Letters - March 11, 1998


Importing Oxbridge

As a master of one of Princeton's five residential colleges I am writing to correct statements in Alastair Bellany's review of Importing Oxbridge (In Review, January 28). While it is true that the Princeton colleges could never be mistaken for their Oxbridge counterparts, I would not call the results of our system "intrinsically flawed" or "stillborn." Whatever the original intentions for the colleges, we have no interest in emulating the British system. We do not have, nor do we expect ever to have, our own faculties or admissions. We do not have the pomp and circumstance (or the 500-year-old silver) which makes high table at an Oxbridge college such a ritual. Nor are we, alas, four-year colleges -- a decision many of us still regret. Wilson College can never be Magdalen or Trinity, nor should it try to be.

What the colleges have succeeded at is making freshmen and sophomores immediately comfortable at Princeton. We oversee an advising system that is unparalleled in depth and breadth, we house the wonderfully successful Freshman Seminar and Sophomore Workshop programs, and we encourage close contacts between students and our faculty, staff, and graduate fellows. The two years undergraduates spend in the colleges are often the first (and arguably the last) time they are exposed to students of different races, classes, and political orientations.

The colleges are places where unfamiliar music, art, and literature can be accessed and discussed. They are the center of the university's efforts to integrate students' social and intellectual lives. They do not seek to copy the British system, but to create a unique Princeton experience where students can develop their talents and come to appreciate those of others. I leave it to alumni and students whether we are successful, but having worked in the system for several years, I am very proud of the upperclassmen we produce.

Miguel Angel Centeno
Master, Wilson College
Associate Professor, Sociology

Princeton, N.J.

Paul Muldoon

It is one thing for the poet Paul Muldoon to create new words such as "Incantata" with their effective connotations in context, but quite another to choose an arcane term and misuse it (paw, February 11). In the 250th anniversary poem you published, "Taking the Air with James McCosh," Muldoon has McCosh pick up a skelly to throw. My mother's family name was Skelly, so I was curious to find its meaning in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a coastal outcrop, a "rugged insulated sea-rock ... covered by the sea at high-water."

Sadly, too few Americans continue after college to read poetry for pleasure.

The fault is all too often that of modern writers of verse who have played fast and loose with their primary responsibility of communicating. I trust such a gifted wordsmith as Muldoon is not encouraging his students to engage in intentional obscurantism.

C. Webster Wheelock '60
New York, N.Y.

Editor's note: We asked Muldoon if he had a reply, and this is what he said: "If Mr. Wheelock were to look down the list of definitions of 'skelly' in the OED he'd find ... the meaning 'to squint.' To 'take a skelly,' according to the Concise Ulster Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is 'to squint at.' That's how McCosh would have used it."

Race relations

Nick Confessore '98's January 28 Opinion piece about campus diversity was not at all compatible with my experience as a black undergraduate.

During my four years at Princeton I never once felt alienated, and I take particular exception to Confessore's description of black sororities. To categorize them as segregationist is to deny their history and function. Confessore ignores the fact that black sororities were founded partially in response to black women's being denied entrance into white sororities in the early 1900s. He also disregards the fact that the overwhelming purpose of any black sorority is public service, not placing its members into servitude. My initiation into Delta Sigma Theta involved no humiliation or degradation. Instead of teaching me how to be a slave, it taught me how to be a leader in my community and to educate both blacks and non-minorities about the plight and accomplishments of black people.

Confessore had no business writing about a subject for which his only apparent research was a conversation with one black sorority member. It is obvious that the person he spoke to had no grasp of the true meaning of sisterhood, nor did she understand that the true mandate of black sororities is public service. I joined Delta Sigma Theta in my sophomore year, the same year I joined Terrace Club. The two are hardly mutually exclusive.

Tiffany Michele Hébert '97
East Lansing, Mich.

Joe Brown

Concerning the January 28 From the Archives photograph of the three people pouring plaster in an art studio, I have no idea who the two individuals standing center and right are, but the one on the left is Joe Brown.

Following his graduation from Temple University in 1931 with a degree in education, Joe apprenticed in the sculpture studio of Dr. R. Tait McKenzie while also boxing professionally. He came to Princeton from Philadelphia in 1938 to take a position as a part-time boxing coach. When Christian Gauss, Princeton's academic dean, noticed a sculpture done by Joe, he asked him to teach, and in 1939 Joe became a resident fellow in the Creative Arts Program.

