Here is the Wimsey reply: The late professor is sadly no longer with us and his “privacy” has already been breached in the most public way. He was suddenly dismissed from his teaching position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
We posited that “it” begins at the top, with the administration’s focus on college rankings and the “value of a Princeton degree” and trickles down to student culture. Maybe it’s the nature of the students who the admission office accepts or the nature of the students who choose to enroll. We could not agree on the origin nor could we agree exactly on what “it” is.
While sources for funding are plenty, information about them is decentralized and non-standardized. Often, details and requirements for various grants, awards and opportunities are only spread by word of mouth. Other times they are unclear, not completely transparent or vary greatly across departments.
It has been a great honor to experiment with the art of critique on these pages. I will miss it dearly.
There is absolutely no need for class participation points, and forcing unwilling students to attend precept hurts everyone.
The University ought to have taken a more straightforward and honest approach in reporting Calvo’s death.
The Committee makes distinctions among acts of plagiarism based on the seriousness of the violation and on what a student ought reasonably to have understood.
The use of late days is not particularly intuitive, so it is greatly overshadowed on campus by the individual extension or standard penalty-for-lateness formula, but it does the best job of balancing flexibility and accountability with minimal additional costs.
Wrapping up nights out at midnight — rather than 4 a.m.— would substantially raise the productivity level of students the next morning.
Any policy inquiry must include all parties affected in order to maintain accuracy. Just as academia must listen to those called terrorists to evaluate the government’s policies, so too must we allow those deemed guiltiest by our courts to speak when evaluating our justice system. Thus, the claim that inviting a speaker to campus is an act of uncritical endorsement rings hollow.
In the past few years, food has additionally become an in vogue issue — think Michael Pollan, “Fast Food Nation” or the even more recent “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” a prime-time television show. The food movement has grown beyond concerns of organic versus nonorganic foods; we now have slow food, local food, artisanal food, free range, grass fed — the tags go on and on.
But for all of Princeton’s contributions to education reform, I’d like to see the University do more to meet public education’s most fundamental challenge: finding 1.6 million great teachers in the next decade as the baby boom bubble of teachers retires.
Given that the Committee on Discipline hears only one or two cases of sexual assault every year, however, it seems that changing the standard of review would not be wholly effective in solving the problem. Attempts to improve the disciplinary process must also focus on reforming campus culture so that more victims of sexual assault feel comfortable reporting it to appropriate campus authorities.
If we choose to save and invest now, the debt-related budget cuts to come will not hit us so hard and we will be better able to cope with the taming of American entitlement infrastructure.
