Debenedetti declined to comment, citing the Prince policy that only the editor-in-chief is authorized to speak to the media; Schelling did not respond to requests for comment. In an email to the Prince staff, president of the Prince grad board Richard W. Thaler, Jr. noted that it was a “difficult decision” for Debenedetti, thanked him for his service, and summed it all up as “a painful moment for Gabe, a challenging moment for Ameena, and a hopeful moment for the Prince.”

This is known as "steeplechase."

Meanwhile, some more literal batons were being passed. While you were trolling Hulu or interning or exploring exotic locales on the Princeton dollar, a handful of your peers were running extremely quickly in Iowa. Donn Cabral ‘12 and Ashley Higginson ‘11 both notched top-10 finishes at the track and field NCAA Championships in Des Moines, and a total of 12 Tigers earned All-America honors. That includes the members of the 4×400 relay team, who were profiled in a fresh NYT piece a while back.

On a more stationary note, the University announced some changes to its Board of Trustees. You’ll spot some familiar faces in the mix: Justice Sonia Sotomayor ends her term on the board, while eBay’s Meg Whitman and journalist Charlie Gibson hop on. As does the recently elected Young Alumni Trustee, Aku Ammah-Tagoe ‘11. Check back soon to read Aku’s 21 answers to our 21 Questions.

(image courtesy of nj.com)

Cool tie. (from Politico.com)

Last May, the Prince and Mudd Library launched the Larry DuPraz Digital Archives, which offers scans of The Daily Princetonian from its early issues in 1876 through 2002. Going through the collection, named after the paper’s former production manager and informal adviser, is like stepping back in history. I highly recommend it, when you’re feeling a bit of that Princeton nostalgia, or wondering if Wendy Kopp ‘89 lived in your dorm room. Sit back, click around, and travel back to a time when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was that senior who was always winning awards and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was that kid who got arrested after the drug bust in his room in Cuyler.

Wait, what?

So, the real reason I started looking into the Prince archives was because I stumbled across a Politico blog post about Daniels’ curious arrest in 1970. (Unfortunately, the Prince archives aren’t available for that year–they’re in the process of uploading every year.) Daniels, one of the frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination, was charged with two counts, marijuana possession and maintaining a nuisance (the nuisance being his room, 111 Cuyler, out of which undercover officers said they purchased marijuana and LSD.)

From Politico:

According to campus newspaper reports supplied by the university, Daniels and two other students were swept up in a five-month joint investigation between New Jersey state police and local police that culminated in the May 14th, 1970 raid on Daniels’ shared room at 111 Cuyler Hall.

…

A local detective testified that police had seized “enough marijuana to fill two size 12 shoe boxes and quantities of prescription drugs were found in the room,” according to a dispatch in the Daily Princetonian, whose archives aren’t available online for that year.

The undercover state police officer involved in the sting visited Daniels’ room “eight or nine times” and “observed narcotics paraphernalia, saw marijuana and hashish being used, and purchased marijuana prescription drugs and LSD.”

In 1988, when he declined to seek Dan Quayle’s Indiana Senate seat, the former Wilson School major told the Prince that after his arrest, he believed that “any goal I might have had for competing for public office were shot.” He later reconsidered, citing other elected officials with histories of drug use, but concluded that he wasn’t “the least bit interested” in working in Washington.

Mitch Daniels at CPAC (from LATimes.com)

It looks like Daniels, known as a smart, middle-of-the-road conservative (think anti-Palin), may have changed his mind. The Los Angeles Times reports that he has promised to make a decision about whether he will run for president in 2012 by May.

To read more about him, check out this profile in Newsweek by Press Club alum Andrew Romano ‘04 (whose Twitter account tipped me off to Daniels’ Princeton adventures–though the main point of the tweet was, look at that tie, and, I know right?)

wikipedia

Last week’s bat sighting in the Daily Princetonian building got me thinking (in numbered list form):

1a) What other critters might “accidentally” find their way into the office of Princeton’s paper of record?  And which of those animals would be big enough, strange enough, “newsworthy” enough, to force Da’ Prince’ to violate one of the cardinal commandments of journalism: “Thou shalt not report on thyself in the pages of thine own newspaper”?

2a) BATMAN. Thanks to 2005’s Batman Begins, everyone knows that the Caped Crusader attended Princeton in his youth. Attended, past tense. But what if the Prince-bat was meant as a public declaration that the B-man is back?

