How do you build a future from a horrific past? This question is occupying the minds of five faculty members and two alumni of the School of Architecture currently developing plans for the World Trade Center site.

The architects are on three of the six teams selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to conceptualize a new beginning for a significant portion of Lower Manhattan, extending from the pit of Ground Zero. The teams have just six to eight weeks from the Oct. 11 start date to submit their proposals.

The Princeton-associated architects were included in this second round of design after the initial six proposals from the first group of planners met with criticism from the public. For this second round, the architects are being given more freedom to reimagine the 16-acre site and to incorporate a broader range of options, such as space for cultural programming, according to Dean of the School of Architecture Stan Allen. Each team will receive a stipend of $40,000 to create plans.

"The first proposals were almost exclusively about office space," said Allen, who is on one of the design teams. "They did not rethink the city innovatively."

Allen ventured four explanations for the high representation of Princeton faculty and alumni in the project. "The first is that the school is committed to innovation," he said. "The second is that we have a close connection to New York City, and many of our faculty practice there. Third, our school focuses on questions of urbanism. The project requires people to think about the future of the city and how it might change. A fourth reason is that our faculty and students understand architecture as above all a public art," he said. "The initiative speaks to what we are."

Among those involved in the project with associations to Princeton's School of Architecture are faculty members Peter Eisenman, Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos and Jesse Reiser; alumni Kevin Kennon and Greg Lynn; and Dean Stan Allen.

More background on these architectural teams is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

"Apathy raises issues about the well being of our democracy," said panelist Thomas Byrne Jr., a 1976 Princeton graduate and former chair of the New Jersey State Democratic Party. He insisted that New Jersey suffers from a "triumph of apathy" as exemplified by tendencies including: candidates' oversimplification of issues, voters' lack of campaign volunteerism and an emphasis on raising money for certain but not all campaigns. He said this apathy is reversing the vision of our nation's founding fathers.

Panelist Ingrid Reed, director of the New Jersey Project for the Eagleton Institute of Politics, countered that New Jersey does not act as though it wants its people to be involved in elections. She pointed to many election faults in the state that she said the rest of the nation should avoid including: the inability to register on election day; computerized voting systems similar to those of Florida; delays in absentee ballots (due to the change in the Democrats' Senate candidates); the inability of voters to cast ballots at their convenience; and the lack of campaign information on the Internet.

The irony of the apathy, experts noted, is that the Senate race to be decided today, between Republican Douglas Forrester and Democrat Frank Lautenberg (Robert Torricelli's replacement), will be close. Reed predicted the election will be a close call due to the increase of people voting in local elections in Bergen and Essex counties. "Every race will be very close, and every vote will count," she said.

"The Senate race in New Jersey is especially interesting because partisan control of the Senate is about as close as it can get," noted Douglas Arnold, panel moderator and the William Church Osborn Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School.

Panelist Iver Peterson, a political reporter for The New York Times, agreed that the balance of the Senate is at stake and that the Forrester-Lautenberg matchup will prove closer than projections. He added that there are many close Senate races across the nation, including 34 Senate seats at stake with only half of those seats considered safe. Races in Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, Arkansas and North Carolina are closer than the New Jersey race, he said.

Other factors also influence race outcomes, noted panelist Richard Zimmer, a former congressman in the 12th District in New Jersey. He expressed concern over the state having a "black hole" when it comes to media coverage and said this benefits incumbents. "The media pays no attention to New Jersey, so the only coverage candidates get is what they pay for. That is why incumbents always win."

Election polls in New Jersey are open today between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m.

The scientific world is full of instruments that measure, count, weigh and otherwise detect physical things with a level of precision that is hard for non-scientists to appreciate. Every once in while, however, a device comes along that is so much more sensitive than anything else it puts even the most advanced tools to shame and creates commercial opportunities that extend far beyond the laboratory.

