Notebook: September 13, 1995
JEREMIAH OSTRIKER IS NEW PROVOST
Astrophysicist brings experience and efficiency to post as Shapiro's deputy
President Shapiro has chosen a 30-year veteran of the faculty and a noted astrophysicist, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, to be his fifth provost in seven years. The chairman of the astrophysical sciences department and director of the University Ob-servatory since 1979, Ostriker succeeds Stephen M. Goldfeld, who stepped down for health reasons. Goldfeld died of cancer on August 25. An obituary will appear in the October 11 paw.
A member of the faculty since 1965, Ostriker was promoted to associate professor in 1968 and to professor in 1971. He has held the Charles A. Young Professorship of Astronomy since 1982.
The provost is the university's second-ranking officer, responsible for its day-to-day operation and all aspects of academic and nonacademic planning. The provost's main duty is chairing the Priorities Committee, a body of professors, administrators, and students that recommends how the funds of the university's operating budget should be spent.
Colleagues praised Ostriker's administrative talents. Edwin L. Turner, a professor of astrophysical sciences, lauded Ostriker for his energy and efficiency. He has a "very broad, catholic appreciation of scholarship," added Turner.
Ostriker's scientific research has ranged from compact objects to cosmology as a whole. Currently, he has been working with colleagues to perform detailed numerical simulations of the development of large-scale structures in the universe.
Ostriker earned his AB in physics and chemistry at Harvard in 1959, and his PhD in astrophysics at the University of Chicago in 1964.
DORMS ON WHEELS ARE HOME
More than 30 sophomores won't be living in residential colleges this year. Instead, they'll call yellow temporary modular-housing units parked on the field between 1922 Hall and Lewis Thomas Laboratory their homes. Princeton is short on housing this year because about 30 more students than anticipated accepted the university's offer of admission. Princeton enticed sophomores who had lived in Butler and Wilson colleges to try out the unusual accommodations by offering them a $1,000 discount on their housing fees. Ten units arrived in August. Nine are occupied by sophomores, but the tenth had still no dwellers at press time. Each unit houses four students and includes two bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchenette, and a full bath. This is the first time Princeton has had to turn to modular units to solve a housing crunch.
IN MEMORIAM: CARL WARTENBURG
A former assistant to two Princeton presidents, Carl Wartenburg, died of a heart attack on August 9, while vacationing in Maine. A leader in higher education with a lifelong commitment to expanding educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth, Wartenburg was 48 years old and lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He had been the Dean of Admissions at Swarthmore College since 1994.
Before going to Swarthmore, War-tenburg had served at Princeton for 10 years. A popular campus figure, he was an assistant dean of student affairs in the mid-1970s and returned to Princeton as a senior admissions officer in 1983. From 1985 to 1992, he served William G. Bowen *58 and Harold T. Shapiro *64 as their assistant.
Wartenburg was a charismatic administrator with a knack for navigating the campus bureaucracy. In 1991 Shapiro appointed him his point-man on alcohol abuse on campus. In his final year at Princeton, he was the executive director of the Action Congress on Responsible Drinking and of the Graduate Inter-Club Council.
Known for his rapport with students, Wartenburg was an honorary member of the Classes of 1988, 1992, and 1993. A Unitarian-Universalist minister, he was a national authority on the prevention of alcohol abuse among young people.
FACULTY FILE: MONEY, GREED, WORK, AND RELIGION
In a recent study, sociologist Robert Wuthnow found most people separate faith and finances.
Jesus warned his followers that they couldn't serve two masters: God and money. Yet today Americans do just that. We worship the almighty dollar, work long hours, and are slaves to a materialistic society. At the same time, Americans are a religious people. In a recent study, God and Mammon in America (Free Press, 1994), sociologist Robert J. Wuthnow has tried to make sense of this incongruous nature by examining the relationship between religious faith and economic behavior.
A 19-year veteran of the faculty and director of the Center for the Study of American Religion, Wuthnow is drawn to studying how people find meaning in life and a sense of community and values. Since his days as a graduate student at Berkeley, he has studied primarily the sociology of religion. "I see religion as a lens for trying to understand American culture," he says.
A comfortable man who smiles often, Wuthnow is an Episcopalian who seems to weave together his faith and his work. Dressed in khaki pants and a blue short-sleeved shirt, he took a break on a muggy August morning in his tidy Green Hall office to talk about his research, his faith, and his spiritual journey.
Drawing on a national survey of more than 2,000 members of the U.S. labor force and more than 175 in-depth interviews with people in various occupations, Wuthnow found in God and Mammon a stronger relationship between religious values and the pursuit of money than many had assumed, but it hasn't helped cure Americans' materialism. Religion cautions us against material greed and excess, but we are embedded in a world of material goods, so the influence that our faith exerts on our economic decisions is limited and often mixed. Believers, says Wuthnow, are not finding explicit answers to their questions about job choices, financial worries, materialism, and economic justice from clergy. Many people turn to churches and synagogues to assuage their conscience rather than to challenge them. "Our spirituality is often little more than a therapeutic device," he writes.
