Notebook: April 2, 1997
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down . . .
Demolition of Palmer Stadium clears the way for building of new athletic complex
Two bulldozers with metal claws crumbled chunks of Palmer Stadium's concrete March 3-the start of a demolition expected to take two months, clearing the way for construction of a new state-of-the-art sports complex. If not delayed by weather, the new stadium will be ready for the 1998 football season. All 1997 football games and outdoor track meets will be played away (for more on this, see page 25).
The razing of the 82-year-old stadium, the second oldest in the country after Harvard's, was bittersweet. "There's a sense of sadness for those who spent a lot of good times in that stadium. That's also true for those of us who watched many of the events here over the years," said Richard R. Spies *72, the vice-president for finance and administration, who was one of several officials on hand to strike ceremonial blows before the heavy work began. "I hope there's also a sense of excitement about what is to come. It is exciting to think about a new stadium, one that is for the 21st century rather than the 20th century."
The new stadium, currently referred to as Princeton Stadium, is being designed by architect Rafael Viñoly. The $45 million project will have seating on four sides but will maintain Palmer's recognizable horseshoe shape, with a perimeter building surrounding the grandstands on three sides. Housed in this building will be concession rooms, restrooms, ticket booths, stairs, and the press box, according to Chan-li Lin of Rafael Viñoly Architects of New York City. Two-tiered grandstands will seat approximately 30,000 (about 15,000 less than Palmer); the field will have natural turf. The complex will accommodate soccer and lacrosse as well as football.
An eight-lane Olympic track, however, will not surround the football field as it did in Palmer; the stadium will be moved 70 feet north to allow room for construction of the track on Frelinghuysen Field, between the new facility and Jadwin Gymnasium. A common structure between the new stadium and the track will house locker rooms and storage space. The track area will have seating for about 2,500 spectators.
The new track and the practice field within it will have a lighting system, but there is no funding as yet to add lighting to the stadium, said Spies. The plan also includes half-time rooms for home and visiting teams (if funding becomes available, these may be expanded to full locker rooms) and an open-air concourse beneath the grandstands. Aluminum seating is planned for the lower stadium grandstands, but concrete seating will be installed for the upper deck and for the track. A canopy to provide shade for track-and-field athletes has been designed but isn't covered in the current budget.
"We're hard at work. Construction and fund-raising are proceeding simultaneously," said Van Zandt Williams, Jr. '65, the vice-president for development. He added that university officials are hoping to find a donor who would like his or her name or a family name on the football stadium, and another donor to name the track.
Construction of the new complex will begin as soon as some 20,000 tons of concrete and materials are hauled away. About half the concrete will be crushed into small stones and recycled for use as a base around the new stadium. The foundation is expected to be in place by April. The remainder of the concrete and debris will be carted away, said Thomas Mazza of Mercer Wrecking Company, the firm hired for Palmer's demolition.
Anyone waxing nostalgic for Palmer will be able to purchase pieces of the old stadium, thanks to Admiral Awards, a firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Larger items, such as signs and wooden seats, will be offered for auction during Reunions. While the principal reason for marketing bits of Palmer is to "provide an opportunity for alumni and friends of Princeton," Spies said, it is hoped the venture will raise between $100,000 and $200,000, which will allow for an embellishment on the current stadium plans.
In the meantime, Rafael Viñoly Architects has mounted on its Internet Web site (www.rvapc.com) renderings of the future stadium and a virtual-reality walkthrough of parts of it. Viewers can also register their opinions via the Web site.
Faculty File: Anthony Grafton Defends the Footnote
Tolerating them, Noel Coward once said, was like interrupting love-making to answer the front door. Academicians use them as badges of erudition and scholarly one-upmanship. Informed readers regard them as a learned mosaic that reflects the intellectual artistry of an author. Regardless of its relative merit, the footnote is a little-understood and underappreciated fixture in the history of humanistic scholarship. However, Dodge Professor of History Anthony T. Grafton is doing his part to shore up the footnote's sagging status.
Its worth was called into question in August 1996, when The New York Times pronounced its demise. Growing numbers of scholars and popular historians, the article said, were eschewing footnotes as "a parade of attribution, exegesis and qualification which some readers might find irritating or superfluous," as British historian F.M.L.Thompson once wrote. Moreover, editors at university presses, having inherited "mid-list" titles from trade-book publishers, were dumping footnotes overboard to appeal to a wider (more lucrative) readership. Other stories in the press soon followed. Apparently, the sky of scholarship was falling.
Grafton doesn't think so. He argues, in an article appearing in the winter issue of The Wilson Quarterly (without the use of footnotes; such is the license of the personal essay), that reports of the footnote's death have been greatly exaggerated. As long as university presses fulfill their time-honored function of publishing learned books for a learned reading public, there will always be, he jokes, a cure for insomnia.
