I can attribute a few successes to my column in The Daily Princetonian. My friend Stephen now knows the word “quotidian.” I inspired a 600-plus comment thread on Hacker News in which I was deemed to be “inarticulate” and a “snowflake.” One time, someone with over 2,000 followers on X retweeted me. Yet despite having published, by my estimates, over 32,000 words in this paper, any material achievements remain — at best — ambiguous.
Women’s sports teams continue to be bonfire-less. The government is still obsessed with legislating the nation’s clocks. And neither campus conservatives nor progressives seem to have paid my proposals for improving their arguments any heed. My erstwhile editor, 147th Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Prince’ Rohit Narayanan ’24, wrote last year that contributing to debate in the public sphere is an unquestioned good. I, too, believe that examining, questioning, and wrestling with ideas and institutions that shape our lives is a useful endeavor for leading a good one: it’s why I publish these columns. But the public sphere of Princeton is becoming blurred with the nation’s, and productive dialogue within is harmed as a result.
Princeton has plenty of undergraduates who share their ideas for broad consideration. Some, like me, write for campus publications; others participate in debates at the Whig-Cliosophic Society or run for positions in the Undergraduate Student Government. But the most successful ones, it seems, aim for attention from those far beyond Fitz-Randolph Gate. They do it in different ways, generally according to the political clout they’re trying to attract, but what much of the left and right share on this campus are prevailing interests in communities beyond the one in which they reside.
My more conservative peers have published columns in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the New York Times. They go outside the Orange Bubble to complain about the anti-intellectual and politically discriminatory practices of the University they chose to attend, probably hoping that someone with more power than they will intercede on their behalf, or maybe offer them a job (to the more powerful readers, please feel free to do either of those for me).
Princetonians to my left loudly and publicly proclaim their views on campus, and declare University-related aims, but seem to be much more interested in developing national and international movements. The initially-disseminated aims of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring were never going to be realized — there was no chance that the organizers would sit on University lawns or refrain from eating food until Princeton cut all interaction with Israel. But it did garner national attention, and, alongside fellow encampments, probably made Palestinian statehood a more mainstream issue for American voters and politicians.
It’s been my belief that going outside of Princeton to complain about Princeton’s functioning is always wrong. The benefit of a small community is precisely its opportunity to voice your beliefs in an open forum, one that is easy to access and easy to get responses. It is not hard to publish a letter in the ‘Prince,’ and the entire undergraduate community can be accessed via an email listserv. This, of course, guarantees no changes — I know well that the University is not accountable to its constituents. But that’s just the nature of the University: it’s a place where you subordinate yourself to receive an education.
It seems I’ve been playing by outdated rules, however, because this is not how most people interact with Princeton. A fellow history major and I recently concluded that we had done Princeton exactly as it was meant to have been done — studying the liberal arts, reading every page that was assigned, revolving our lives around our independent research — if we had attended school in the 1980’s. I sincerely believe in the power of institutions: I’ve worked within the collegiate system, and never beyond. This has given me the chance to gain a serious liberal education. But perhaps the activists — conservative and liberal — have understood the world better than I. Everyone seems to agree that achieving professional gains and status claims are the primary goal of a college education, and it seems that their successes in these fields are far greater than mine.
As both a self-described and derogatorily-deemed moderate, I am interested in resolving issues with the tools of thorough examination and engagement in the establishment. I hold strong opinions, certainly, and am constantly coming up with new ones, but I aim to approach problems without an allegiance to a particular conclusion. However, few seem to be interested in this approach: the moderate rarely gets featured in a national publication or dramatically photographed for an international one.
I cannot imagine that the phenomenon of students trying to attract attention is a modern one. But the level of success they manage to achieve in the contemporary world is perhaps unprecedented. The “ivory tower” is no longer an accurate description of the modern Ivy League school: connecting to and elevating oneself in the outside world is now its prevailing design.
An incredible amount of national attention is expended on college campuses, to the point that they are blamed for tearing our society apart. Universities are no longer treated as institutions of education, but microcosms of America’s political landscape — the fight over student opinion is presented as the fight over the nation. Never mind the fact that the college-educated vote is a poor indicator of political outcomes, or that a university is in no way a microcosm of the nation; a college campus is an attractive stand-in for a wider community because of its unreality. Students and external actors alike are able to fight a culture war, or pretend to engage in a real one, without worrying about consequences: a college community can always be left behind.
Obsessive interest in university life harms the learning that goes on within. When student opinions are given outsized attention, we start to believe that they have something meaningful to say and forget that they are, in fact, still very much in the process of learning how to think. Moreover, when partisanship and zeal are rewarded with fame, students are pushed towards extremism and away from careful and deep inquiry that can elucidate truth.
The story that national outlets pick up every few months — “as a student at Princeton, I think X or Y is a crisis” — is almost always a worthless one, and an example of grift from everyone involved. The author uses the name of the school to gain legitimacy despite having no authority within the community, trying to cash out on their elite status before they must turn in their credentials as someone in a widely coveted position.
Thankfully, few have paid my writing much heed, keeping me really quite humble and moderate (you’re welcome). It would probably be better for everyone if all college students were treated this way. University is meant to be a time to learn, grow, make mistakes, and stumble a little bit farther along the path to knowledge. If the college degree is meant to mean anything other than a certificate of qualification for an office job, college students should not be treated like public intellectuals worth very much salt.
I am grateful to feel as though I have gotten an extraordinary education at Princeton. Writing this column has been a valuable endeavor as well; while I have not become A Voice of My Generation (yet), I have had the chance to think critically about my community, develop coherent thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses, and share them with an audience which has always been kind enough to point out my rhetorical flaws and thus teach me how to become a sharper writer and thinker. Every student should give themselves a chance to develop their judgement in a similarly enriching way, and every graduate that has left those quadrangles behind should pay them as little attention as possible.
Abigail Rabieh is a senior in the history department from Cambridge, Mass. She serves as the Public Editor at the ‘Prince’ and can be reached via email at arabieh[at]princeton.edu or on X at @AbigailRabieh. This will be her last column for the paper, and she would like to thank her readers for their attention over the past four years.
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