That is the category into which an innovation by Princeton chemist Kevin Lehmann fits. He has invented a device that detects traces of gas with a combination of sensitivity, precision and speed that is far greater than any other technology. More than just a technical feat, his invention stands to become a valuable resource for a number of industries, including computer chip manufacturers, which require extraordinarily pristine conditions.

Princeton has patented Lehmann's invention and licensed it to an instrumentation company that started to market it earlier this year. This summer, the Research and Development Council of New Jersey awarded Princeton and Lehmann its Thomas Edison Patent Award and, in September, R&D Magazine listed it among the top 100 inventions of the year.

Lehmann's patent also has the distinction of being the first at Princeton to be developed into a marketed product, said John Ritter, director of technology licensing and intellectual property. While many Princeton discoveries have been patented and licensed to companies, all but Lehmann's are still under development.

"It's not an incremental improvement on any technology," said Roger Van Zee, an expert in gas measurements at the National Institute for Standards and Technology. "It really just outstrips everything else."

Lehmann's invention, called continuous wave cavity ring-down spectroscopy, can detect the presence of gasses down to the level of a couple hundred parts-per-trillion. That is like pointing a detector at the earth and being able to tell in a matter of milliseconds whether the world population has gone up or down by a single person.

For Lehmann, work on these devices has been a nice change of pace from the basic research that occupies the majority of his time, the investigation of the fundamental physics of chemical bonds. "I have been very excited about being able to solve real-world problems that have an impact on many people," he said.

The full story is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is creating a new institute that will focus on regional issues, and has named an administrator with experience at the University and in state government as its director.

Karen Jezierny, associate dean for administration in the Woodrow Wilson School, will direct the new Policy Research Institute for the Region (PRIOR), effective Jan. 1.

The institute will coordinate the design and execution of research, the creation of courses, the organization of student internships and other service opportunities, and the convening of public forums -- all centering on problems and issues of regional concern. For example, Jezierny is pursuing plans to work with government officials to find ways Princeton faculty might contribute scholarly expertise to the work of state departments and agencies.

"This institute will provide a way to match the research resources of the University with the policy needs of the state and the region," said Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the school. "It also will have the ability to focus attention on specific policy issues and to marshal resources to respond to those issues. And it will provide useful links to both students and faculty seeking to engage with the state and the region in their research and learning."

In her new position, Jezierny will be working closely with Slaughter, University President Shirley M. Tilghman and Vice President for Public Affairs Robert Durkee. Tilghman is a co-chair of Prosperity New Jersey, a statewide agency seeking to foster economic development, in part through linkages between business and academia.

The full story is available in a news release.

Ansley Johnson Coale, the William Church Osborne Professor of Public Affairs and Professor of Economics, emeritus, died Tuesday, Nov. 5. He was 85.

Coale was educated at Princeton University (B.A., M.A. and Ph.D.) and spent his entire academic career at its Office of Population Research, serving as director from 1959 to 1975. He was president of the Population Association of America in 1967-68 and president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population from 1977 to 1981.

He published more than 125 books and articles on a wide variety of demographic topics. He also trained and served as mentor to many students who later became leaders in the field.

His first major influential work was "Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries" (1958), co-written with Edgar Hoover. The results, which showed that slowing population growth could enhance economic development, had a major impact on public policy and set the research agenda in this field.

Perhaps Coale's major scientific contribution was to the understanding of the demographic transition, according to James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research . He was the intellectual architect of the European Fertility Project, which examined the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe. Initiated in 1963, the project eventually resulted in the publication of nine major books summarizing the change in childbearing over a century in the 700 provinces in Europe.

OPR honored Coale in June by naming its demographic research library "The Ansley J. Coale Population Research Collection."

The full story is available on the OPR Web site.

Both sides of this debate were presented by Professor Bernard Lewis, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Middle East, in a lecture Thursday sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Lewis, the Cleveland Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus, examines the history and future of the region in his recent book, "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response."

Lewis retired from teaching at Princeton in 1986, but has remained in great demand from the media and political leaders for perspective on the Muslim world, particularly after Sept. 11. "What Went Wrong" was written before the attacks on the United States.