Grafton's interest in the subject of footnotes awoke while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. In 1993-1994, while at the Wisenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, he pursued this intellectual sideshow in earnest. The German university afforded him the chance to navigate the maze of Berlin's collection of manuscripts and rare books to understand the birth of the footnote. The result was The Tragic Origin of the German Footnote, a book that Harvard University Press will publish this summer.
"I must make the confession of a pedant: I have just always found the footnote fascinating," says Grafton, a 1995-96 recipient of a Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. "On the one hand, it was something I was trained to do very early on; on the other, I never heard anything about where the footnoting came from-unlike the sciences, where you learn who invented them and what kind of struggle it took to establish them."
Systemic documentation-the footnote being one form-has been with us for a long time. Exactly how long wasn't adequately understood until Grafton arrived on the scene.
In the ancient world, scholars and historians skirted the braggadocio of history's players to analyze documents independently. Early historians of Judaism and Christianity also relied on primary sources to set the record straight. And the reference books of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, diligently produced by Roman lawyers and Catholic theologians, also demonstrate an extensive use of a system of documentation.
According to Grafton, the modern footnote took its form in the later part of the 17th century. At a time when many staples of knowledge were under question-the Bible, nature, God-Descartes was challenging the certainty or usefulness of historical knowledge with his philosophical ruminations. Scholars countered, arguing that an account of the past, grounded in careful examination of primary sources, could be validated. A century later, academics such as historian Edward Gibbon were creating texts with considerable literary elan, studded with footnotes of impressive erudition.
However, Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century professor from Berlin, is widely considered the founder of the modern documented historiography. "He transformed history, in theory, by insisting that every narrative about the past should rest on a systemic analysis of the sources," says Grafton. "But his practices were far less rigorous than his theoretical professions. For example, he would add the footnotes after writing the text."
This burgeoning world of text and footnote was no problem for 18th-century readers, Grafton points out. They were a small, highly educated group accustomed to this style of point/counterpoint-much like kids bopping around on the Internet today. Democracy and modernity, although shedding light into many dark corners of illiteracy around the world, have nonetheless produced less discerning readers. "So," says Grafton, "today's reading public-huge, amorphous and sharing very little in common-regards the footnote as an obstacle because it interrupts the reading of the text."
But times change, and Grafton does not expect any dramatic proliferation of footnotes. Different books, he points out, demand different types of documentation. He sees nothing wrong with extensive bibliographies or the use of endnotes, either at the end of chapters or of the book itself. Undoubtedly, footnotes have their limitations, yet they reveal the tacks taken in pursuit of the truth.
And that's fine by Grafton. "Something is never too heavily footnoted for me," he says. "I don't mind a page that is one-third footnotes or a book that is two-fifths endnotes. I'll probably read that, end to end, with great pleasure."
-David Major
New Members Join Eating Clubs
A total of 983 sophomores-about 80 percent of the Class of 1999-joined eating clubs last month after taking part in bicker or sign-ins.
According to figures compiled by The Daily Princetonian, among the five selective clubs Ivy was the most popular choice, with 175 students bickering and 63 receiving bids. At Cap and Gown, 109 students bickered and 77 were accepted. The remaining three selective clubs-Tiger Inn, Tower, and Cottage-had 105, 100, and 96 bickerees respectively. Tiger accepted 76, Tower 75, and Cottage 64.
Of the sign-in or "open" clubs, Campus, Charter, and Cloister filled on the first round. Campus accepted 100 students, Charter 99, and Cloister 90.
For the third year in a row, Cloister broke ranks with the Inter-Club Council (ICC) by holding its first round of sign-ins on a Sunday, three days before the other open clubs. In an unsuccessful attempt to bring Cloister into line, the ICC forbade sophomores who failed to gain admission to Cloister on Sunday from participating in first-round sign-ins at one of the other open clubs the following Wednesday.
"A committee is being formed to study the whole method of taking in new members," said David T. Partridge '66, the interclub adviser. The committee, which will include undergraduates and alumni, will look at ways to improve the entire bicker/sign-in process, he added, with possible recommendations in place for 1998.
Quadrangle, making a comeback from last year, had 75 sign-ins on the first round and welcomed the most students during the second round, 57. Only 43 students joined Quad during 1996 sign-ins.
Terrace accepted 58 students on the first round and 38 on the second, while Colonial took in 38 and 23, respectively. DEC, the combined Dial, Elm, and Cannon clubs, accepted 32 students in the first round and 18 in the second. DEC calls its system "snicker," a hybrid of the bicker/sign-in process. The club ranks prospective members randomly using a computer program. After bickerlike interviews, members can allot points to raise a candidate's position on the list.
