On the occasion of tonight’s Oscars, here’s a December piece from Slate.com that looks at “how F. Scott Fitzgerald decided where to send his characters to college.”
The impetus for the article stems from the omission of Harvard references in the Best Picture nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based off of Fitzgerald’s short story. In the story, Benjamin Button is a Harvard man, though in the film, he is Brad Pitt, so, like, whatever dude.
(image source: slate.com)
vs.
(image source: princeton.edu)
Meg Whitman ‘77, who has announced her intention to run for governor of California, has predicted that her campaign could cost $150 million, much of it self-financed.
The $150 million figure is about the same amount of money it took Princeton to build Whitman College ($136 million). But Whitman didn’t finance the entire cost of the fieldstone/limestone clusterfuck that was built to last 200(!) years: she “just” donated the initial $30 million to kick start the project.
This, of course, means that Whitman loves California about five times more than she loves Princeton. Alternatively, it could also mean that her campaign will be five times better than Whitman College, which can only be a good thing because the 250,000 sq. ft. complex is an ugly monstrosity.
(Also: Did you know that Community Hall, Whitman’s dining hall [a.k.a. barn], isn’t named for the Princeton University community, but for the eBay community? WTF?)
SACHS SCHOLAR DUMPSTER DIVES, FIGHTS SCARY CITADEL CADETS, & SCREAMS LIKE A GIRL (refer to video after the jump)
Name: Alexander Vosick Barnard
Age: 21
Major: Sociology
Hometown: Flagstaff, Arizona
Eating club/residential college/affiliation: One man Spelman vegan cooperative.
Who’s your favorite Princetonian, living or dead, real or fictional?
Sean Gleason.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in Princeton?
Full Eggplant Parmesean (minus the Parmesean) from Hoagie Haven. By merit of being from Hoagie Haven, it’s probably 80% meat by osmosis, but we all have indulgences.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day?
Sit around and read about people who are trying to change the world, and try to figure out why everything still sucks.
What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
Tormenting librarians. There’s nothing that I get more of a kick out of than wandering into a university at library at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday and joining the band in a serenade of “Tequila.” We were definitely not planning to do that at the Citadel before our plans were derailed by the cadets attacking us.
The couple who brought you Wilson College’s Feinberg Hall (1986) has been hired by the university to design the building for the newAndlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
The firm, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, is most famous for designing the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
(image source: princeton.edu)
It was, not surprisingly, very depressing.
We’ve all heard about plummeting university endowments across the country in recent months. PRINCO (which manages Princeton’s endowment) predicts our $16 billion endowment will fall 25% this fiscal year. That amounts to roughly $4 billion of Princeton’s endowment.
But even more shocking was the Powerpoint slide that showed that, under realistic conditions, Princeton’s endowment will not return to $16 billion until 2020, at the earliest (see chart above). By then, we will have children and a mortgage.
Eisgruber said it was time for us to get used to a new “normal” (in other words, being somewhat poorer). The university is facing an $82 million shortfall, and is in the midst of budget cuts. Eisgruber also said he is almost certain that Princeton will make a second round of budget cuts next year.
One piece of good news, however: Princeton will increase the financial aid budget by 13% next year.
Also at the meeting, President Tilghman promoted a new web page where anyone can suggest ideas for administrative budget cuts. So email away! Save your university!
(image source: dailyprincetonian.com)
Ben Folds
Singer-songwriter Ben Folds kicked off his winter tour here at Princeton tonight to a packed McCarter Theatre. The audience appeared to be a mix of Princeton students and area residents, including a fair number of middle-aged people (this is Princeton, after all).
Folds played a raucous two-hour set list that had the audience often singing along with him. Though he is officially promoting his last album “Way to Normal” that was released in September, Folds played nearly all of his best known songs from over the years like “Army” and “Rockin’ the Suburbs” (the latter of which is the source of the lyrics in this post’s title).
One of the two opening acts was the Nassoons, who will be featured in an upcoming compilation album of Ben Folds covers by a capella groups. The Nassoons performed three songs tonight, including Folds’ “Time,” which is the song slated to be on the CD.
The Nassoons were chosen by Folds after he announced a national contest, and were one of 18 a capella groups chosen from about 250 submissions, according to the Daily Princetonian. You can see the Nassoons’ winning Youtube submission to Folds after the jump:
Bad News Bears...
Has the population of “green haired” high school students plateaued? Shirley Tilghman’s now-infamous desire to attract students with a penchant for hairdye may be backfiring!
Princeton has suffered a second major blow to its ego in less than six months! In August, the university dropped down an entire spot to number two in the annual US News & World Report rankings, and two weeks ago, Janet Rapelye’s admissions office announced that this year’s applicant pool for the class of 2013 grew just two percent.
This figure, so far, represents the smallest growth in applications among its peer schools (Columbia and Penn have yet to release their data). As the table above shows, Brown saw a whopping 21 percent increase in applicants this year, and even Cornell reported a higher increase with three percent.
After the jump, the second table shows that Princeton’s application numbers haven’t grown as quickly over the past three years, compared to Harvard’s and Yale’s:
INCOMING USG PRESIDENT & BATMAN SHARE COMMON ENEMY
Name: Connor Lawrence Diemand-Yauman ‘10
Age: 20
Major: Psychology
Hometown: Chesterland, Ohio
Eating club/residential college/affiliation: Tower/Rocky
Who’s your favorite Princetonian, living or dead, real or fictional?
Cornel West
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in Princeton?
Thanksgiving Dinner in Whitman.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day?
Think about everything that I have to do.
