Notebook - January 26, 2000

Enrollment increase on table for Board of Trustees
Report to recommend changes that will affect Princeton's future

Welcome to the new millennium: On January 29, 2000, after two years of research and planning, a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees will present the full board with its official recommendations on the future direction of the university. The Wythes Report, named after the subcommittee's chairman, Paul Wythes '55, intends to make suggestions in a number of areas, including a recommendation that Princeton increase its undergraduate enrollment by 500 students (about 10 percent) over the next eight to 10 years. Other topics to be covered include the Graduate School, the faculty, the administrative and support staffs, the university's physical plant and financial resources, the use of new technologies, and the Library.

The possibility of an enrollment expansion-which would call for the construction of an additional dorm, as well as a sixth residential college-has already been widely reported in The Daily Princetonian and cyberspace (the Prince has given the idea the tentative thumbs up, while TigerNet's Internet chatter is generally more dubious). With the publication of the Wythes Report, however, debate is expected to begin in earnest.

According to university officials, the time is ripe for Princeton to share its resources with more students: the university is financially in great shape-it has the highest endowment per student in the nation-the size of the faculty has been growing steadily in recent years, and the pool of qualified applicants continues to grow.

"Our final vote on the plan probably won't happen until sometime in April," said Wythes. "In the meantime, we intend to seek out as much input as possible from the alumni and other groups."

PAW's March 8 issue will provide details of the Wythes Report, along with an analysis of the reasons behind the suggested increase in the size of Princeton's undergraduate student body-and what its impact on the university will be.

--Royce Flippin '80

 

Wythes Report Topics

· Enrollment increase

· Graduate School

· Faculty

· Staff

· Physical plant

· Financial resources

· New technologies

· Library

Psychologist finds cells regenerate in advanced area of brain

On October 15, Princeton psychologist Elizabeth Gould and her collaborators, including Professor of Psychology Charles G. Gross, reported that in primates the most advanced area of the adult brain receives fresh supplies of neurons daily. The neuron is the basic unit in the brain's operating system, and the discovery was a milestone in neuroscience. It delivered a final blow to the longstanding belief that the adult brain can only lose neurons, never add them. That dogma had begun to crumble in recent years, partly because of earlier work by Gould showing that neurogenesis, the birth of neurons,takes place in a more primitive part of the brain.

In their new work, published in Science, the Princeton scientists showed that neurogenesis also occurs in the neocortex, which is the highest-functioning area of the brain, responsible for memory, perception, and reasoning. Gould spoke with PAW about her work.

What is the most exciting implication of your finding in terms of understanding how the brain works?

Just in the simplest sense, having a new population of neurons at any given time presents a totally different mechanism for learning. Learning has almost always been thought of as a modification of existing neural circuits. We know that the amount of information that can be learned over a long period of time is enormous, and yet the brain was always believed to be structurally static. Now we know that is not true-the brain is always undergoing structural changes. This presents the possibility that it is new neurons being added and new connections being formed that are important for learning.

In the long term, could your findings translate into new therapies for brain disorders and injuries?

It's intuitive that tapping into a natural regenerative mechanism and enhancing it in some way is a good approach for trying to repair damaged brain regions. But we need to be careful not to overinterpret these basic findings. It is well known that the adult brain is not very efficient at repairing itself, and it is likely that the number of new cells added to the neocortex would not be sufficient to repopulate a damaged area. For our results to have clinical relevance, many new experiments will be necessary to identify ways to enhance and direct this new neuron growth.

Anniversary Campaign hits $900 million

The Anniversary Campaign reached its revised goal of $900 million in early November, eight months ahead of schedule. But Vice-President for Development Van Zandt Williams, Jr. '65 cautions that the work is far from over. Some categories of the campaign, such as academic programs, have been more successful than others, leaving four areas in particular underfunded: Annual Giving, financial aid, the Presidential Teaching Initiatives, and new buildings.

To fill those gaps the university hopes to raise at least $170 million more by June 30, said Williams. The most important unmet goal is this year's Annual Giving campaign, which has raised $9 million toward its goal of $35 million-typical progress for this time of year. Princeton's effort to improve its financial- aid package for undergraduates and to strengthen the endowment for graduate fellowships still requires more than $30 million. About $20 million is needed to fully fund the Presidential Teaching Initiatives, including the new McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and distinguished visiting professorships. And to complete the funding for several buildings, including the Frist Campus Center, the Princeton Stadium, the Wallace Social Sciences Building, and dorm renovations, Princeton needs more than $100 million.

Medieval art goes online

When Colum P. Hourihane arrived from London's Courtauld Institute to take charge of Princeton's Index of Christian Art in 1997, staff members worked on just one computer-what the Irish-born Hourihane calls "a data-entry machine." Barely 1 percent of the Index's 250,000 text entries, which describe the works of art, were on the Internet, and none of the 150,000 photographs had been digitized. Today 18,000 text entries are online and 15,000 photographs have been digitized.

