Greetings on the Occasion of
Princeton's 250th Birthday
Richard C. Levin,
President,Yale UniversityPrinceton's 250th Anniversary Convocation
October 25, 1996The evidence is sketchy, but there is reason to believe that the event we celebrate today had its origins nearly eight hundred and thirty years ago. In 1167, according to the account of John of Salisbury, foreign scholars were expelled from France, sending back to their homeland the Englishmen who studied at the University of Paris. At the same time, to strengthen his hand against the influence of Thomas a Becket, Henry II prohibited English clerics from visiting the Continent without permission of the Crown. In the wake of these two developments -- the one bringing English scholars home and the other restraining their travel abroad -- a growing concentration of scholars settled in and around Oxford, where a great university began to emerge in the waning years of the twelfth century.
Thus began the great academic procession. In the thirteenth century, the influence of Oxford's newly established collegiate system spread to Cambridge, and, nearly four centuries later, Cambridge-educated citizens of the Massachusetts colony founded the school that soon became Harvard, importing from their alma mater a Trinity College drop-out to serve as its first head. Sixty-five years later, it was a graduate of Harvard, James Pierpont, who secured a charter for the new Collegiate School of Connecticut, which soon thereafter took the surname of its benefactor, Elihu Yale. After another forty-five years, as President Rudenstine has explained, six blues and a fellow traveler founded the great university whose birthday we mark today. Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and beyond, the procession continued as graduates of our three colonial institutions went on to found many if not most of the leading colleges and universities throughout North America.
President Rudenstine has reminded us of the fate of Princeton's first presidents. I would add to his account one notable lesson about the shortcomings of university governance that we all failed to learn from that early experience. It is true that Jonathan Edwards came to Princeton in poor health. For this very reason, when he arrived, the wise men of the College of New Jersey convened a group to determine whether Reverend Edwards should be inoculated against small pox. For days the group debated the question, dangling Reverend Edwards over the fire like the spider of his best-known sermon. At last, after much scholarly deliberation the decision was taken to go forward with the inoculation. And so Jonathan Edwards, Yale's greatest theologian and preacher, died -- killed by a Princeton committee!
We have long forgiven this transgression, even as we have forgotten the lesson it teaches about the dangers of decision-making by committee. Indeed, we have come to admire Princeton's agreeable atmosphere, its magnificent walks, its proud athletic tradition, and, above an, its distinguished graduates and superb faculty. For any university, to have educated Madison and Wilson and to have welcomed and nurtured Einstein and von Neumann would be accomplishment enough for a quarter millennium.
It is my great honor, on behalf of Yale University, to bring greetings and congratulations to Princeton University on the occasion of your 250th anniversary. In expressing our hopes for Princeton's future, we at Yale are drawn to these words of one of your most distinguished graduates, Adlai Stevenson:
We [Americans] have placed our hopes on the understanding of our people. It is a magnificent gamble. And it is to the universities, to Princeton, that we look for so very much. How well it does its job determines how each generation resolves that magnificent gamble, for it involves the idea of freedom and the search for truth.
We can have no higher hope or aspiration for Princeton but that it will do it well.
For myself and for my institution I can only add that we have no higher hope or aspiration for ourselves than to join with Princeton in this noble calling, to join with Princeton in the nation's service.