For Trustee Danielle Allen ’93, time at U. led to ‘immeasurable intellectual growth’

“I had never seen so much water coming out of the sky, never seen a place so green,” Allen said in an email.

The experience of arriving on campus was magical, Allen noted, but as a native of drought-ravaged Southern California and a diverse public high school, equally unsettling. It was not just the weather that startled her, but the social climate as well.

“I had never been somewhere where people didn’t greet strangers as they passed them on paths and walkways. I had no umbrella and no duck-boots ... and in those first few days ruined every pair of shoes I had. Arrival, in short, was a shock,” she explained.

Allen, now a University trustee and a political theory professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, has come a long way since her first few days, though she said she still keeps them in mind. On the Board of Trustees, Allen said she is both informed by her recollection of when Princeton was “socially disabling” for an African-American woman and her adamant belief in the importance of higher education.

In her years at Princeton, Allen was a model student with particular interest in Athenian ideas of punishment. After graduating in 1993, she pursued this passion under the prestigious Marshall Scholarship at the University of Cambridge. To date, Allen has written three books, including, “The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens” and “Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. the Board of Education.”

Politics professor Melissa Lane knew Allen in the classics graduate program at Cambridge. Since meeting nearly 20 years ago, the two have remained close friends.

“[Allen] is very highly regarded in her field for her imaginative ability to make different texts and voices speak to each other and to our own political predicament,” Lane explained.

Allen’s educational pedigree includes two doctorate degrees — one in classics from Cambridge and a second in government from Harvard. She was also awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 while a professor at the University of Chicago. A faculty member there for 10 years, Allen eventually rose to the position of dean of the Division of Humanities before returning to Princeton to join the Institute for Advanced Study, where she studies ancient Greece.

With past experience as both a faculty member and administrator at elite institutions, Allen brings rare insights to the table, she explained.

“I believe I understand the academic enterprise — both teaching and research — in a deep way and the kind of stewardship necessary to protect and maintain it over time,” Allen said of her contributions to the Board of Trustees.

As a member of the Board’s Committee on Academic Affairs, Allen has most direct authority as a Trustee over academic life on campus. It was this aspect of Princeton, she said, that was most crucial to her four years as an undergraduate.

“I did get used to the place and in many ways came to love it,” Allen noted. “The classes and faculty were transporting. Writing a senior thesis was one of the best experiences I have ever had and spurred immeasurable intellectual growth.”

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The classics department, where Allen studied under professor Josiah Ober, was her “heaven,” she said. African American studies professor Cornel West GS ’80 was another mentor who she said “got [her] through” hard times.

Allen said she cherishes her current role at IAS.

“At the Institute,” she explained, “we are given the greatest privilege the world has to offer: the right and responsibility of conducting research on questions that we have identified as important without a view to immediate outcomes.”

Presently, Allen’s particular area of study “turns primarily around political equality and the questions of how to empower an efficacious citizenry,” she said. Allen added that her research questions include “how to cultivate specifically democratic forms of social capital and how to approach the hard questions of political economy that often seem to bring liberty and equality into conflict with one another.”

This talent manifests in her research and written work, Lane noted. But outside of an academic context, too, Lane noted Allen’s personal strengths.

“She is a wonderful person to talk to: intellectually engaged, generous and passionate about ideas and their civic importance,” she said. “Having such an engaged scholar, not to mention an alumna, on the Board of Trustees is invaluable for Princeton.”