The most important and the largest archive of medieval art anywhere in the world, the Index classifies and stores information on religious art before the 14th century. Each entry-whether on a file card or on the Web-indicates where the actual artwork is located, its medium, the date, and the artist. The Index began in 1917 with file cards and black-and-white photographs that art history professor Charles Rufus Morey collected in a shoe box. File cards and photographs still make up a sizable part of the collection, which is housed in the lower level of McCormick Hall.

About 1,000 works of art become available annually and are added electronically.

Recent new arrivals include images of all the sculptures from Chartres and Amiens cathedrals and the mosaics of San Marco in Venice.

Outside money has made it possible to expand more rapidly onto the Web. The Getty Grant Program is financing the Index's computerization of the Pierpont Morgan Library's entire collection of 500 medieval manuscripts. "This will add 32,000 images to our database," said Hourihane.

Subscribers from around the world can tap into the database and search among 26,000 subjects, ranging from Christ and Jeremiah to bread, fools, and palms, to locate text and images that they need.

-Ann Waldron

The Index of Christian Art's Website is www.princeton.edu/~ica/indexca.html.

Smith, Treiman
In Memoriam

Datus C. Smith, Jr. '29, a book publisher and a former editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly died November 17. He was 92. After editing PAW from 1931 to 1939, he was the director of the Princeton University Press until 1952. Smith then served as president of Franklin Book Programs, a nonprofit organization promoting the development of book publishing in the Third World.

In 1967, he became a senior associate for John D. Rockefeller III '29, serving as vice-president of the JDR III Fund, a foundation promoting the arts and Asian-American cultural relations. He retired in 1973.

Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, Sam Bard Treiman, who was at the center of Princeton physics for many years, died November 30 of leukemia in New York. He was 74. Born in Chicago, he served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1952. That same year he joined the Princeton faculty. He chaired the physics department from 1981 to 1987 and the University Research Board from 1988 to 1995, retiring in 1998. Treiman's scientific work spanned all areas of particle physics, but he had the deepest impact on weak interaction physics. In 1959, Treiman and Princeton colleague Marvin Goldberger derived what became known as the Goldberger-Treiman relation, which gave a quantitative connection between two seemingly disparate areas of physics, the strong- and weak-interaction properties of the proton and neutron.

Graduate School gears up for centennial, plans changes

As the 100th anniversary of the Graduate School nears, the university hopes to find more effective ways of recruiting graduate students of color and to improve career counseling for students not pursuing positions in academia.

This year Asian-Americans make up about 5 to 6 percent of enrollment, African-American and Hispanic students each comprise between 2.5 and 3 percent, and only one or two students are Native Americans, said Associate Dean of the Graduate School David N. Redman (pictured at right).

Princeton also has proposed adding a master's degree in finance, to go with two other small-scale, professionally oriented master's programs, in public policy and in engineering, said Redman.

The centennial celebration kicks off at Reunions 2000 and continues for a year. The Graduate School, established December 13, 1900, is planning various events, including symposia, a conference on civil society at the United Nations, a public lecture series, and a gala. In conjunction with the 100th anniversary, Princeton seeks to raise $100 million for the Graduate School; to date, the university has brought in $65 million.

-Kathryn Federici Greenwood

The Graduate School's centennial Website is located at www.princeton.edu/centennial.

Students warm to hot fields

Before the Graduate School was founded in 1900, graduate students were enrolled in a number of programs, including art and archaeology, astronomy, biology, classics, geology, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. In its first official year, 1901, the Graduate School boasted 116 students. The student body and offerings grew steadily through the 1950s. The next decade saw dramatic expansion-by 1969 enrollment approached 1,500.

Over the past 30 years, enrollment has increased by more than 200, and research in interdisciplinary and interdepartmental programs such as Materials Sciences and Engineering has flourished.

Princeton, like many other graduate schools, has slightly downsized its humanities and social science disciplines in response to the tight job market in the last five or six years, said Associate Dean of the Graduate School David N. Redman. Meanwhile, the number of engineering students has grown in response to the hot fields of electrical engineering and computer science, as has the number of students in the Woodrow Wilson School and the School of Architecture.

