Notebook - February 24, 1999
Princeton is still a too-white
campus
The university is stepping up efforts at diversifying faculty, students
Look around the Princeton campus, and you see mostly white faces in dorm rooms and offices and lecture halls. After examining statistics on the diversity of the faculty, staff, and student body last summer, Provost Jeremiah P. Ostriker concluded that while the university has made great progress overall, it is "surprisingly weak" in some areas. So Princeton is embarking on its latest initiative to attract more minorities and women.
The university, said Ostriker, is targeting specific areas where women and minorities are underrepresented, including minorities at the assistant-professor level; minorities at the senior-staff level; and the School of Engineering, which is lacking in black and female faculty members and black graduate students. Princeton will continue to strengthen efforts in areas where it has achieved good results, he said, including the undergraduate student body.
The university's strategy is still being developed, said Associate Provost
Joann Mitchell. Princeton must focus not only on its recruitment efforts,
she said, but also on retention -- by making the climate academically and
socially more appealing to minorities.
In 1997-98, about two thirds of the student body was white; 12.8 percent was Asian-American, 7.1 black, 6.4 Latino, and .7 Native American.
That same year, 11 full professors were black, 8 were Hispanic, 27 were Asian-American, and 384 were white. Thirteen percent of full professors were women. Among executive officers of the university in the fall of 1998, none were black, 3.8 percent were Hispanic, 8.7 percent were Asian, and 19.2 percent were women.
Compared to the other Ivy League institutions, Princeton can do better in attracting a diverse faculty, said Mitchell, particularly black and Latino faculty members.
"There is a very dominant culture [at Princeton] and it is not mine," said Associate Professor of Sociology and Master of Wilson College Miguel A. Centeno, who is Cuban. "A lot of people feel that way."
"Something is lacking in all research universities" because none of their faculties are diverse, said Centeno, who said he sometimes feels alienated at Princeton. The perception is that wise people are of one gender, race, and class, he added, which is a dangerous impression to make on undergraduates. It is important that students see that the "face of knowledge can take many forms."
A more multicultural faculty would bring different perspectives to the social sciences and humanities, said Centeno. A more diverse faculty would not enhance research, he said, but it would probe a broader set of questions. Mitchell said that "students are hungry" for histories and views not included in the curriculum.
A more diverse faculty offering a richer spectrum of courses might help attract more minority students, said Jessica J. Marquez '99, president of the Latin American Organization. In the view of Jade K. Wagner '00, vice-president of the Princeton section of the National Council of Negro Women, more black faculty members, in particular, would provide black students with role models: "It can be disheartening when the majority of my classes are taught by white males."
A more diverse student body would help Princeton fulfill part of its mission, observed Ostriker: "Princeton wants to educate leaders of all groups. Therefore, if we find ourselves remaining narrow, we're just not doing our job for society."
Although Nell I. Painter, the Edwards Professor of American History, is heartened by Ostriker's readiness to admit to the university's shortcomings, she said that recruiting black faculty members is an especially difficult task at most institutions because of the "assumption that African Americans are stupid." No one says it, she said, but it works against hiring them to do "brain work."
Students have complained that the social environment -- particularly the club scene on Prospect Avenue -- is not appealing to minorities. "Many minorities still feel the 'Street' caters to a white audience because of the music played and the huge emphasis on drinking," said Wagner.
Mitchell mentioned several actions the university is taking to increase diversity. A young alumnus is working in the Office of Admission to help develop ways to strengthen outreach to students of color. In addition, the university will provide funds to help prospective students from low-income families and minorities visit the campus in the fall. Princeton is also strengthening the Program in African-American Studies; and Painter, its director, is leading an aggressive effort to recruit leading scholars in the field.
As the university embarks on the latest initiatives, the climate about affirmative action at some elite colleges is charged. The Center for Individual Rights, a conservative public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., that has sued colleges over race-based admission policies, launched a campaign in January to urge students and trustees to reform what it sees as unlawful admissions policies.
