June 7, 2006: Reading Room Coming
of age in New Jersey By Alex Barnett
Despite its name, Princeton University at the turn of the 20th century was a small liberal arts college that drew most of its students from East Coast prep schools and tended to hire its own graduates as faculty. The undergraduates — white, male, and overwhelmingly Protestant — were required to take seven classes each semester, but these didn’t interfere too much with the real business of the place: mass pilgrimages to the football field, the publication of The Daily Princetonian, and the all-important bicker. Woodrow Wilson 1879 looms large in Axtell’s story. Upon becoming University president in 1902, Wilson announced his ambition to make Princeton the best university in the country, and he pursued his vision energetically. Wilson organized the faculty into departments and brought order to the curriculum; he fired underperforming professors and hired academic stars away from other universities; he built up Princeton’s fledgling graduate school; and he raised academic standards and sought to make the undergraduates more intellectual. An outsider — Axtell is a graduate of Yale and Cambridge — and an expert on the cultures of colonial North America, the author approached Princetonians, he writes, as he would “the cultural strangeness of the 17th-century Iroquois.” In four chapters devoted to undergraduate life, Axtell delves into dress, jargon, rituals, songs, games, politics, and religion to gain access to Princeton’s student culture. Other chapters follow the growth of the faculty, the graduate school, the library, and the art museum. To research the book, Axtell perused a century’s worth of back issues of student publications and PAW, consulted with current and former faculty and staff, and studied histories, memoirs, and novels relating to Princeton. He says a University policy prohibiting access to certain official records for up to 50 years after preparation had little effect on his work because the book’s focus was not on administration policies as much as their effects. When asked the obvious question — Why Princeton? — Axtell
mentions a lifelong interest in the history of education, a fascination
with Woodrow Wilson, and the absence of any scholarly book on Princeton’s
impressive 20th-century history. “It’s a rare little tribe,
with distinctive colors and values and pride,” he says. “They’ve
got a lot going for them.” Alex Barnett is a freelance writer and staff member at the University Art Museum.
BOOK SHORTS
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