Well I got to thinkin’, and then I got to investigatin’, and now it’s time for some answerin’ answers.

1b) According to sources at the Prince, either “something big enough to eat you” OR “any animal you wouldn’t expect [ie, any non-indigenous species]” would warrant mention in the paper.  Good to know from a completely theoretical standpoint!

2b) Batman’s actually here. For real for real. His email is batman@princeton.edu.  His job is to keep us safe (from others, sure, but also from ourselves).  He’s not the hero we want; he’s the hero we need. “A silent guardian. A watchful protector.” BUT WHO IS THIS MASKED AVENGER?…

His name is David Tricoche (né Wayne?). He is a Public Safety Lieutenant. He is Batman…@princeton.edu.

We emailed “Lieutenant Tricoche” to find out what’s up.  Does he deny his double life as the Dark Knight?

Yes, he does.

“When email first started at Princeton, to my knowledge everyone was allowed to select their own email name. I’m a comic-anime fan, so I chose the name of a character who I liked,” he wrote. “It does make it easy to remember because it’s simple and stands out.”

Got it, Bru… Lieutenant Tricoche.  Just a netid.  You’re not Batman; Clark Kent is just a “humble reporter”; Peter Parker’s a “science dweeb”; and that grizzly bear and/or toucan in the Prince office tomorrow totally just wandered in off the street, no idea how that happened, it was the weirdest thing.

Some students are wondering what happened to that debate and whatever became of the conversation:

As quickly as things got heated in Princeton, they cooled down. Following the controversy that erupted after The Daily Princetonian published an op-ed about sexual assault, the buzz fizzled, and many students think the charged debate over rape hasn’t changed campus culture.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post.

Jezebel, a self-proclaimed feminist blog in the Gawker network, has seen their coverage blow up with user feedback, having more than 15,000 views and 713 comments on their story at the time of this posting. Gawker has 296 comments and more than 14,000 views.

Blogs aren’t the only interested parties. Amelia Thomson-Deveaux ‘11, co-editor of the feminist blog EqualWrites.org, tells us that a Fox News reporter sent an email on the subject to the EqualWrites address earlier today. At this point she doesn’t “know what their plan is.”

The Daily Princetonian has not issued a response to the controversy. Mendy Fisch ‘11, executive editor for opinion, declined to comment for this post on Princetonian standards for vetting potentially inflammatory opinion pieces or the process of editing and approving opinion pieces.  He also declined to comment on the Prince’s rationale for running this particular piece by an aspiring regular columnist.

Jack Ackerman ‘11, editor-in-chief of and spokesperson for the Daily Princetonian, has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

What’s the hubbub about? At the risk of reducing Neagu’s argument, the gist of the piece is this:

She knew what would happen if she started drinking. We all know that the more people drink, the less likely they are to make wise decisions. It is common sense.

Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.

The Princetonian’s own website has a current 231 comments at the time of this posting, and the paper printed a response to the opinion from members of SHARE and SpeakOut on Tuesday.

The take-away: High school seniors don’t care about how high the acceptance rate is! They’re not going to judge you for it, Ivy League schools (and University of Chicago!). They just want to get in!

From the joke issue:

The University received an astonishingly low 10,943 applications for the Class of 2014, representing a 50 percent drop from last year, a stunned Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Tuesday. If the University accepts roughly 2,150 people from the applicant pool this April — as it did last spring — the school’s acceptance rate would more than double, to 20.1 percent.

“I will be delighted to be able to offer admission to more students,” Rapelye said. “It’s only good for us. They are so strong and so powerful.”

Reactions after the jump.

The first post, of the “I CAN’T BELIEVE I DIDN’T APPLY” variety:

The fooled, next:

The earnest high school junior:

And, as per College Confidential tradition…the toolish, long-winded analysis that references things like “college-to-student contact,” under-represented minorities and low-income students:

from blog.nielsen.com

Sure, you might read a copy of the Prince while eating your cornflakes, or grab a Nassau Weekly off the table when you head out of the dining hall–but campus media is headed to the Internet.

Princeton’s newest publications–Equal Writes, American Education Review, which launches in December, and this blog–have all been web-only, and will likely stay that way. 127-year-old Tiger Magazine recently relaunched its website, adding consistently updated content, and American Foreign Policy has done the same.