Marquez predicts change will come slowly, if at all. "Princeton is very much set in its way," she said. And the environment at Princeton doesn't help -- a mostly white student body in a mostly white, suburban town. "Why expect it to change?" she asked. "It will take years," cautioned Mitchell. "We just have to be realistic."
Ostriker is more optimistic, noting that the university recruited five female professors in the sciences and engineering last year. "The face of Princeton," he said, "is changing."
-- Kathryn Federici Greenwood
Tuition and fees rise 3.5 percent,
to $31,599
The budget-setting Priorities Committee has recommended a 3.5 percent increase in the undergraduate tuition and fees, bringing the cost of a Princeton education for the 1999-2000 academic year to $31,599. (Last year's increase was 3.7 percent.) While running ahead of a national inflation rate of .8 percent, the 3.5 percent increase continues an almost decade-long effort to reduce the rate of increase of the comprehensive fees and is the lowest percentage increase in more than 30 years.
Next year, tuition will go up 3.4 percent to $24,630; room charges will increase 6 percent to $3,262, and board charges will increase 2 percent to $3,707. Tuition for graduate students will increase 3.4 percent to $24,630. Their room and board charges will increase 3.4 percent.
The trustees approved a change to the financial aid program: starting next academic year, the university will no longer take external scholarships into account when calculating financial need. Princeton's policy has been to split the benefits of an outside scholarship with the student: roughly half of outside scholarship funds go to reduce a student's self-help (loan or job expectations), while the rest replace Princeton's own grant awards. The new policy will mean that all of an outside scholarship will go to replace self-help until the student no longer has a loan or job; only at that point will outside awards begin to replace Princeton grants. This change will cost about $75,000 per class per year.
The committee presented a balanced budget for next year totaling $614 million, including additional funds for graduate students in the form of the Presidential Fellows program, which provides support for women in the sciences and engineering and underrepresented minorities in all fields; additional funds for the Freshman Seminars Program and for library acquisitions; funds to staff and provide program support for the Frist Campus Center; and support for dance instruction in the Program in Theater and Dance.
In formulating its recommendations, the Priorities Committee took steps to rectify a projected deficit of approximately $3.2 million for the 1999-2000 fiscal year, caused by last year's enhancements to the financial aid program, as well as rising health care costs and expenses associated with running new facilities. To achieve a balanced budget, the committee banked on expected success in achieving administrative savings goals and a one-year adjustment to the university's endowment spending rule approved by the trustees. The adjustment increases the amount of the endowment earnings spent on the operating budget from just under 4 percent of the market value to approximately 4.4 percent.
Thinking about the unthinkable
The Holocaust is the most traumatic event of modern Western experience,"
declares Froma I. Zeitlin, who teaches Texts and Images of the Holocaust,
a joint offering of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Council
of the Humanities.
And it is a course like no other. It examines modes of thinking about the unthinkable and speaking about the unspeakable. Zeitlin, a professor of classics and comparative literature, says, "There is always the tension between the imperative to speak and remember the Holocaust -- which was meant to leave no trace -- with the impossibility of speaking, because there are no adequate words. The Holocaust shows us the necessity, and the limitations, of language."
Nevertheless, students study a variety of voices that bear witness to Hitler's "Final Solution." The course begins with immersion in survivor accounts, such as Elie Wiesel's Night (1958) and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (1947). They examine the Holocaust from the point of view of the perpetrators as well, with such documents as Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness (1974), which is based on interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka.
In addition to reading novels, memoirs, testimonies, and numerous official documents, students view documentary and feature films, such as Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987) and Europa, Europa (1990). They must keep a film journal and write two papers during the semester; recent topics have ranged from "The Power of Women's Communities in the Camps" to "Luther's Influence in Nazi Germany" to "Countering Denial of the Holocaust."
