We know, we know. Princeton is apathetic. Politically, we are unengaged. Well, Occupy Princeton doesn’t seem to have received the message. Having held General Assemblies on Frist North Lawn since November 17, they occupied JP Morgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs info sessions Wednesday and Thursday nights. Their message? That sending roughly 10% of our graduates into finance goes against our motto “in the nation’s service and service of all nations.”

Dressing in business attire, about 20 students infiltrated the two info sessions, looking like they were interested students. At the end of Wednesday’s session, senior Derek Gideon yelled “Mic check!” and followed with Occupy Princeton’s speech call-and-response style. Senior Sandra Mukasa led Thursday’s mic check.

In an email sent to Occupy Princeton after the Wednesday info session, Derek told the occupiers who had been unable to attend:

The mic check at the end was awesome- the look of shock on their faces was priceless, especially as we all walked out and they realized more than half of us were protestors- and then I heard the woman leading the session declare, “Well, it’s getting close to 7…”

Though they realize they are unlikely to change the minds of anyone at the info sessions, Occupy Princeton hopes to start a discussion on campus by disrupting and bringing publicity to the info sessions. Occupiers told the Prince:

“Our goal is to open up a discussion at the University level,” said Luciana Chamorro ’12 …. “The idea is that it will spread.”

“My personal goal is to raise awareness,” occupier Robert Joyce ’13 said. “We’re young. These are some formative years. We’re around very smart people and this is our chance to challenge our views.”

The question is, on a campus known for its political apathy, will they get a positive response? Though, with about 50 people in the group, I guess they’ve proved that we’re not all Whitney Blodgetts.

The next General Assembly is Tuesday. Find the words from the mic checks after the jump.

JP Morgan/Chase

Princeton’s motto is:
In the nation’s service and service of all nations
JP Morgan, your actions violate our motto
Your predatory lending practices helped crash our economy
We’ve bailed out your executives’ bonuses
You’ve evicted struggling homeowners while taking their tax money
You support mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia
which destroys our ecological future
In light of these actions,
we protest the campus culture
that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street
as a prestigious career path.
We are here today
as a voice for the 99%
shut out by a system that punishes them
just for being born without privilege.
What we need is not a university for the 1%,
but a university “In the Nation’s Service,
and in the Service of All Nations.

Goldman Sachs

Princeton’s motto is:
In the nation’s service and service of all nations
Goldman, your actions violate our motto.
In 2001, you helped mask Greek Debt.
From 2007-2008, your imposed commodity market
contributed to the global food crisis
with a quarter-million people starving.
In 2008, you paid a mere $14 million Dollars in global tax,
while making a $2 billion profit.
Your lending practices helped crash our economy
Our bailout dollars went to your executives’ bonuses
In light of these actions,
we protest the campus culture
that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street
as a prestigious career path.
We are here today
as a voice for the 99%
shut out by a system that punishes them
just for being born without privilege.
Dear Fellow Princeton Students,
We are here to ask you for a moment of reflection.
Deciding on a future career path is difficult
It deserves serious introspection.
When you came to Princeton as a wide eyed freshman,
you probably didn’t dream of working at Goldman Sachs.
What happened?
We are all privileged to have made it to Princeton.
However, our talents will be wasted
if we send all our best and brightest to Wall Street.
Some of you joke that you’re going over to the dark side.
To the Gold Man Sacks.
Those nicknames exist for a reason
You’ve heard that investment banking is an exciting, fast-paced career.
That is what smart people like you do.
You’ve been told that this is what success looks like.
We are here to challenge those beliefs
What you’ve been listening to is a carefully crafted recruitment pitch.
You can do better for yourselves
and you can do better for our society.
Princeton is a university “In the Nation’s Service,
and in the Service of All Nations.”
We invite you to join us at our next General Assembly.

Agrawal, a math major and former co-president of Engineers Without Borders, is currently getting his master’s in economic policy evaluation at the National University of Ireland on a Mitchell Scholarship. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in financial economics.

Butterworth, a classics major interested in arts education, will pursue a master’s in comparative and international education. While at Princeton she founded and directed a music program for children of low-income families, and she has worked on excavations in Greece and Italy.

Rosenbaum, a Woody Woo major with minors in African American studies, Judaic studies, and Near Eastern studies, is the president of SHARE Peer Advisors and the Religious Life Council. She is interested in bioethics and healthcare policy and plans to do a master’s in public health.

Stuth, an East Asian studies major who hopes to pursue a career in diplomacy, went to high school in Hong Kong and has represented the US in debate competitions in China in Chinese. She’s also president of the Tigressions and co-founder of a peace conference for U.S. and Iraqi teenagers. Stuth plans to pursue a master’s in international relations.

Check back this week for more on this year’s winners. But did you notice something unusual about the 2012 Rhodes contingent?

Sure, we got more this year than we usually do. Historically, we’ve trailed other Ivy League schools in the number of winners – since 2002, Princeton has claimed 19 to Harvard’s 47 (to be fair, Princeton has a smaller student body). This year, only Stanford topped Princeton, with five, while Harvard and Brown joined us in a three-way-tie for second.

But even more surprising? There were girls! Butterworth, Rosenbaum and Stuth are the first Princeton women to win the Rhodes since 2003. This year’s trio doubled Princeton’s total number of women Rhodes winners over the past 11 years.