Joe continued to coach boxing at Princeton until 1962, and he taught sculpture as a professor of art until his retirement in 1977. In 1984 the Joe Brown Martial Arts Room, in Dillon Gymnasium, was dedicated with a bronze plaque inscribed, "Joe Brown -- Teacher, Coach, Friend."

During his long career, Joe created more than 400 sculptures. He sculpted athletes in action, monuments, and portaits of noted individuals. Many of his bas-reliefs were done for medallions and medals awarded by Princeton, the Ivy League, and the E.C.A.C. (in the photo you published, Joe and the other two are pouring a plaster casting for such a piece). As Joe often sculpted from life, and always from experience, every piece carried a story. Until his death in 1985, he continued to participate in his craft and to entertain and enlighten those who visited his studio.

Denny Emory '70
Wilson, Wyo.

Editor's note: We have received many letters, phone calls, faxes, and e-mails identifying Joe Brown h'42. Several readers informed us the student on the right as Lester Mount '43*48, but the person in the center remains a mystery. Brown's first studio on campus was in the basement of the Joseph Henry House, Christian Gauss's residence (at the time located on the site of the future Firestone Library); later he moved to McCormick Hall and then to 185 Nassau Street. Those who at press time had contacted us include Herb Shultz '40, Bruce McDuffie '42, Jim Merritt '42, Nicholas Wetzel '42, Smokey Williams '42, Kenneth Folsom '43, George Gundlach '43, Don Gutmann '43, Ken Looloian '43, Hallam Walker '43, Donald Hirschberger '44, Bill White '44, David Acaster '45, Wil Britten '45, Al Luft '45, Emmett Murphy '45, Dick Boera '46, Sidney Dillon '46, George Morris '46, Ralph Munyan '46, Bernie Ryan '46, Eugene Corrigan '47, John Joline '47, Frederic Allen '48, Joe Fischer '48, Richard Morgan '48, Charlton Price '48, Will LeBourveau '49, Avery Chenoweth '50, Bryant Northcutt '50, Wallace DuPre '51, J.D. Hosfield '51, George Mather '52, Leigh Smith '52, Beck Fisher '55, Tom Quay '56, Dave Irving '58, Bob King '60, Rick Lavine '61, Dave Ames '66, and Sue Post Lichtenstein '77; from the faculty and administration we heard from Leon Barth, Marion Levy, and Jim Seawright.

Diving horses

Re Charles Rissel '75's January 28 letter about the Steel Pier's diving horses: I am gratified that Gamal and Shiloh spent the later part of their lives in the hands of another Princeton family, but I do not appreciate his suggestion of indifference to them on my part.

From 1947 to 1975 our horses worked for three months each year. Their "work" consisted of diving into a clean, warm pool and climbing out for their reward of apples and molasses. For the other nine months they lived comfortably at a nearby horse farm with gourmet food (oats and hay) and loving care.

When we sold the Steel Pier to two hotelmen in 1975, the diving horses went with the property. The new owners featured them for the next two years, then closed the pier in 1978. The horses were returned to the horse farm, where they remained for five years at the cost of the pier's owners. Thanks to Mr. Rissel's letter, I now know what happened to them after they were sold at auction in the 1980s.

Some of the humans who performed at the Steel Pier would disagree with Mr. Rissel's assertion that we treated them better than their equine counterparts. As Phyllis McGuire once told me, "George, you are cruel. You care more for your diving horses than you do for your singers." I gave her a brotherly hug and replied, "But, my dear, you don't work for molasses and apples."

George A. Hamid, Jr. '40
Northfield, N.J.

Fixated on sex?

Your January 28 review of Jim Brogan '63's novel A Time to Live was illustrated with the dust jacket, which shows a naked man standing with his back to the viewer. Being mooned is not a wholly novel experience for me, but I could rationalize these prior episodes as the product of inebriation, youthful high spirits, or both. I sense no such justification for this egregious lapse of taste on your part. How about doing straight alumni a favor and giving your gay sympathies a rest; it is somewhere between simply tiresome, at best, and patently offensive, at worst. I still find much of value and interest in paw, but our society's fixations regarding sex are way too much in evidence.

Thomas J. Keating IV '60
Centreville, Md.

Bill Clinton

It seems like only yesterday that Princeton awarded an honorary degree to Bill Clinton. It did not take long for him to go from being our most famous alumnus to the most infamous. In view of the controversy that surrounded the granting of his degree in 1996, it would be instructive to hear from the trustees how well they think he now represents Old Nassau's standards and traditions.

Ned Waller '47
Danville, Va.

Editor's note: We don't know about the trustees, but for a presidential scholar's view of Clinton, see page 6.


paw@princeton.edu