The relationship between religious commitment and money and work is confusing. Wuthnow notes that people who regularly attend religious services seem to glorify money almost as much as those who don't and are just as likely to compartmentalize faith and finances. At the end of his research, Wuthnow felt "frustrated" by what he found: "Even the people who are doing a good job of resisting the pressures of the marketplace are really torn."
Wuthnow is currently working on two more studies of faith and economic behavior. One study looks at the values that guide people's decisions about money and work. The second study looks at clergy members. He's found that clergy "really don't understand the work lives of their parishioners very well," and, therefore, they don't feel comfortable preaching about it. And even if they did have all the answers, Wuthnow wouldn't expect people to listen to them that much. "Clergy authority has diminished enormously in the last 50 years," he says.
The changing face of religion today is reflected, in part, by the small-group movement, which Wuthnow has explored in two books based on a national survey: Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for Community (Free Press, 1994) and I Come Away Stronger: How Small Groups Are Shaping American Religion (Eerdmans, 1994). About 40 percent of Americans are involved in small groups, and 60 percent of those members belong to groups associated with a church or synagogue. Wuthnow himself has been involved in small groups since he was a child. His experience with them has been mixed, and his ambivalence sparked his interest in his study.
Small groups, he found, cultivate an "anything-goes spirituality." They foster a sort of feel-good religion that is not theologically deep or based on tradition and history. Groups members are not challenged spiritually to change. Wuthnow calls it a "me-first religion." Yet he thinks even with their weaknesses, small groups are beneficial. They help people progress on their spiritual journeys. And they offer a complementary experience to large church or synagogue services.
Wuthnow's faith has "raised a lot of questions" in his mind, and his spiritual quest has also led him to study the "devotional practices" performed by women mystics of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The goal of devotional practices is to purify one's soul and enter into a greater love of God. He is also searching for the sacred by piecing together ideas from several religious traditions. By knowing something about other religions, such as Judaism or Islam, he says he can better understand his own Christian tradition. "You grow up hearing a lot of stories, religious stories, Biblical stories," he says. "And I don't think for me at least they provide clear or simple answers. There are questions that keep circling around in my mind, that are rooted in those stories, such as 'Why is there evil in the world?' 'Why has greed been such an important part of human existence?' On the other hand, 'How is it possible to be optimistic about the future of society?'"
He looks for answers to these and other questions he struggles with, in part, through his research. "I learn an awful lot from people we interview." In an uncertain world "where there probably are no final answers, it's very helpful to look into people's lives for their basis for insight and guidance."
-Kathryn F. Greenwood
FACULTY MEMBERS EARN TENURE
Last spring, the trustees approved the promotion of seven assistant professors to the tenured rank of associate professor: Frank R. Dobbin of sociology, Igor R. Klebanov *86 of physics, Elizabeth A. Lunbeck and Stephen M. Kotkin of history, Deborah A. Prentice and Eldar B. Shafir of psychology, and Wayne H. Wolf of electrical engineering.
Dobbin came to Princeton in 1988 and was previously assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. He studies the origins of the national industrial-policy strategies of the United States, Britain, and France, as well as the history of American management practice. A 1980 graduate of Oberlin College, he earned his PhD in 1987 at Stanford University. At Princeton he teaches courses in organization and management, stratification, and comparative public policy.
Klebanov, 1982 graduate of MIT, joined the Princeton faculty in 1989. His primary areas of research are elementary particle theory, string theory, and quantum gravity, but his interests also include nuclear theory and condensed-matter theory. Kle-banov is a director of the Spring School on String Theory, Gauge Theory, and Quantum Gravity, in Trieste, Italy. At Princeton he has taught general physics and a graduate course on general relativity.
Lunbeck, who joined the faculty full time in 1988, is a Duke University graduate who received her PhD from Harvard in 1984. She studies gender and the human sciences from the 18th century to the present. She has taught courses on gender and the human sciences, psychoanalysis and feminism, 20th-century American women's history, and U.S. and comparative gender history.
Kotkin is a scholar of modern European history, Russia, and Russo-Japanese relations. A 1981 graduate of the University of Rochester, he earned his PhD in 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the Princeton faculty in 1989. Kotkin teaches courses on Europe since 1700, Soviet Russia, and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. In 1994 he received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Prentice, a 1984 Stanford graduate, received her PhD from Yale in 1989, the same year she joined the Princeton faculty. A social psychologist, she studies processes of social influence and change, with a focus on the psychological and behavioral consequences of social norms and values. Prentice teaches introductory psychology, the psychology of moral behavior, and statistics. This fall, she is teaching a freshman seminar in Butler College on the IQ controversy.
