Princeton Weekly Bulletin September 13, 1998
T H E P R E S I D E N T'S P A G E
Strengthening Princeton for years to come
By Harold Shapiro
If 1996-97 was a year to celebrate Princeton's first 250 years, 1997-98 was a year to move ahead with important commitments that will strengthen Princeton for the years to come. We took steps this past year that will affect the composition of our student body, the quality of our academic programs, significant aspects of our campus landscape and many other University activities in areas ranging from athletics to the arts.
Undergraduate financial aid
In January the trustees adopted the largest single enhancement of our undergraduate financial aid program in many years. The principal elements of the program are the conversion of loans to grants for students from families with incomes below or near the national average and a reduction in required parental contributions for low and middle-income families. In addition, the trustees approved the lowest increase in tuition and fees in 30 years, adopted policies intended to ensure that recently enacted federal education benefits will flow directly to the families of our students, and increased our financial aid budget for students from abroad. Detailed information about these new policies was sent to all alumni and to all American secondary schools this past spring.
Our intent was to be sure that Princeton remains accessible to talented students from all socio-economic circumstances and that, especially for students from lower income families, the cost to them and their families of attending Princeton should be no greater and in some cases may be less than attending their state university.
While these changes in our policies were announced too late in the year to affect the composition of our applicant pool for the Class of 2002, we hoped they would help us increase our yield among admitted students with financial need. In fact, it looks like 43 percent of the Class of 2002 will be receiving financial aid, as compared to only 38 percent in the Class of 2001. This returns us to our average level of recent years. We hope that when our new policies take full effect this coming year they will add a number of truly outstanding students to our applicant pool who until recently would have assumed that Princeton was beyond their financial capabilities. (Overall our yield increased this year from 65.6 percent of all admitted students to 69 percent.)
Wythes Committee
A special trustee committee chaired by Paul Wythes '55 has been considering a series of long-term questions regarding Princeton in the 21st century. It has been looking at such questions as the future size and composition of our undergraduate student body and our faculty, as part of an even broader review of Princeton's financial capacities and aspirations for the coming years.
While strongly committed to preserving the important characteristics associated with Princeton's relatively small size, the committee has been looking carefully at the explosion of society's knowledge base, changes in the student-faculty ratio as the size of the faculty has increased modestly but steadily over recent years, and the number of extraordinary applicants we have to disappoint each year who could contribute in important ways to the quality of the educational and residential experience we offer and then to our society. While the committee has not yet completed its work, it may conclude, for example, that we ought to phase in some modest increase in the number of undergraduates, as well as some continuing increase in the size of our faculty.
Graduate financial aid
One of the important goals of our Anniversary Campaign for Princeton is a significant increase in funds to support first-year graduate students in the sciences and engineering (before they become associated with the research projects that will help support their later years of study) and to support summer study for students in the humanities and social sciences (when they are not being supported as assistants in instruction). Fortunately, the campaign has been encouragingly successful in raising funds for these purposes, and we hope that the celebration of the upcoming Centennial of the Graduate School (2000-01) will give even further impetus to these efforts, while also allowing us to increase support for other Graduate School programs.
The Anniversary Campaign
I am very pleased to report not only that our campaign has passed the $650 million mark toward our June 2000 goal of $750 million but that Annual Giving continues to set impressive new records. One of the first priorities for the trustees this fall will be to consider whether this goal should be increased to reflect additional needs and opportunities that have emerged since the campaign was launched in the fall of 1995.
Academic and teaching initiatives
The campaign has allowed us to introduce and strengthen a number of exciting academic and teaching initiatives. This spring I approved the third round of presidential teaching grants, which have encouraged and enabled faculty to revitalize their teaching programs in various ways, and I approved the appointment of our second two Distinguished Visiting Professorships in Teaching, Classics Professor Andrew Szegedy-Maszak of Wesleyan and Engineering Professor Zellman Warhaft of Cornell. We are moving ahead with two new masters programs, one in finance and one in engineering, and we are creating a new academic program in law and public affairs as a collaboration among the politics department, the Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values.
In looking ahead to the coming year, we are at advanced stages of planning for the possible adoption of three major new scholarly programs: a center for the study of genomics and cancer that would bring together faculty from molecular biology, physics and chemistry in what we believe would be a pioneering collaboration that builds on exceptional leadership in all three fields at Princeton; a center for the study of religion; and a Princeton society of fellows that would bring a number of outstanding postdoctoral students in the humanities to Princeton each year for three-year appointments under the auspices of the Council of the Humanities.