The Prince is also shifting toward a more web-oriented model, says editor-in-chief Matt Westmoreland ‘10.

“Not only is there so much more we can do on our Web site that we can’t do in print, but there will come a time in the future when The Daily Princetonian is an online-only publication,” Westmoreland said. “We need to make sure that we’re making as much progress as we can, so that when that time comes … we’ve built a new media infrastructure that will have the opportunity to grow even more.”

To read more, check out the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Wait, okay, hold on, don’t look at me that way. Come on, it’s really not a bad publication. It’s actually quite informative and presents some interesting points of view.

User 'complacent biz alum' takes time out of his day to comment

…Maybe I should qualify that. I usually read the Prince online, and typically only the comments. Because, Jesus, have you seen those things? They’re kind of like what I imagine would happen if you shoved 20 of those “that guy from precept” into a room and asked them to argue about abortion. And you gave them lots of Adderall beforehand. And they all had funny names like “mr hat” or “t-bone” or pretended to be “Shirley Tilghman.”

I mean, don’t you guys remember this comment thread after the Prince reported Princeton had admitted 9.79% of applicants last year? Classic. Just absolutely brilliant reading, I’m serious. Leave it to Princeton students to be absolutely enraged over – what else – exclusivity.

But hey, don’t believe me? Gonna keep on glossing over the comments? Fine, let’s look at a few cases.

Take for example this story from yesterday’s paper, called “From the West Wing to the Wilson School.” It’s concerning former Bush Chief of Staff Josh Bolten ’76’s return to Princeton to teach an undergraduate seminar about public policy and the Office of Management and Budget.

(For the sake of clarity, Bolten was a deputy chief of staff at the White House after 9/11 and was appointed by President Bush in 2003 to be director of the OMB.)

Of course, Princeton students had lots to say about the issue. One insightful commenter responded to Bolten saying he carries the Constitution in his pocket:

Posted by t-bone

Josh Bolten surely has a wealth of insight to provide to future GOP staffers as to the best way to turn our economy into a train wreck. I’m also curious if he updated his pocket constitution by lining through the 4th Ammendment to reflect the Bush administration’s illegal spying on US citizen’s without a warrant. When is Rumsfeld coming back to Old Nassau to teach a course on the Geneva Conventions? What an embarrassment.

Mr. T-Bone, here, opts for the sarcastic route in order to say, “Hey, Bolten, thanks a lot for the economic crisis, buddy!” He also uses the comment to sound off on Bush’s wire-tapping, which isn’t quite related to the subject at hand, but is still appreciated, thank you.

Yet leave it to a Princeton student to be forceful and direct in his comment. A bright Princeton junior does Mr. T-Bone one better:

Posted by prince ‘10

go back now u freak. you did this to the economy, idiot.

We can see here so clearly the four years of a Princeton liberal arts education just absolutely crystallized in one firm, declarative statement. Go back, u freak, idiot. Well said, sir.

And, after a while, you start noticing a couple types of commenters cropping up. Take, for example, the recent news article announcing the new coed housing option for 2010.

First up, we have the ornery alum who’s always angry about the darned tootin’ Commies changin’ Princeton!:

Posted by concerned alum

Please, no. PC has gotten out of control. Fight back, Princeton!!!

Uh oh! Someone’s, well, concerned. Please, don’t change things from how they were two/forty years ago!

And then, of course, there’s always the really funny guy who types out a long comment with lots of Princeton stereotypes and exclamation points that, of course, show he’s being really!!! sarcastic!!!:

Posted by Princeton Pride

This is PC gone way out of control!!! It’s time to bring back the good ol’ days of Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton, back when white men were in charge of Nassau Hall and the White House!!! There was no need to worry then about girls distracting our boys on campus and them darn minorities and sexual perverts gettin’ too uppity!!! Thank God for the good people of groups like the Anscombe Society, exclusive eating clubs, and certain politics professors who keep morals alive and relevant in Princeton!!!

…Only to have it completely misunderstood by some really touchy idiot two posts later -

Posted by @Princeton Pride

fuck off you racist/sexist

You tell ‘em, @Princeton Pride! Your ability to capture and process irony in the English language is second only to your dirty mouth.

Of course, not everyone’s totally interested. Indeed, in this case, user “jas” was offering a bit more than just opinion:

Two gay guys can already room together if they want. This is about guys and girls being able to room together.
bisexual,gay,lesbian meet http://www.FindBilover.com

So in case anyone out there’s looking to room with a total stranger/bi lover next year in coed housing, please, by all means, jas is looking out for you.