Lewis explained to a capacity audience at Dodds Auditorium in Robertson Hall that the Middle East - for centuries the center of civilization - has struggled to define how it fell behind not only the West, but more recently modernized nations such as Korea and Singapore. He discussed the history of conflict between the Middle East and the West, which, he said, ultimately boils down to two questions for the Muslim world: "What did we do wrong?" and "Who did this to us?"

The first approach, Lewis said, is more constructive and naturally progresses toward a remedy for the Middle East, which is "more active and effective modernization in every field - economic, cultural, intellectual, as well as military."

Lewis noted Muslim society's treatment of women as its biggest failure in falling behind the West, citing Turkish writer Namik Kemal's contention that the Muslim world's male-dominated society is akin to a human body that is paralyzed on one side. This must change for the Middle East to advance toward greater freedom and democracy, he said.

The second approach of blaming the West and modernization for the plight of the Muslim world "leads into a twilight world of neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories and the like. And that has been much more popular in recent years in a large part of the region," Lewis said.

Osama bin Laden, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and other fundamentalists believe that the Muslim world must stop imitating "the infidels" and that the pursuit of modernization is preventing a return to their true, original faith, Lewis said.

"Both of these can make strong cases, and both of them command considerable support," he said. "The future of the Middle East will depend on which of them prevails."

Richard Jeffrey, professor of philosophy emeritus, died Nov. 9. He was 76.

An expert in probability and decision theory, Jeffrey joined the faculty at Princeton in 1974 and was granted emeritus status in 1999. He also taught logic and the philosophy of science. In recent years, he spent part of his time in Princeton and part as a visiting distinguished professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California-Irvine.

Jeffrey earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton in 1957. A World War II Navy veteran, he received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1952. He was a research engineer, a Fulbright Scholar and an assistant professor of electrical engineering before starting his career teaching philosophy at Stanford University in 1959.

He served as a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study and at Princeton in 1963-64, and taught at the City College of New York and at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to Princeton as a professor of philosophy.

The author of several books and numerous articles, Jeffrey presented a new theory of decision-making under uncertainty and of probable knowledge in "The Logic of Decision" (1965). He further developed these themes in "Probability and the Art of Judgment" (1992). His textbook, "Computability and Logic" (with George Boolos, 1974), bridged the gap between general books on logic and treatises written for mathematicians.

Jeffrey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and he served as president of the Philosophy of Science Association from 1999 to 2000.

Electrical engineer Margaret Martonosi knew her latest research project was out of the ordinary when she found herself e-mailing biologist Dan Rubenstein to ask, "Do zebras swim?"

That is one of the many queries that have been flying back and forth between the E-Quad and Eno Hall as part of an interdisciplinary project called ZebraNet. Martonosi and engineering colleagues Vince Poor and Li-Shiuan Peh are collaborating with Rubenstein, chair of ecology and evolutionary biology, to develop a network of wireless devices that will hang from the necks of zebras and monitor their every move.

Funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers are building a prototype of the network and hope to test it on zebras in Kenya next summer.

The purpose is to study the animals -- ultimately not just zebras, but lions, hyenas, entire systems of predators and prey -- and analyze their activities with a level of detail that was previously impossible.

The fruits of such knowledge go beyond the basic desire to unlock the secrets of the animal kingdom. As human development in Africa -- and around the world -- encroaches on animal habitats, ecologists want to know why animals do what they do and how flexible they are in the choices they make. Understanding such questions could mean the difference between development that coexists with animals and development that destroys them, said Rubenstein.

The payoffs are expected to be large for the engineers as well. Academic, commercial and military engineers are increasingly interested in "remote sensing networks" -- autonomous, but communicating devices that could perform unmanned military surveillance, monitor underground water pollution or track the weather, said Martonosi, a specialist in low-power-consumption computing and networks.

"There are many potential applications," she said, "and they raise interesting technical challenges regarding how to deploy sensing computers that use little energy, that run autonomously in harsh environments and that communicate with each other to interpret data or forward it to base stations."