Graduate School enrollment by discipline:

                                1969-70       1999-00

Natural sciences           31%             28%

Humanities                   25%            20%

Social sciences             19%             15%

Engineering                 17%             23%

Woodrow
Wilson School              5%             10%

Architecture                  3%             4%

Total enrollment   1,491     1,735

Source: Office of the Dean of the Graduate School

Summer research lures minorities to Princeton's graduate program

Minorities can get a taste of what it's like to study and conduct research at a top-notch graduate program through the Graduate School's Princeton Summer Research Experience. The program seeks to encourage minority undergraduates from institutions other than Princeton to pursue graduate study, whether in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, or engineering. Twenty-one students lived on campus last summer, working on projects with individual faculty advisers. The program had started in 1985, but lapsed after 1996 for two years from lack of money. As part of the Graduate School's effort to increase minority recruitment, it has infused the program with funds. Pictured from the left are some of the students who participated in 1999: (front row) Richard Ellis (Georgia Institute of Technology), Shanaysha Furlow (University of Maryland), Roberto Razo (California State University, Fullerton), Ayana Free (Spelman), Tina Enhoffer (Villanova), and Manuel Berrelez (Yale); (back row) Nandi Leslie (Howard), Jonathan Gillespie (Long Island University), Stephanie Jones (University of Pennsylvania), Ayesha Hardison (University of Michigan), and graduate student advisers Michelle Fowles and Stephanie Smith.

Postdoctoral fellows focus on both teaching and research

Attracting science and engineering postdoctoral fellows who want to do research as well as teach is the aim of the Council on Science and Technology's Postdoctoral Teaching Program. Launched in 1997, the program gives seven fellows, here for terms of up to three years, the opportunity to conduct research in the lab of a faculty member and also work with a teaching mentor, who may or may not be the research mentor.

The university started the program because nationally "there is a great need to train scientists to be good teachers," said Council director Shirley M. Tilghman, who is also Howard A. Prior Professor in the Life Sciences and director of the Institute for Genomic Analysis. "Our second motivation is very Princeton-centric. We suspect these fellows will invigorate and enrich our own teaching of science."

Melissa Hughes, a fellow in ecology and evolutionary biology, said, "There are other so-called teaching postdocs out there, but they require that the recipient teach two or three courses a semester. That's certainly teaching experience, but it doesn't leave much time for research." Princeton's program has allowed her the freedom to experiment in both teaching and research, she said.

"In many cases," said Matt Trawick, a fellow in physics, "teaching is actually frowned on professionally. You know: 'Shouldn't you be concentrating on your research?' This fellowship encourages me to be seriously interested in teaching and seriously interested in research. I really want to do both, and to do both well."

What does the future hold for the first crop of fellows? "We hope they'll be prepared to take up faculty appointments at a variety of educational institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to research universities," said Tilghman. Alex Bradley, the first fellow to finish sometime this year, is interviewing for faculty positions in chemistry, mainly at liberal arts schools.

In the meantime, said Bradley, "This program affirms and reaffirms Princeton's dedication to undergraduate education. It's not just talk, it's true."

This story is adapted from one by Caroline Moseley that appeared in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin.

Nassau Hall 2000 . . . cocoa cups . . . oboe wish

When it came to ushering in the new millennium, Prince- ton's front campus could not compete with the Eiffel Tower's splendid display of orgasmic fire, nor with London's eye-popping pyrotechnics. But for those 1,500 people who waited in front of Nassau Hall for the year 2000, it was sweetly satisfying to count down with President Shapiro and along with revelers in New York's Times Square, as seen from a giant television screen. At midnight, Kenny Grayson, foreman of the university's electrical and elevator shops, led the crowd in "Auld Lang Syne," followed by "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The public-address system then boomed Buster Poindexter's mid-1980s' hit "Hot, Hot, Hot," and conga lines wound through the crowd. Some revelers, sporting black tie and ball gowns, drank champagne; others, bundled in parkas and watch caps, waved illuminated wands. One nine-year-old, with glow-in-the-dark, 2000-glasses perched on her nose, threw fistfuls of confetti into the air. All too soon, the music ended, the television screen went dark, and the crowd dissipated into the damp night.

To avoid possible Y2K problems, the university took the precaution of closing all offices from December 30 through January 1. A core staff of administrators and computer specialists were at the ready to usher in the New Year and to avert any electronic disasters. Not to worry; by 1 a.m., it was apparent that no major glitches had occurred. A special 1-800 hot line reported an all-clear to callers, but for cybersurfers trying to find an all-clear message on the university's Website, it was impossible-the university had taken its computer systems temporarily off-line. By 6 a.m., though, the Website was accessible, and the university was back to business as usual.

In a deliberate act of goodwill, Todd Johnson '03 and Danny Fahim '01 last month inaugurated a new club, Random Acts of Kindness, by giving out cups of hot chocolate to passersby in front of the chapel. Future gestures are yet to be decided upon, but might possibly include lemonade come spring.

Joseph Robinson *66, principal oboist for the New York Philharmonic, in a concert at Lincoln Center on December 11, took pride in the 16-year-old who sat next to him. Johanna Johnson, who had been diagnosed the previous year with Hodgkin's disease, told the Make A Wish Foundation that she wanted "to sit in the middle of a fine orchestra." Johnson, who has played clarinet for five years and oboe for two, was given her wish; not only did she play with Robinson, but before the concert, he gave her personal instruction and a new, top-of-the-line oboe. Johnson, whose cancer appears to be in remission, said in The New York Times, "My wish came true."

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