Notebook: June 5, 1996


CONFERENCE EXAMINES THE RISE OF THE RIGHT
The most important news at the May 3-4 conference "From Redemption to Reaganism: American Conservatism in Historical Perspective, 1865-1980" might have been that it happened at all. Organized by Benjamin Leontief Alpers *90, a lecturer in the history department, and Jennifer A. Delton, a graduate student in history, the conference aimed to fill in what scholars of all ideological stripes agreed are significant gaps in the study of the conservative movement in the United States.
Sean Wilentz, a professor of history and director of the Program in American Studies, noted at the start of the conference that for all the talk about diversity on campus, "We don't often have political diversity." This conference did.
Keynote speaker William A. Rusher '44, who served more than three decades as publisher of the conservative journal The National Review, agreed that conservatism has been "something of an orphan" among academics. In 1984, when he wrote The Rise of The Right, about the Republican path to power, Rusher hurried to finish it, since "I was sure all sorts of similar books would be flooding the market. I needn't have worried."
Rusher outlined how The National Review, founded a few years before he arrived in 1957, served as a catalyst in the "fusion" of three conservative strains: free-market libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-Marxists. (Scholar George Nash later explained how neoconservatives and the religious right subsequently joined the conservative movement as distinct groups.) Conservatism in those days was outside the political mainstream, and it was pretty much left to a few intellectuals, Rusher explained. "Most of them couldn't have found a polling place with a flashlight in broad daylight."
However, Rusher said, conservatives sensed the shifting demographics that were sending more families to the suburbs and more middle-class Americans to the South and Southwest. The decision to draft U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 was made with this shift in mind, Rusher explained, since the expectation was that he would face the incumbent president, John F. Kennedy. Had Kennedy not been assassinated, the contest between the two could have been "breathlessly close," he said.
To Rusher, the GOP's decision to nominate Richard M. Nixon in 1968 was a setback for conservatism, with Watergate being only part of the problem. Not only was Nixon not a true conservative, Rusher said, but his nomination and election prevented Ronald Reagan from coming to power until 1981.
In the 1960s, Rusher said, conservatives were either belittled or ignored. But that seemed to feed the sense of mission and "embattlement," as Rusher called it, at The National Review and elsewhere in the movement. Shunned by the media, conservatives developed their own way of getting their message out. Rusher offered a candid description of how the old Goldwater mailing lists were the seeds of a GOP direct-mail operation used by Reagan and by GOP Senate candidates. The intellectuals may not have been able to find the polling place, but they found political professionals adept at using mailing lists to reach people receptive to their message.
The issue of race and its role in the rise of the right was one Rusher side-stepped, and later Nash did, too. To hear Rusher tell it, the conservative intellectuals didn't court racists. Moreover, the racists of the South and the suburbs who voted for the GOP as a reaction against the Civil Rights movement came to the party on their own; to these voters, Rusher said, conservative intellectuals "had nothing to say." Scholars and political professionals in the audience grumbled in dissent. When asked if conservative intellectuals had any responsibility to rein in operatives willing to play the race card, Rusher said only, "We'll have to keep an eye on it."
Rusher said the great debate of the next 50 years will be whether the U.S. continues to further secular humanism or returns to its moral roots. In the conference's final panel, Nash and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne debated whether the collapse of communism has destabilized the conservative movement by melting the anti-Soviet glue that held libertarians and traditionalists together. Nash viewed the lack of an "evil empire" to rail against as a temporary setback. But Dionne, the author of They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (Simon & Schuster, 1996), believes that America's embrace of conservatism is easing, and the right will ultimately lose its hold on power.
-Mary Caffrey

CARTOONS BY WHITNEY DARROW, JR. '31
Former New Yorker Cartoonist Whitney Darrow, Jr. '31 has loaned original artwork and published versions of his drawings to the Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library. The exhibit will run through September 29. Few cartoonists have had as long and successful a career as Darrow, renowned for his nimble wit, gentle satire, and adroit draftsmanship. Between 1933 and 1982 he contributed more than 1,500 sketches to The New Yorker.
He has also illustrated children's books and publications by humorists such as Johnny Carson.