The full story is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

His 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Battle Cry of Freedom," has become the classic text on the Civil War, and now James McPherson has a new book out that focuses on a single battle of that war. "Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam" tells the story of the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the Civil War, in which more than 6,000 soldiers were killed. The war was at a crossroads as the soldiers met in the fields between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River on Sept. 17, 1862. When the Union emerged victorious, the course of the rest of the war was determined.

McPherson, the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History, "does a superb job of re-creating a moment when the war, and all of American history that followed, might have gone altogether differently," said a review in USA Today.

In between appearances to promote the new book, McPherson is working on a new edition of "Battle Cry of Freedom" with 700 new illustrations, set to be published in December 2003. And he is putting the finishing touches on "Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg," a short book in a series about places that are meaningful to the author. In addition, McPherson recently was named the 2003 president of the American Historical Association. This semester he is teaching his popular "The American Civil War and Reconstruction" course.

The Civil War scholar talked to the Princeton Weekly Bulletin about what would have happened if the South had prevailed at Antietam, what lessons from that battle are instructive today and how he has tried to humanize the image of Abraham Lincoln.

You've written about so many aspects of the Civil War. Why the battle of Antietam?

I've long been convinced, ever since I started trying to put together the multiple layers of Civil War history -- the military, the political, the social, the diplomatic -- Antietam was a turning point on all those levels. No other single battle in the war had such multiple consequences.

And yet Antietam is less well-known than, say, Gettysburg, or the combination of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg, which happened at virtually the same time, as a crucial battle of the war. I thought it would be a good idea to enlighten readers on the importance of this battle.

You discovered in researching the book that public opinion underwent lots of dramatic shifts during the war.

What surprised me the most was the volatility of public morale in both the North and the South, the mood swings in response to the fortunes or misfortunes of their armies. During the early months of 1862, when Union armies won a string of victories, euphoria set in in the North: "The war's going to be over by May 1st. We're going to win this war by the Fourth of July." And there was real despair and depression in the Confederacy. And then it turns around 180 degrees after a few Confederate victories.

So by the eve of the battle of Antietam, when Lee invades the North, despair is widespread in the North: "The war is lost. The United States is going down the tubes." And even more than euphoria, a kind of arrogance creeps into Southern public opinion: "These Yankees, we always knew we could whip 'em, and we got 'em on the run now!" And then it all turns around again in Antietam. This fever chart of public opinion, which was expressed by newspapers, letters and diaries kept by ordinary people, is really quite remarkable, and it shows the extent to which support for a war effort really depends on how well the war is going.

You've said understanding history helps understand the present and the future. Are there any lessons from Antietam that are relevant today, as we think about going to war with Iraq?

I think so. I think if -- and it is still a big if -- we engage in some kind of military activity in Iraq, as long as it goes well, the public will support it. But if it looks like it's not going well, or it's costing more in lives and resources than the objective might be worth, as in Vietnam, public opinion can turn against it pretty quickly. Nothing succeeds like success in military events, and nothing fails like failure. It's probably more extreme than any other sphere of life.

The full interview is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

The packed boxes around Howard Ende's office at 120 Alexander St. signified the close of one chapter in his life. But his black tie with the gold elephants marching across it suggested the opening of another.

Ende, a member of Princeton's legal staff for 28 years and general counsel since 1991, left the University at the end of October to become president of the Mpala Wildlife Foundation. The foundation is the primary funding arm for the Mpala Research Center, a research, education and training facility located in central Kenya.

"I don't look at it as a retirement or a resignation, but as a transition to a new position in which I can continue to serve Princeton," Ende said in March 2001 when he announced his plans. The center focuses on ecological and social sciences education and research, and is administered by the Mpala Research Trust, a collaborative undertaking by the foundation, the Kenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, the Smithsonian Institution and Princeton.

Ende has spent the last year and a half finishing his term as general counsel, then serving as senior counsel. He also has been traveling to Kenya and preparing for his next adventure.