Then, one of my personal favorites, the “poster posing as a person who is mentioned in the article responding to other commenter’s reactions.” It’s funnier sometimes because, you think, maybe that’s the real person? Which is not the case in a recent article about Cornel West:

Posted by C. West

Yo Princeton Haters, I’m really happy for you. I’mma let you finish. But Cornel West is one of the best rappers/professors of all time. One of the best of all time!

Well-played nonetheless (the Kanye thing still kills me!).

I guess, to conclude, and to take a comment slightly out of context, we have the realistic, self-aware, and surprised current student:

Posted by P’11

Wow, these reactions are ridiculous.

I know, right?

(image source: amazon.com)

In his upcoming book Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever, novelist Walter Kirn ‘83 writes about his experience at  Princeton, where, as he said in an interview with the Chicago Maroon, he felt “alienated among the indoctrinated.”

The book description on Amazon describes the university as:

an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor’s critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional.

Compare that to a comment on an article in the Daily Princetonian posted today:

who comes to pton to “learn”? pton is a means for the end that is employment with a high salary/status/etc. with this ridiculous deflation policy, cheating will only increase as people realize that in the real world, no one cares about your “honor” but rather your gpa.

Huh.

Our favorite excerpt from Kirn’s article “Lost in the Meritocracy”, published in the Atlantic in 2005:

“Remove the blindfold,” Leslie said.

When I raised my dazzled eyes, I saw, about fifty yards in front of me, surrounded by stately trees, an actual castle, with countless tall windows and pediments and columns. In the center of its crescent driveway stood an enormous dry fountain of leaping cupids.

“My family’s estate,” Leslie said. “Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!”

With that he ran back to his car and drove away.

Oh my god, what? In what world does that happen?

We want to know, what’s been your most absurd Princeton experience?

The Prince reported this week that “tweeting” has increased in popularity recently, and has attracted the attention of a few big names on Princeton’s campus, namely Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Cornel West. Not mentioned was Peter Singer, who also updates his Twitter quite frequently.

It’s to be expected that these update-streams from noted scholars at a prestigious institution should be self-referential, yes, and perhaps even a bit introverted. But these three take it to a new level.Indeed, Ms. Lacewell, Mr. West, and Mr. Singer seem to “tweet” only about… themselves. Of course, that’s what Twitter’s all about, right? The homepage asks all the same question: “What are you doing?”

But while celebrities like Shaq, Diddy, and Seth Rogen often give “shout outs” to their fans and regularly respond to others’ posts, this Princeton trifecta manages to keep their tweeting furiously egocentric.

On March 29th, former NPR host Farai Chideya posted about a lecture Lacewell was to give at Harvard. Lacewell responded with, “Thanks for the support. Wish u were here. Wish I could still hear your voice daily. We need a show.”

Alright, one instance of turning an offhand comment into a self-referential boast. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Lacewell’s April Fools “joke” was to post, “After Harvard lecture last night I was offered 7 pm slot on MSNBC beginning next week!” After receiving a couple responses congratulating her, she admitted it was a prank but “thanks for thinking it ’should’ be true!”

Don’t worry; it’s okay to cringe.

Cornel West isn’t shy about self-aggrandizing either. Since West’s first post on February 27th, nine out of the scholar’s ten posts have been quotes… of his own.

Peter Singer, on the other hand, focuses mainly on his new book,The Life You Can Save which addresses the ethics of the poverty issue. But he also focuses on how often he goes on shows to talk about it. And who reviews it for the Wall Street Journal. Oh, and book signings and readings. Also, the fact that “Shapoor Mohamadi, from the UK, is going to present the book to his Member of Parliament. Nice idea.” Oh, and that due to the “generosity of Erroll Treslan, a Canadian citizen, every Canadian MP is going to receive a copy of The Life You Can Save.”

Singer is altruistic. And everyone should frickin’ know it, damn it.

It’s all a bit dizzying, perhaps even nauseating, but at least they’re not sticking their head in the public sector.

And while on the subject of warped vanity, Mr. Singer has an adorable set of photographs of himself (cuddling with animals, no less), on his website. If it weren’t so cute, the whole thing would be painful.

(image source: twitter.com)