9. 250th Anniversary Campaign for Princeton Plaque
A monumental plaque honoring the contributors to the record-breaking 250th Anniversary Campaign for Princeton resides in the main stairwell of the Frist Campus Center, between the 100- and 200-levels. An extraordinary 78 percent of Princeton’s undergraduate alumni contributed to the campaign between 1995 and 2000, raising a total of $1.14 billion for the University’s programs of teaching, research and campus life. This plaque pays tribute to Princetonians’ distinctive tradition of giving back to the University by listing the names of all 58,358 donors in a manner that reflects the spirit and theme of the campaign, “With ONE Accord.” Intended to acknowledge not individual Princetonians, but rather what the alumni community achieved together, the plaque makes no distinction between donors of large and small gifts, instead listing the names in random order using ten-point font, such that they are part of the background and emerge only when viewers get very close. Measuring eleven feet wide and eight-and-a-half feet tall, the plaque consists of five painted-aluminum vertical panels shaped into large, curving orange ribbons—historically-significant for Princeton since an orange and black ribbon was the first object to display Princeton’s colors at a baseball game in 1869.