Ende first learned about Mpala through his work. A dozen years ago, he began assisting George Small, a 1943 Princeton graduate, in setting up a trust. Small owned 47,000 acres in Kenya, and wanted to dedicate that property to preserving the land, wildlife and natural resources of the region and to improving the quality of life of area residents. The center opened in 1994 and today is the premier facility of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Ende.

He traveled to the center several times over the years as the University's representative to the trust, including spending a six-week sabbatical there in 1998. "As I got to know George Small, I was incredibly impressed with his commitment to Princeton and to this project," Ende said. "Over the years, we discussed the long-term management of the project. At George's request, I thought I would get more involved when I could."

Ende's involvement became more critical in recent years as Small's health began to fail and he was unable to continue overseeing the center's activities. "I had to start thinking about what that meant for me," Ende said. "I decided this would be a good time to 'reinvent' myself and transition into this new project."

Taking the reins of the foundation this fall is somewhat bittersweet for Ende -- his friend George Small died on Sept. 16, 2002. Upon his death, the entire Mpala property -- to which Small had added 3,500 acres for the research center -- was turned over to the foundation.

The full story is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

Steven Healy, chief of police at Wellesley College, has been named director of public safety at Princeton University.

Healy, who has worked in law enforcement for 18 years, will replace Jerrold Witsil, who retired Oct. 31 after 27 years as director of public safety.

Healy's appointment is effective Jan. 1, 2003. Donald Reichling, a 23-year member of the public safety staff, will serve as acting director until then.

The chief of police at Wellesley since 1999, Healy has been responsible for the day-to-day and strategic operations of a 20-member staff. From 1995 to 1999, he was associate director of public safety at Syracuse University, managing the daily operations of a 60-member staff.

"Steven Healy is an outstanding public safety executive," said Charles Kalmbach, senior vice president for administration, to whom Healy will report. "His personal qualities of integrity, dedication and teamwork are consistently cited by his past and present colleagues. Furthermore, during his entire career he has interacted effectively and imaginatively with young people and seasoned professionals -- in the Air Force and in two academic environments. He was the unanimous choice of the advisory committee, and I am looking forward with great anticipation to his joining the administration."

"We also want to take this opportunity to thank Jerry Witsil for his service to the University," Kalmbach added. "In the more than 27 years that Jerry has led our public safety department, the role of the department has become increasingly more complex and critical to the well-being of our campus. Jerry met these challenges with imagination, enthusiasm and professionalism. We wish him well in his retirement."

"We also are grateful to Don Reichling for his willingness to add yet another responsibility to his already full agenda," he said.

The full story is available in a news release.

Anti-American public sentiment in Arab nations has reached a dangerous boiling point, according to Marjorie Ransom and David Ransom '60 , a wife-and-husband team of American diplomats with decades of service in the Middle East.

During a joint lecture Sunday, Nov. 17, the pair maintained that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the threatened U.S. invasion of Iraq, along with a malaise in politically and economically stagnant Arab countries, has culminated in the most Arab anger toward America they have ever seen.

"In my experience of 30 years I have seen periods of equal bitterness, but the stakes are higher this time and the anger is greater,'' said David Ransom. "It's a boiling situation.''

Marjorie Ransom credited the Bush administration with re-establishing "public diplomacy'' that seeks to bring an American point of view to Arab populations. Over the long term, she said, American commitment to human rights and the rule of law is an alluring contrast to "extreme Islamists (and) unreasoning Arab nationalists.''

"In the short term,'' she warned, "public diplomacy cannot stem the rising tide of antipathy for Israeli repression of the Palestinians and our apparent tolerance of it.''

The Ransoms have been advocating American policies to Arab governments and reporting Arab response back to Washington since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Marjorie Ransom, now an associate at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, was the first female U.S. foreign service officer to serve in the Arab world. She was director of the U.S. Information Agency in Syria and Egypt, among many postings.