ARCHITECT TO DESIGN THREE-SIDED STADIUM
The trustees in April charged the architect of the new football stadium to design a three-sided stadium with seating for 30,000, to design a separate track located on Frelinghuysen Field, and to adhere to a $45 million budget. The trustees also want the stadium to be "involved in the normal flow of campus life," said Director of Athletics Gary D. Walters '67. The trustees had already agreed to raze Palmer Stadium (Letters, April 17).
In addition to those guidelines, architect Rafael Viñoly will design a stadium that, in function and design, will be integrated with the adjacent track and with the surrounding buildings on campus. The trustees want the football stadium and track complex to be used for nonathletic events, including receptions, orientation-week activities, and Staff Day, said Richard R. Spies *72, vice-president for finance and administration.
Prior to the trustees' meeting, an alumni advisory committee had prepared a report that made recommendations regarding the design for the football stadium, the location of the track, and potential features in the new stadium, including lights, a public-address system, half-time rooms, a natural-grass field, and a trophy room. It's too early to determine whether everything the committee recommended will come to fruition, said Spies, who added that the university doesn't know what tradeoffs it might make to stay within the $45 million budget.
In its report, the committee proposed a three-sided stadium because that configuration would better accommodate a separate track, said Walters. Also, having a separate track with its own seating will make scheduling easier, he added, and it will give "the track team a sense of identity," because it won't be competing in the shadow of the football stadium. The report suggested a need for seating 30,000 people to allow for potentially large crowds for soccer, lacrosse, and football games.
The new stadium, said Walters, might have some subtle reinterpretation of Palmer, but it will be "built for the future, not the past." The design will be completed by the end of the summer, said Spies. The university hopes to begin construction after the 1997 football season and to complete the new stadium before the 1998 season, said Walters.

CAMPAIGN AHEAD OF PACE; DEFICIT CUT
At their April meeting, the trustees learned that the five-year aniversary campaign is 11 months ahead of schedule and that the university's deficit is smaller than had been expected.
The university has raised one-third of its $750 million goal for the campaign, said Van Zandt Williams, Jr. '65, vice-president for development. Raising money is traditionally easier in the early going of a campaign, he said, because trustees and volunteers usually make pledges early on. The 250th-anniversary celebration coinciding with the start of the campaign and Gordon Y. S. Wu '58's $100 million pledge also helped jump-start the effort. Williams said he was mildly concerned that people will think the campaign is over when the 250th concludes in June 1997, when in fact "we will have three more years of campaign time."
Provost Jeremiah P. Ostriker told the trustees that the university's budget deficit for this fiscal year is less than $2 million, which is half of what had been projected last fall. A balanced budget may be achieved this year, he said, although it's too early to know for sure.
The shortfall is smaller than expected, said Ostriker, because "contributions of Annual Giving are up over what we had planned," as are sponsored research funds, and departments and university offices have begun implementing administrative cutbacks. Last fall, the budget-setting Priorities Committee instituted a two-year, across-the-board, 4-percent cut. To achieve savings, the university estimated that 80 to 120 positions would have to be eliminated. To date, approximately 80 have been lost, the majority through retirement and attrition. The university also instituted a hiring freeze, which ended this month. Although the smaller deficit is good news, said Ostriker, to achieve a balanced budget next year the university must continue to make administrative cuts.

IN BRIEF
Impostor: James Hogue appeared in Princeton Borough Municipal Court on April 8 and pleaded guilty to trespassing on university property, a petty disorderly persons offense. He had been arrested February 19 at the Graduate College while posing as a graduate student. Five years ago, he was arrested after swindling the university out of $30,000 in financial aid while attending the university under an assumed identity. At his recent court appearance, Hogue accepted a plea bargain, which includes a lifetime ban from campus, $205 in fines and court costs, and a 30-day jail sentence. The sentence was suspended because he had already served that time in the Mercer County Correctional Facility, where he is currently being held. Hogue now faces a hearing before the New Jersey parole board to determine if he violated his parole and if he should remain in jail or be released. Staying off the campus had been a condition of his parole.

Awards: Professor of Political Economy and of Economics and Public Affairs Uwe E. Reinhardt has received the first Richard E. Quandt '52 prize in recognition of his teaching of undergraduate economics. The award was created to honor Quandt, a professor of economics, emeritus, for his teaching and career at Princeton. Reinhardt, who came to Princeton in 1968, taught Description and Analysis of Price Systems last fall and The Development and Use of Accounting Data this spring. Although he's an expert in the economics of the health-care industry, Reinhardt says that he specializes in teaching, his "great love." Professor of History Robert C. Darnton has won the National Book Critics Circle's 1995 criticism award for The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (W. W. Norton). An expert in 18th-century France, Darnton was on leave at Oxford University this semester.

