“We’re a country that is forgetting about war,” University librarian Steve Knowlton said. “In WWII about 80 percent of princetonians wound up in the military, but nowadays it’s fewer than 1% of all people of military age ever enlist. The experience of war therefore is becoming more and more distant from all of us. Since war is such an important instrument of national policy, it removes us all from being cognizant of what war does to a community. So I’m very pleased to see the experience of Princetonians at war.”
Fota, a student-created app that allows users to rank and choose restaurants based on photos of food, will launch on Nov. 10. “When you open Fota, you see a stream of photos from restaurants around you,” said the app’s creator and CEO Kevin Zhang ’19. “All these photos are ranked by users who upvote and downvote them, kind of like Yik Yak or Reddit.”
For graduate women, 1 in 11 respondents said that they had experienced sexual harassment in the past year. According to a University infographic made from survey results, 23 percent of those harassed said that the incident involved an employee or staff member, faculty member, or postdoc.
The University will award its top alumni honors, the Woodrow Wilson Award and the James Madison Medal, to Charles Gibson ’65 and Daniel Mendelsohn GS ’94, respectively. The official award ceremony will take place on campus during Alumni Day on Feb. 24, where Gibson and Mendelsohn will also deliver speeches.
“At its heart and at its best, [domestic work] is about upholding the dignity and quality of life of others,” said Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in a lecture on Wednesday. “It’s the work that allows all other work to be done.”
On Tuesday, New Jersey residents hit the polls to vote in the state elections. Within one minute of polling sites’ 8 p.m. closing, Democrat Phil Murphy was projected as the winner in the race for governor. Murphy received 56 percent of the vote with 1,165,001 ballots cast in his favor.
Princeton, along with hundreds of other U.S. colleges and universities such as Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania, has investments in offshore accounts where its endowment can grow with little or no taxation.
Endowments are currently tax-exempt and are subject to few financial regulations. The government sees fit to make these endowments tax-exempt because of the ostensible public good they are providing, since they are considered part of a university's educational and charitable mission.
“Abortion is and always will be the opposite of empowerment,” said Kristan Hawkins during her pro-life lecture Monday night. Hawkins’ talk at the University was a part of an national tour, “Announcing the Lies Feminists Tell.”
The protesters, who included members of the Alliance of Jewish Progressives and the Princeton Committee on Palestine, stood outside the lecture hall, holding handmade signs with slogans including “I believe in Palestinian history — “why don’t you, MK?,” and “Israeli domination is not peace.” Many handed out slips of papers printed with a quote from a speech Hotovely made to Palestinian Members of Knesset earlier this year: “You are thieves of history. Your history books are empty, and you are trying to co-opt Jewish history and Islamicize it.” The protesters remained calm and largely silent, but there were four Public Safety officers in attendance, and protesters were frequently asked to move farther away from the entrance to the lecture hall to avoid blocking the hallway.
The Center for Jewish Life postponed of a talk with Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, on Sunday evening after drawing criticism from the Alliance of Jewish Progressives for “her racist, anti-Palestinian views.” On Monday, Chabad House announced that it would host the speaker instead.
Westminster Choir College, Rider University’s musical branch only a short walk from the University, has been facing a rough year. The layoffs, which will take effect on August 31, 2018, come after Rider University’s Board of Trustees decided to divest from the Choir College, as reported in March of this year. The buyer of Westminster was decided by the Board in August 2017, but the buyer’s identity is still unknown.
“The history of Princeton and slavery is the history of America writ small,” professor Martha Sandweiss said. “We are a place where liberty and slavery have been intertwined from the very start.”
“PCS is a part of the community whether we like it or not, and they’re here, they’re taxpayers, and a lot of the parents at PCS also have children at PPS. I think it’s unhealthy for us to create dichotomies between the two,” explained Fields. “They are both funded through taxpayer dollars. Because of that, I would like to see transparency on both sides, PPS and PCS, and I would like to see where we can have greater collaboration and cooperation.”