David Ransom is the former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain and was a State Department officer in Yemen, Abu Dhabi and Syria, as well as in the State Department's Near East bureau in Washington.

"In the last few years, thanks to the likes of Arafat and Sharon, our dream that (an Israeli-Palestinian) agreement was not just possible but inevitable has been shattered,'' he said. "The tide of anti-Americanism in the Middle East is rising and the threat to our government and the governments of our friends is alarming. The threat of terrorism to us, in Washington and other American cities is, I think, swelling.''

As many Arab-American groups have stated, anti-Arab sentiments in America have been on the rise since Sept. 11. The Ransoms noted that there have been more than 1,000 arrests of Arabs -- both U.S. citizens and those living here on visas -- but none of the suspects have proven to be terrorists. The long delays processing visas for visitors from Arab countries are "unconscionable,'' they added.

While American diplomats are duty bound to adhere to the President's policy, the Ransoms said they believe that foreign service officers have doubts about the wisdom of current policy in the Middle East.

"I think it is fair to say that among our ambassadors in the region, and probably among many of the officers of the Near Eastern Division in Washington, there is a perception that we have all but abandoned the (Israeli-Palestinian) peace process, and at the same time are preparing for large scale military efforts to change the noxious regime in Baghdad,'' said David Ransom.

The Ransoms made their presentation as part of the Princeton Middle East Society Speaker Series and was co-sponsored by the International Center.

Joseph Taylor, dean of the faculty at Princeton since 1997, will step down from that post at the end of the academic year in June.

Taylor, the James McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics, will return to full-time teaching and research.

"It's been a terrific experience," Taylor said. "I've really enjoyed working with both presidents Harold Shapiro and Shirley Tilghman. It has been a real privilege. Princeton has been served well over the years by having members of its faculty willing to spend time in the senior administration. I am happy that I was persuaded by Harold to take a turn at doing that."

Taylor originally was appointed to a five-year term as dean. This past June, his term was extended for one year. He has kept up with his research and stayed in touch with his colleagues in physics by spending most Friday afternoons in his office in the department.

"I promised Harold five years," he said. "I always imagined that I would be coming back to the department around this time. I was very willing to stay on and help Shirley during her first two years. But if I'm ever going to go back to doing the kinds of things that I do in the physics department, now is the time."

"Joe Taylor has provided exceptional leadership for Princeton and has helped to strengthen our faculty in significant ways," Tilghman said. "I have relied heavily on his wise counsel and excellent judgment, and was deeply grateful that he agreed to extend his service for an additional year. Now our challenge is to find someone with similar qualities to succeed him."

Tilghman has appointed a search committee for Taylor's replacement that consists of: Philip Nord, professor of history, who will serve as committee chair; Tony Dahlen, professor of geosciences; Caryl Emerson, the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Bo Honore, professor of economics; Peter Jaffe, professor of civil and environmental engineering; Suzanne Staggs, associate professor of physics; and Michael Wood, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English.

The dean of the faculty, who traditionally comes from the ranks of the faculty at Princeton, has administrative oversight of the departments and programs of instruction and is responsible for recruiting and retaining faculty members. Taylor said the highlights of his time in the position include taking advantage of the opportunity to get to know many faculty across the University.

"Most of us as academics are fairly narrowly focused much of the time in our discipline," he said. "We don't get a chance to appreciate all of the wonderful things that are going on in the intellectual environment here. I have had a good reason to do it as dean and really enjoyed that."

Taylor said he also particularly enjoyed interacting with Princeton's alumni. "They are very loyal to the institution, and they care a lot about it," he said. "They appreciate what they had when they were here, and they certainly appreciate the fact that we are trying to maintain and improve the quality of the faculty and the professional staffs over time."

Taylor joined the Princeton faculty in 1980 and was named to the McDonnell chair in 1986. He shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993 with Russell Hulse, principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, for their discovery of a unique twin star system known as a binary pulsar and its use to verify Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Taylor also has received the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics, a MacArthur Fellowship and the Wolf Prize in Physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society.

