Smash the gargoyle, Shirley

Come to holder hall, and grab a gargoyle. Maybe there are no gargoyles, but there is some mighty impressive stonework to fondle. And it’s really old. There’s so much history with which to cuddle. We feel safe under the ancient stone walls. Eat in the up-campus dining halls, and you can sit where medieval lords once sat. Or go to Whitman, and wallow in neo-Gothic brilliance. Those high parapets hold so many stories. The architecture reminds us that we are the next chapter in a long history of excellence.

Hang on.

Holder was built in 1910. The stonework is new, not old. The dining halls are wrapped in too-smooth wood paneling. It’s a dream, and it’s too perfect. The stone steps are not bowed from years of use. There is no rebellious graffiti, etched in the walls by frustrated students.

Down campus is worse. Whitman is five years old. When it rains, the paving stones are almost too flat for puddles to form. It looks like heaven — and that’s what makes it hell.

Hell could be too strong a word. And the architecture matters only so much. The buildings have withstood Sandy; they’ve kept us warm while snow falls outside; they give us a place in which to live and to learn. But it is a facade. Many of Princeton’s buildings are made to be something that they’re not. This reflects the wider culture of the University. That culture is misguided.

Of course, on the one hand, things are going very well. The Aspire campaign catapulted through its $1.75-billion target and received gifts from almost 65,000 people. There were over 26,000 applications for the Class of 2016. Financial aid has made college affordable for ever-increasing numbers of students. Princetonians are “achieving”: making news, making money and perhaps making the world a better place. Directly or not, all of this benefits current undergraduates. We’re not in a bad place. And we’re grateful for it.

Get back down to daily campus life, though, and things aren’t so obviously moving in the right direction. The University has an image of the perfect undergraduate experience and tries to force students into that mold. It attempts to place students in a constructed ideal and present an unblemished facade to the outside world. This social construct is suffocating. The administration equates the existence of happy, healthy students with the eradication of social division and the idea that everything has to be completely perfect, all of the time. With free food and T-shirts given to the “right” kind of organizations on campus, the University hopes to level social interaction and thus put smiles on faces every day.

This is all admirable, but it’s just too rosy, and too much social engineering can do more harm than good. The rush ban — as much as it deserves its own discussion — is perhaps the public cornerstone of this theme. Freshmen may not associate with Greek life. Fraternities and sororities don’t fit the image of harmony. Instead, at every turn undergrads are compelled to over-associate with a residential college that they know they will leave in two years or consider joining some banal, overfunded student group. The University is trying too hard. Life doesn’t always have to be perfect. Without bad times, there would be no good. Some upset is never the end of the world, and those are lessons that we can continually learn from.

The University picks us from a pool of supposedly talented, largely reliable, self-motivated people. We are repeatedly told we have the best minds and the best prospects. Yet, when we get to campus, we aren’t always trusted to look after ourselves. The administration must reverse its policy of social engineering. Princeton should do less in forming an experience for its undergraduates and be more willing to let the students make it for themselves. Leave me alone for a little: Let me be lonely sometimes, find my friends, find my fun, have happy times, grim times and make Princeton mine.

There are no cracks in Princeton’s pavements. There should be. The University would like us to always show cohesion and to fit together in a state of perpetual perfection. They are trying much too hard. You can stick stuff together — that’s easy. Toddlers can use superglue. Making something feel real, and letting it grow organically, is much more difficult. Given its relentless direction over the past decade, it will be hard for Princeton’s leadership to take a step back. But that’s exactly what the administration needs to do. Rather than acting as a violent Procrustes, the University needs to put more faith in its students. By attempting to solve a social problem, it has created a new one. It now needs to move out and let undergraduates look after themselves.

Princeton’s architecture will always be a little fake. We can live with that. Human relationships must not follow the same artificial path. Cuddle a gargoyle, Shirley. Then consider taking it down.

Philip Mooney is a sophomore from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He can be reached at pmooney@princeton.edu.