In Memoriam
Samuel C. Howell '50, a former associate director of athletics, died February 19 at his home in Princeton of a brain tumor. He was 68.
Howell majored in geology and ran the quarter-mile for the track team, helping the mile-relay team establish a school record in 1950. He also participated in the combined Cornell-Princeton track teams, which defeated the combined teams of Oxford and Cambridge universities in 1949 and 1950. In his senior year he won the William R. Bonthron Trophy as the team member who contributed most to Princeton track.
After graduation he served in the Korean War, where he earned the Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman's Badge. He joined the university staff in 1953 as an assistant director in the Bureau of Student Aid. He then spent seven years as an assistant to the dean of the faculty. In 1970 he was named to the newly created position of associate director of athletics for general administration, a position he held until his retirement in 1991. Howell worked with Merrily Dean Baker, an associate director of athletics, in developing the women's sports programs.
The recipient of the 1996 ECAC Distinguished Achievement Award, Howell was president of the Friends of Princeton Track and Field.
Visiting Professors for Distinguished Teaching Named
Frank Morgan *77, a professor of mathematics at Williams College, and Teofilo Ruiz *74, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and at City University of New York's Graduate Center, will be the first two incumbents of new visiting professorships for distinguished teaching. They will be in residence at Princeton during the 1997-98 academic year.
The visiting professorships were established by President Shapiro as part of a set of teaching initiatives announced at the beginning of the university's 250th anniversary celebration. The program, known as the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorships for Distinguished Teaching, aims eventually to support as many as five visiting faculty members each year, spread across all divisions of the university.
Visitors are selected for their demonstrated excellence in teaching and their capacity to bring new ideas in undergraduate teaching to the campus. Each will teach an undergraduate course, possibly in collaboration with a regular faculty member. The visitors will also engage in other activities aimed at improving teaching at Princeton, such as workshops for faculty and graduate students, demonstration lectures, and classroom visits.
While universities often invite distinguished scholars to serve as visiting professors, "we know of no other university that has this kind of program to bring distinguished teachers to its campus as visitors," said Dean of the Faculty Amy Gutmann.
Morgan works in minimal surfaces and studies the behavior and structure of minimizers in various dimensions and settings. In 1995, he published a new edition of his text on Geometric Measure Theory: A Beginner's Guide and a new book, Calculus Lite, which is prescribed for use in Princeton's introductory mathematics courses. He has also published a text on Riemannian Geometry: A Beginner's Guide.
He describes his teaching approach as using the simplest examples to expose the principles involved in understanding complex phenomena. His Calculus Lite departs radically from traditional textbooks in that it is a fraction of the length; "it gets right to the point, and stops there," he said, "rather than describing every possible strategy to derive a proof-a tendency that can be distracting, and sometimes overwhelming, to students."
Ruiz is a historian of medieval Castile and 16th-century Spain. His most recent book, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile, a social and economic history, won the American Historical Association's Premio del Rey for the best book on Spanish history in 1995. He has also studied the history of popular culture and is currently at work on a new book, A Social History of Spain, 1400-1600.
"The most important thing in teaching is to show students that you care for them," said Ruiz, a visiting professor in history in the spring of 1995. "That means we must challenge them, even subvert them. They must learn to question the material, as well as their own convictions, and they can only do so in a nurturing atmosphere."
In Brief
Bioethics commission: President Shapiro is leading an 18-member National Commission on Bioethics due to report to President Clinton in May on the implications of cloning. The directive for the report came on February 25, the day following the announcement that scientists in Scotland had successfully cloned a sheep using a single cell from an adult to create a lamb bearing identical DNA. The commission will examine whether private research should be sensitive to issues surrounding cloning, and whether there are policy ramifications for the federal government to address. Shapiro told The Daily Princetonian that the breakthrough in cloning higher organisms offers "much more good news than bad news," including such advantages as improved breeding of animals, greater food supply, and increased production of pharmaceuticals.
Appointment: Michael W. Doyle, professor of politics and international affairs, has been named director of the Center of International Studies in the Woodrow Wilson School, effective July 1. Doyle has been a faculty member and an associate of the center since 1988, having returned to Princeton after teaching three years at Johns Hopkins. Doyle is an authority on United Nations's peacekeeping, comparative history, and international relations. In 1993-94 he took a public-service leave to serve as vice-president of the International Peace Academy, in New York City, where he remains a senior fellow. He is the author of U.N. Peacekeeping in Cambodia, Empires, and Ways of War and Peace, to be published this year. He also is the coauthor of Alternatives to Monetary Disorder and the coeditor of Escalation and Intervention.