He earned his B.A. degree with honors from Haverford College and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University.

A committee charged with looking at issues related to the post-enrollment period for doctoral candidates has recommended a set of initiatives intended to ease the transition and help them finish their degrees.

"The University is committed to the goal of helping students complete their degree within the enrollment period," wrote Provost Amy Gutmann in a memo to department chairs and directors of graduate studies. "The University also recognizes that a sizeable fraction of students do not complete their degree within their enrollment period, and that there is room for improvement in our practices across departments."

The Post-Enrollment Committee was formed last spring at the request of President Tilghman. Members included directors of graduate studies, graduate students and other administrators, including several from the Graduate School.

Gutmann, who chaired the committee, noted that while the time to earn a doctoral degree at Princeton has increased -- as it has at universities across the country -- the amount of time generally remains shorter than at peer institutions. Since the mid-1970s, the average time to earn a doctoral degree in the United States has increased by about 1.5 years. Today, the median time from matriculation to receiving a Ph.D. at Princeton is 6.2 years, compared to a national average of nearly seven years.

Associate Provost Jed Marsh, who served on the committee, attributed the shorter time to degree, in part, to the unique structure of graduate study at Princeton. Graduate programs at Princeton, unlike most other institutions, have a fixed period of enrollment. During that enrollment period, the University provides generous fellowship support and limits teaching requirements in order to facilitate degree completion.

According to Marsh, approximately 190 students this year are affected by the status change, which was made retroactive to Sept. 1, 2002. He expects the number will remain fairly steady at 150 to 200 students each year. He noted that one-quarter to one-third of these students currently complete their degrees within a year.

The full story is available in the Weekly Bulletin.

Michael Cook, the Cleveland Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, has been selected by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as one of five winners of its Distinguished Achievement Award. The awards, in their second year, are intended to honor scholars who have made significant contributions to the humanities and to provide the recipients and their institutions with resources to deepen and extend humanistic research.

The three-year awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, aim to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation's intellectual life. In contrast to other notable academic award programs that benefit the individual scholar exclusively, the Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize the interdependence of scholars and their institutions. Accordingly, while this grant program recognizes the achievements of individuals, the grants themselves will support specific programs of activities that will enhance scholarship and teaching more broadly at the recipients' institutions.

Cook, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1986, is widely considered among the most outstanding Islamicists in America today. He has made major contributions to the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world. His works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology have become classics.

Cook's recently published pioneering study of the interaction between morality and authority in Islamic belief and thought has garnered praise throughout the field and beyond. His scholarship draws upon a wide range of medieval and modern legal, literary and philosophical sources from across the lands and languages of the Islamic world.

The full story is available in a news release.

	Fleurette King

Seeking to amplify discussions about diversity and increase the number of voices in this essential dialogue, the University has developed a new program to foster a more open and welcoming campus environment.

The initiative, Dialogue@Princeton, is funded by a three-year, $225,000 grant awarded in July by the Bildner Family Foundation. Fleurette King, who most recently ran the Office of Diversity Education at DePaul University in Chicago, is joining the Office of Campus Life as the coordinator of Dialogue@Princeton.

As part of the initiative, a $30,000 Bildner Fund for the Advancement of Diversity on Campus has been launched to support projects dealing with race, ethnicity, gender, faith, class differences, social justice and other issues. Applications are now being accepted for grants.

"I hope we can redouble Princeton's efforts to make this a place that is truly inclusive for all of the students here, which is particularly important in a time when we're getting more students of varied backgrounds and income levels," said Janet Dickerson, vice president for campus life.

U.S. minorities and international students currently constitute 34.8 percent of Princeton's total undergraduate population, up from 32.1 percent four years ago.

One major goal of the initiative is to expand the University's ongoing Sustained Dialogue program, which currently includes 12 groups of about 10 people who meet twice a month to discuss diversity-related issues.

The full story is available in the Weekly Bulletin.