In July and September of this year, the Princeton Alumni Weekly celebrated the long life and upcoming demolition of the Butler Apartments: the barrack-like tract of small frame houses, first opened on Christmas in 1946, that replaced Princeton’s polo field.
It's fall again. I can tell, even though I'm not in Princeton to see the leaves change color, but on leave in an undisclosed location 50 miles away.
Last Sunday, I arrived at Princeton Junction around 9:30 at night. On the New York platform I recognized someone: a recent alumnus standing with a distinguished-looking couple, whom I took to be his parents.
Universities need to serve their societies. But they do that best when they give their faculty and students the chance to become deeply, passionately excited about some new inquiry, and let them follow it, even if the immediate rewards aren’t clear.
In recent years, universities and research centers from Berlin to Beijing have caught up or passed us in many fields. The states have decided that higher education isn’t a public good, which they should support, but a private one, which students and their families should pay for.
The books are still for sale, listed in their thousands and their 10 thousands on the big book sites on the Internet, where shopping is perfectly efficient and as free from pleasure as it is free of odor. But they’re too expensive to collect casually, as a student could in the old days. Sadder still, the shops where late we used to roam and hunt have disappeared.