SEVEN PROFESSORS EARN TENURE
The trustees have approved the promotion of the following to the tenured rank of associate professor: Marguerite A. Browning in the Humanities Council, Elizabeth Diller in architecture, Andrew P. Dobson in ecology and evolutionary biology, Margaret M. Larkin in Near Eastern studies, Richard A. Register in chemical engineering, Jacqueline I. Stone in religion, and Mark A. Wigley in architecture.
Browning's research is in syntactic theory, which examines the nature of the knowledge possessed by native speakers about how sentences are formed in their language. She teaches linguistics and language acquisition, phonology, and advanced topics in syntax. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1987.
Diller, who joined the faculty in 1990, has been a member of the collaborative team of Diller+Scofidio, an interdisciplinary practice that combines architecture, performing arts, and visual arts, since 1979. A graduate of the Cooper Union School of Architecture, she teaches design studios and is the director of graduate studies.
Dobson, an expert in the ecology of parasitism and infectious disease, also studies the ecology and social system of elephants and a range of problems in conservation biology. He teaches population ecology, a field course in tropical biology, and a freshman seminar on disease in human history. Dobson earned a D.Phil. in biology from Oxford University in 1981.
Larkin teaches medieval and modern Arabic literature. A member of the faculty since 1989, she received her Ph.D. in Middle Eastern languages and cultures from Columbia. Her field is Egyptian neoclassical poetry, including the works of Ahmad Shawqi.
Register, a specialist in polymer science and engineering, studies the structure and properties of complex polymeric materials. He teaches a chemical engineering lab and courses on polymers. Register holds two B.S. degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He joined the faculty in 1990.
Stone's field is Japanese Buddhism. Her current research concerns deathbed rituals and representations of dying in medieval Japan. She teaches courses on Japanese religion and on Buddhism. Stone earned her 1974 B.A. in Japanese and English at San Francisco State University and received her 1990 Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty in 1990.
Wigley, who studies the history of architectural theory, came to Princeton in 1987 as a lecturer in the School of Architecture and was promoted to assistant professor in 1989. His writing focuses on the structural role of ornament throughout the history of architectural discourse. He graduated in 1979 from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he also received his Ph.D. in architecture in 1986.

RESEARCH SHORTS
Complex fluids: Princeton has entered into a research agreement with Rhône-Poulenc, the world's seventh largest chemicals and pharmaceuticals company, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) to study complex fluids. CNRS is France's vehicle for government support of basic scientific research. The agreement was signed March 12. The lab will be located at Rhône-Poulenc/CNRS headquarters in Cranbury, New Jersey, and will be fully operational by midsummer. Professor of Chemical Engineering Robert K. Prud'homme and William B. Russel, chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering, will sit on the lab's advisory board. The facility will support four or five graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and four undergraduate summer interns. Complex fluids include such everyday items as detergents, shampoos, and medication solutions. Researchers will focus on water-based mixtures to make them less costly and more environmentally friendly.

Cosmology: A team of Princeton scientists will build the microwave instrument for a satellite to be constructed at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The satellite, scheduled for launch in 2001, will be propelled into space by the medium-sized rocket of NASA's new Explorer Program. NASA announced on April 10 the selection of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) for the mission. It will map the cosmic background radiation from the earliest epoch of the universe. Professor of Physics David T. Wilkinson, Associate Professor of Physics Lyman A. Page, Jr., researcher Norman C. Jarosik, and Associate Professor of Astrophysical Sciences David N. Spergel '82 will receive $12 million to build the microwave instrument. MAP will look at physical processes that happened at the atom-forming epoch. That information should answer some of the big questions in cosmology such as: what is the rate of expansion of the universe (Hubble's constant) and how does that rate vary with time? MAP should also shed light on how and when the universe evolved into the structures of galaxies and of clusters and superclusters of galaxies that we see. More information on the MAP mission can be found on the World Wide Web at http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov.


paw@princeton.edu