Online, there is an e-mail discussion group and a syllabus that contains numerous links to Holocaust resources. (The Website for Zeitlin's course is located at http://www.princeton.edu/~fiz/pucourse/com349.) Students can connect with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; an index of Holocaust bibliographies; a virtual Auschwitz; and a Holocaust glossary, elucidating terms from Anschluss (Hitler's 1938 "joining together" of Austria to Germany) to Zyklon B (used to gas millions in Nazi death camps).
This semester's class is 30 students, mostly female and, as far as Zeitlin knows, mostly non-Jewish. Both these demographic factors, she says, "puzzle me, but I have stopped wondering. All I know is that each new group of students approaches the material with urgency and engagement."
In a class discussion of the 1993 film Schindler's List, students pondered the film and its relation to their readings. They also examined their own relationship to the film and other intensely disturbing course materials as "voyeurs."
One student commented that the film, which details the efforts of the enigmatic Oskar Schindler to save Cracow Jews from death in the Plaszow labor camp, "was less shocking, less horrible than some of the narratives we've read." And despite the "terror conveyed in the scene where the women are led into the showers," one young man said, "I felt detached because the scenes were too beautiful." Students noticed "Hollywoodisms" -- for example, said another student, "having Schindler wear a white suit and the Germans wear dark suits." Still, they agreed that the film, unlike the memoirs and narratives, made them to some degree more "complicit," in Zeitlin's term, as bystander witnesses. As viewers, they were put "more in the position of the person with absolute power than in that of the powerless victims."
In discussing the character of Amon Goeth, the sadistic commandant of Plaszow, Zeitlin pointed out, "What's terrifying is that most Holocaust perpetrators, unlike Goeth, were not one-dimensional evil monsters." Hence, that week's readings included excerpts from Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors (1986) and Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1993). "We must de-demonize the perpetrators or we are lost," she declared, "since we thereby fail to understand the range of possible human behavior." Likewise, "Stereotyping the victims robs them of their identity, viewing them only as the Nazis saw them."
Zeitlin, who has been at Princeton since 1977 and taught this course since 1983, has more than an ordinary perspective on Western experience: she is Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature and a specialist in ancient Greek literature. "The subject matter of the Holocaust and the students' responses to it crystallize the mission of the humanities," she says. "The Holocaust calls into question our most cherished beliefs about the value of human life, and our need to cling to an ideal of the perfectibility of human nature."
Her thoughts turned to the Holocaust while teaching Homer's Iliad, she says. "The heroic Greek tradition is built on memorializing great people and great deeds. Its opposite is the Holocaust, dedicated to obliterating anonymous people and any memory of them in the anonymity of mass death."
Zeitlin's family came to the United States from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. As a child during World War II, she was conscious of being "an enfant sauvé -- a 'saved child,' but indelibly marked" by the fate of European Jewry. An expert on Holocaust studies, she has read "probably a thousand" memoirs and has an extensive library of diaries, historical accounts, and Holocaust-related volumes of psychology, theology, and sociology. She is also a contributor to the literature of the Holocaust, most recently with "The Vicarious Witness: Belated Memory and Authorial Presence in Recent Holocaust Literature," in History and Memory, vol. 10 (1998).
Pointing to the almost daily appearance of new Holocaust-related news stories, books, memoirs, and films, Zeitlin observes, "More than 50 years after the fact, the Holocaust seems to be with us more than ever."
-- Caroline Moseley
A reading list by Professor Froma Zeitlin
In addition to the books and films mentioned above, Zeitlin recommends:
Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck, eds., The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (1998). A compendious series of over 50 essays on virtually every aspect of the Holocaust, written by experts who give brief summaries of their findings and set the agenda for future research.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1989). This collection of essays attests to the enduring moral challenges of the Holocaust as probed by one of the greatest humanists and writers of our time.
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (1997). Delbo, a non-Jewish member of the French resistance, writes of her experiences in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck with an uncommon intensity of recollection.
Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1980). Amery, an Austrian of half-Jewish parentage, offers five philosophically compelling essays on life in the camps and its aftereffects.
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