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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy March 9, 2005: The
melting pot “Diversity” has been a campus buzzword for years now, with universities around the country trying to show off the wide variety of their students’ backgrounds. Princeton, in particular, has had a tough time changing its image, working to combat the country-club, Princeton Charlie stereotype made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 nearly 100 years ago. Still, it is not entirely surprising to find the myth of Princeton homogeneity to be just that—a myth. Though surely the majority of undergraduates throughout the 20th century were Caucasian, Protestant men from upper-income households, the Graduate School has long attracted scholars from all over the world. The April 22, 1955, issue of PAW carried a story about an unusual group of Princeton students and employees, all living in a University-owned building at 47 University Place. The Gordons were from Jamaica. Mr. Gordon – pictured with his wife having their afternoon tea in their apartment – was a former editor of Jamaica’s newspaper who had earned one bachelor’s degree in his home country and a second at Canada’s McGill University. He was studying toward a combined Ph.D. from the Woodrow Wilson School and the economics department, writing his dissertation on Jamaica’s economic policy as a British dependency. A Swedish-speaking Finnish family, the Idstrums, was in Princeton so that Mr. Idstrum could complete an engineering degree. While he also held a research assistantship, his wife worked at a local nursery school, and still found time to knit a beautiful Nordic sweater for their three-and-a-half-year-old son, Christian, who was pictured trying it on. French native Henry Jacqz, who already had a master’s from the Woodrow Wilson School, was working toward a degree in economics. He gave lessons in French and in riding to undergraduates, and his American wife commuted to a job in New York, leaving precious little time for their son – also three-and-a-half and also named Christian. Princeton Ph.D. Frederick Liu, who earned his physics degree in the late 1940s, was working at the Forrestal Research Center as the head of the Central Electronic Recording Room and as such was “the top instrumentation man in jet propulsion and rocket combustion studies, “according to PAW. The impressive Dr. Liu had been at the head of his class at the Chinese Naval Aviation School; he shot down a handful of Japanese planes and was wounded twice in World War II. Once the United States entered the war, PAW wrote, “his extraordinary knowledge of China and Formosa, where his father was in command of the defense forces before that island fell to the Japanese, was utilized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department.” In his spare time, Dr. Liu wrote a military history of modern China that was scheduled to be published by the Princeton University Press. He and his wife had two sons, one eight and one, yes, three-and-a-half, though not named Christian. The most poignant story of this miniature League of Nations, however, belonged to the Goto family. While one of their grown children was fighting for the U.S. in Italy in World War II, the Japanese couple ran a restaurant in southern California – until 1942, when their property was confiscated and they were sent to a Wyoming detention camp. While there, however, PAW wrote that Mr. Goto “became fascinated by the fossils he found in the area.” He sent many of them to Princeton Professor Glenn Jepsen ’27 for identification, and became determined to come himself to Princeton to work on fossils. “After two years of prodding and a fruitless mission all the way to Princeton,” PAW recorded, “Mr. Goto was finally employed in the laboratory with a small sum of money obtained especially for that purpose by Professor Jepsen.” PAW noted further that “through the good offices of the University, Sen. H. Alexander Smith 1901 for the third time is introducing a bill in Congress to permit Mr. and Mrs. Goto to make an $8,000 claim for their confiscated property – a possibility they were unaware of until three days after the deadline had passed.” Mr. and Mrs. Goto were pictured seated around a coffee table decorated
by Mr. Goto with a mosaic made of colorful stones he had found in
Wyoming – a mosaic in the shape of a map of the United States
of America.
Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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