [the professor status] was that it was time,” Hollister said. “Makes some room for the next generation of geologists.”

Since 1968, Hollister has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in subjects, such as “crystal chemistry, metamorphic petrology, field geology, tectonics and evolution of the continental crust” as member of the Princeton geosciences department, according to a University press release.

His favorite experience at the University, he said in an email, was the retirement celebration the geosciences department sponsored for him on April 30. “They published a brochure that pretty much covers my 43 years at Princeton ... About 100 former students, grad and undergrad, came and it was a love-in.”

When interviewed in July, Hollister was in Vancouver, working on a geologic guide he hopes to write for high schools and had just returned from a geology excursion across British Columbia. For the next few years, he said, he will continue his quest to find a natural occurrence of a mineral containing forbidden five-fold symmetry and write about how he believes environmental non-government organizations abuse the scientific method in order to sustain their donations.

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EEB professor Henry Horn wrote in an email that, with the number of activities still on his plate, “ ‘retirement’ has been less retiring than you might think.”

Horn is well-known for his work on the geometric structure and function of trees; the social behavior of butterflies, birds, and deer; the wind dispersal of seeds; and the ecology and distribution of local wildflowers, a project researched with his wife, Elizabeth.

As an emeritus professor, Horn said, he hopes to continue work in the EEB department while exploring secondary interests. “In the near future, I hope ... to continue to teach an introductory graduate seminar, a sort of ‘journal club’ combined with discussions of how to be a successful graduate student in EEB, including ‘end game,’” he said. “I also hope to be available as a sort of ad hoc ‘ombudsguru’ for EEB undergraduates, helping them to find formal advisors and offering an initial/additional sounding board for new ideas. I also hope to have a potential secondary career in visual art, specifically computer-part collage, parodies of artistic icons, wooden sculpture and photography ... and especially the possibility of using such art in elementary education.”

Horn came to the University in 1966 at the then-singular Department of Biology. He has since taken on leading roles both within and outside his department, including the Program in Teacher Preparation, the Alumni Council, the Program in Environmental Studies and the University Chapel Choir.

All his activities, he said, are united by “the opportunity to watch people grow intellectually in matters both practical and conceptual, and to see the way in which traditional disciplines enlighten one another.”

Throughout his teaching career, Kochen has also explored innovative teaching methods within his department. Kochen said that one of his favorite experiences at Princeton has been watching the mathematics department grow and expand its appeal to non-majors.

“We were a large department [when I arrived],” he said, “but we only had between 25 and 30 majors, and I wanted to increase that number. Within the past three years, we have essentially tripled that number to 80 and have added a new track in the department called applied mathematics.”

Kochen attributed the newfound success to service teaching targeting students coming outside of the department and including weekly review sessions and reviews before the midterms and finals. “On a scale of one to five, the quality of our lectures has gone up by a full point,” he noted.

Despite his transfer to emeritus status, Kochen will keep his office at the University and continue to travel, with the only difference being a reduction in teaching. “The University makes it very easy to move onto retirement. Because my research is theoretical,” he said, “I can continue my work while elsewhere those in experimental fields might have their research restricted.”

Kochen earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1959 and became a professor in 1967. He is known for making contributions in the fields of mathematical logic, model theory, number theory and quantum mechanics, and for devising the “Free Will Theorem,” which asserts that if humans have free will, then elementary particles like electrons and atoms possess free will as well.

Davidson will be continuing his research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he has worked since 1991. He remains active as the Head of PPPL’s Beam Dynamics and Nonneutral Plasma Division and as Deputy Director of the Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy Ion Fusion Science, a collaborative effort among PPPL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He also continues to serve as editor of the journal Physics of Plasmas.

“I have enjoyed every aspect of my experience at Princeton, both as graduate student (1963-66) and faculty member (1991-2011), and greatly look forward to my continued interaction with students and colleagues,” Davidson said in an email.

Malkiel will also “continue to be active in research, writing and lecturing.”

“My advice to students is to keep a wide-open mind to any and all opportunities and possibilities,” Malkiel said in an email. “If anyone had told me when I was in college that I would spend most of my life as an academic, I would have said that [was] the least likely course my life would have taken.”

Malkiel joined the University faculty in 1964, the same year he earned his Ph.D. His book, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” revolutionized the field of investment management and has sold over 1.5 million copies since its publication in 1973. He has served on the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisors and as the dean of the Yale University School of Management. He plans to keep his Princeton office but spend some time in the fall lecturing in Australia. He is also married to former Dean of the College and current history professor Nancy Malkiel.

Boon, Garry Brown, Peter Brown, Gunn, Piglia and Steiglitz did not respond to request for comment at the time this article was written.