Shafir's field is human reasoning, judgment, and decision making. The Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor, he was a visiting assistant professor last year at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard. A 1984 graduate of Brown, Shafir received his PhD from MIT in 1988 and came to Princeton the next year.
Wolf is interested in the design of large digital systems, especially video multimedia computing systems. His interest in video has led to a project to design a video multimedia library in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School and the psychology department. He has taught courses on computer architecture, computer-aided design, and VLSI system design. Wolf earned his BS and PhD at Stanford and joined the Princeton faculty in 1989.
PAW STAFF CHANGES
PAW begins its 97th year of publication with several changes to its staff.
Colleen Finnegan, a former advertising consultant for The Trentonian newspaper, is our new director of advertising. She is responsible for managing the magazine's local advertising and the Princeton Exchange, and for liaison with the Ivy League Magazine Network, a consortium that sells space to national advertisers. A 1989 graduate of Syracuse University, she has also worked as a media planner and account executive for Wunderman Worldwide, an advertising agency in New York City.
Perrino replaces Lolly O'Brien, paw's advertising director since 1987, who is now the associate editor for Class Notes and Memorials. In her new job, O'Brien works with the secretaries of more than 80 Princeton classes and the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.
O'Brien, in turn, replaces Paul Hagar '91, who last spring assumed the position of senior editor. Hagar's responsibilities include the Sports and On the Campus departments and the maintenance of paw's home page on the World Wide Web.
ANNUAL GIVING TOPS $21 MILLION
The numbers are in, and Annual Giving for 1995 raised $21,170,663 in unrestricted funds, with 56.1 percent participation among undergraduate alum-ni. Encouraged by more than 2,000 volunteers, a total of 33,835 alumni, parents, and friends contributed.
This year's total is the second highest on record, and this is the third time Annual Giving has topped $20 million. Last year, AG raised $20,221,289, with 56.1 percent participating.
The 25th-reunion Class of 1970 became the first class in Princeton's history to raise $4 million. With a participation rate of 72.2 percent, the class raised $4,001,970, a 25th-reunion record. The major-reunion classes of 1945, 1950, 1955, and 1965 each raised more than $1 million.
For the sixth year in a row, nonalumni parents topped the million-dollar mark, raising a record-breaking $1,347,814 from 3,642 donors. Graduate alumni set a new participation record, with 1,831 donors. And more than 40 of the 130 regional AG committees achieved more than 60 percent participation.
Among classes not holding major reunions, 1952 again set a new record by raising more than $347,000, and 1963 also finished above $300,000. The classes of 1951, 1961, and 1964 each finished with more than $200,000. The youngest alumni class, 1995, set a participation record of 94 percent, obtaining pledges from more than a thousand seniors to make gifts for their first four alumni years.
RESEARCH SHORTS
Test scores: Differences in class size are contributing to the disparity between blacks' and whites' scores on standardized achievement tests, concludes new research coauthored by Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Cecilia E. Rouse. This difference in class size, Rouse and coauthor Michael Boozer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, calculate, accounts for about 15 percent of the black-white difference in test scores. Most recent research has discounted class size as a possible factor in African-Americans' lower test scores, finding little difference in teacher-pupil ratios at predominantly white and predominantly black schools. But Rouse and Boozer found pupil-teacher ratios often mask enormous variations in class size that can exist within schools. "In predominantly black schools," says Rouse, "there are more special-education classes, [which tend to have fewer students] and they're being compensated for with slightly larger regular classes."
Imaging: A team of researchers led by physicists William Happer *64 and Gordon Dell Cates, Jr., and a chemist from Stony Brook University has discovered a new imaging technique that will give physicians clearer pictures of certain areas inside the human body. The scientists' new Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique is called "hyperpolarized gas imaging." The patient inhales polarized gas, which can then be detected in the airways of the lungs and dissolved in blood flowing to the nearby heart and brain. Happer and Cates's discovery promises to provide physicians for the first time the capability to map lung functioning, which is particularly helpful for treating conditions such as emphysema. Other applications include imaging the blood in vessels of the heart and imaging brain function.
With conventional MRI, the protons in the water of the patient's body are polarized by putting the patient in a strong magnetic field. Conventional MRI yields very poor images of the lungs because, among other reasons, they are filled with air and contain little water.
Minimum wage: A recent study by Professor of Economics David E. Card *83 and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Alan B. Krueger challenges the conventional view that higher minimum wages reduce jobs for low-wage workers. In their book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, published by Princeton University Press in February, the authors put standard economic theory to the test, using data from a series of recent episodes, including the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, and the 1990-91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In each case they present evidence showing that increases in the minimum wage lead to increases in pay, but no loss in jobs. Krueger is on leave from the university and is serving in the Clinton administration as chief economist in the Department of Labor.