We took two important steps toward realizing another major academic objective this past year: the creation of a Center for Teaching and Learning to promote innovative teaching and effective learning throughout the University. We received a gift of $5 million from Harold McGraw Jr. '40 that will endow the center, which will be located in the new Frist Campus Center when it is completed, probably in the summer of 2000. In the meantime, I have asked Associate Provost Georgia Nugent '73 to begin to develop the program of the Center for Teaching and Learning even before it is able to occupy its physical space. For example, we have begun to expand our programs of teacher training for our graduate students, and we have organized an effort to help faculty in the humanities develop appropriate uses of new technologies in their teaching programs.
Campus landscape
We dedicated two important new libraries this past year: the Cotsen Children's Library in Firestone, named for Lloyd Cotsen '50, and the Scheide Music Library in Woolworth, named for William Scheide '36. During Reunions we dedicated a new state-of- the-art building for the teaching of physics, James S. McDonnell '21 Hall, and earlier in the spring we dedicated our new state-of-the-art William M. Weaver Jr. '34 Track and Field Stadium, located between the new football stadium and Jadwin Gym. At the Weaver dedication, captains of Princeton track teams from the '30s through the '90s ran a special commemorative relay once around the new track, with Mr. Weaver himself running the "anchor leg" over the last few yards.
The stunning new Princeton stadium opens this fall with a football game against Cornell on September 19. We also are planning to begin housing undergraduates in the new Vincent and Celia Scully dormitory, named in honor of the parents of its donor, John Scully '66. In addition to providing very attractive housing for undergraduates and allowing us to reduce crowding and to take about 150 rooms in other dorms out of commission each year for extensive renovation and modernization, Scully Dorm will also help to define a significantly improved southern entrance to the main campus along the northern perimeter of Poe and Pardee fields. (In anticipation of Scully's completion, we began the first of our major dormitory renovation projects this summer in Patton Hall.)
We have begun construction on the Frist Campus Center and on an expansion of Caldwell Field House, and we are well along in designing the Friend Center for Engineering Education across from the Engineering Quadrangle on William Street (named at the request of the building's principal donor, Dennis Keller '63, for Peter Friend '63, his boyhood friend and college roommate, who died one month before his 21st birthday); a new social sciences building behind Corwin Hall and Dial Lodge that will serve the Woodrow Wilson School, the Office of Population Research and the sociology department; an expansion and renovation of our boathouse and crew facilities; and a number of other important projects. This spring we entered into an agreement with McCarter Theatre to seek funds for an addition to McCarter that would provide a 350-seat theater and other facilities both to enhance McCarter's activities and to serve as the principal performance venue for our Program in Theatre and Dance. At their June meeting the trustees named Hugh Hardy '54 as the architect for this project.
Athletics
While Princeton has enjoyed an enormous amount of athletic success in recent years, this past year was truly in a class by itself. Our men's lacrosse team won its third consecutive national title and its fifth in the last seven years. Our men's heavyweight and light-weight crews and our women's squash team also won national titles.
Our men's basketball team went to the second round of the NCAA championship tournament after achieving the highest national ranking of a Princeton basketball team in 30 years. Our men's ice hockey team won the ECAC tournament and went to the NCAA tournament for the first time ever. Our men's volleyball team made it to the final four. And both the men's and women's track and field teams won the heptagonal championships indoors and outdoors.
Overall, seven men's teams and five women's teams won Ivy titles, and eight men's teams and eight women's teams competed in NCAA championships.
Defining moments
Each year there are a number of special moments that help define for me just what is so exceptional about Princeton. These moments can come in the classroom or during office hours. They can come at a student performance or an athletic event. They can come listening to the award recipients on Alumni Day, participating in the Service of Remembrance, or watching a member of the Class of 1923 proudly waving the cane given by his class to be carried by the oldest alumnus in the P-Rade.
One especially memorable moment for me this spring occurred on the afternoon of April 26 in Alexander Hall. The occasion was a poetry reading by Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, in connection with the presentation to Princeton of the Leonard L. Milberg '53 Collection of Irish Poetry, which comprises more than 1,100 printed works by 50 poets from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Not only was Alexander Hall filled to overflowing, but so were McCosh 10 and McCosh 50, where the reading was being simulcast.
And among those in the audience were two other Nobel Laureates in literature: Toni Morrison, a distinguished member of our faculty, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was on campus to participate in the Atelier program that Professor Morrison directs. On this Sunday afternoon literally hundreds of students, faculty, staff, alumni, townspeople and others had come together to be mesmerized by the beauty and power of language in the hands of a poet of extraordinary gifts.
This opportunity was available to them because of the efforts of many thousands of others before them who have created here a University that strives for the highest possible levels of achievement in scholarship and teaching, in the arts and sciences, in the life of the mind and in service to others.
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