President Tilghman said last year that the gender gap was one of the reasons she founded the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership – particularly after the Rhodes scholarship trust chairman asked her why Princeton had so few female winners.

The timing – Princeton’s biggest-ever class of women winners just one year later – is pretty striking, and not entirely coincidental. Dierdre Moloney, director of fellowship advising, said the jump was “in many ways an outgrowth of the Steering Committee.” The three faculty advisors for Rhodes and Marshall fellowships – Professors Alan Ryan, Melissa Lane and Eric Gregory – were “highly committed to broadening the applicant pool.”

“It was clear this was a priority at Princeton,” Moloney said. “Faculty and other campus mentors, including those who were writing letters in support of applications, were also aware of this lack of representation (as publicized by the report) and encouraged many outstanding women to apply.”

And while the report put a spotlight on the gender gap that may have encouraged more women to apply for fellowships, there were also new mentoring programs with recent Marshall and Rhodes Scholar alumni, graduate students and postdocs aimed at encouraging more students, regardless of gender, to apply for fellowships.

“Mentoring made it much less daunting for potential applicants who could see someone just slightly older than themselves successfully navigate the process,” Moloney said.

Next question: If it worked for the gender gap, think we can get a Steering Committee report to start chipping away at the slightly embarrassing Harvard-Princeton gap?

Triangle sold out so fast when people thought this was a real Sondheim-adapted rap musical.

Cornel West, African-American Studies/Religion professor and one of our many celebrity academics, recently announced that he will be leaving his Princeton post in 2012 to teach Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, the school where he first began his career in academia.

For his time at Princeton, West will be remembered for more than just his commitment to paideia (which I learned is not a Spanish rice dish), his multiple political arrests, and his theological bromance with fellow professor Robbie George.

Oh, and that time his cartoon self roundhouse kicked some R. Kelly supporter in the Boondocks.

Since he began teaching at Princeton in 2001, West’s radical liberal politics have made him a controversial figure. A smattering of editorials and always well-phrased comments in the Prince since his arrival highlight the various opinions on West: “Princeton’s foremost hire” to “clownish entertainer,” “hero” to “charlatan,” and “exemplary human being” to “media whore.” My crowd of friends isn’t a big fan of West either, and as one friend once put it: “Why is he in academics at all? Why does he matter?”

I’ll be honest. Despite his platitudes, gangster proclivities, and propensity for showmanship, I believe Professor West matters.

After following (not creeping) West around and hearing him speak to various communities, both in academics and outside of them, I understand why some in the academic community object to his pathos-heavy, Baptist-preacher style of lecturing. He doesn’t fit the mold of your standard university professor. Princeton kids aren’t used to lecture information being disseminated like a Sunday morning sermon.

But Professor West matters in a different way to the African American community at large. When he spoke at the One Table Café dinner last year, a community dinner comprised of lower-income families and youth from Princeton, Trenton, and Camden, that’s when I really got up close and personal with Professor West. (Literally, two feet from his face.) And that’s the relative distance needed to really understand the impact that he has on the African American community.

As one person I spoke to at the dinner put it best, “He is one of the few black male role models these kids have today who isn’t either an athlete or a rapper.” (Granted, he does have a rap group named after him.) As an academic, West is a model of how intellectualism, faith, and badassery can co-exist for a community with a long history of academic disenfranchisement and systematic oppression. The students at the dinner were enraptured. They asked him question after question about his feelings on the political implications of rap music, intellectualism, President Obama, etc. This was West doing what he does best: engaging, provoking, and inspiring — something he doesn’t change or curtail once behind a lecture podium.

I could go on about our need for Afrocentrism, radical academia, and an energized dialogue on race and religion at Princeton, but my point is, Professor Cornel West matters as a role model in the academic sphere — if not for us, then for a generation of young intellectuals coming from places with less privilege than our Orange Bubble.

Okay, maybe I’m just hoping that he’ll secure me a seat on the Council of Zion to combat the rise of the machines.

I know kung fu too, Keanu.

Well, that changed for a little while on Friday night, as the “Occupy the Highway” march came through our secluded glen, Washington Post reporter in tow, on their way down to D.C. They were met by erudite, thoughtful students who shared their divergent views on economic theory and philosophy with the protestors.

Just kidding.

The conflagration began after Princeton student Whitney Blodgett started to yell at the marchers as they passed by the bar. “We’re the 1 percent!” Blodgett yelled at them, laughing and making a thumbs up sign. “Get a job!” his friends yelled in chorus.

Alcohol. Freshmen. Pseudonyms. (The reporter was initially given the name “Whetney Brockton.”) Light jeering. Yup, those are all the elements I would want present for the lead anecdote about Princeton students’ views on the Occupy movement. Fortunately, the Post was able to get a different student viewpoint, too. What did this other student, incidentally also a freshman and, according to the Post, the only person to show up in support of the march, have to say about the general sentiment on campus?

“That’s what happens when you come to a campus of ibankers,” the student, who did not give her name, said. “Princeton students are benefitting from this system, so why would they protest?”

In the comments section of the blog post, one commenter mentioned that Blodgett reminded him of the preppy Harvard douchebag in Good Will Hunting. It’s my favorite scene in the movie — a rich, pretentious, ponytailed jerk trying to intellectually bully Ben Affleck, a southie kid who doesn’t belong in his Harvard bar, only to get his ass handed to him by Matt Damon and the fine Boston Public Library system. After Matt Damon proves conclusively that he’s smarter than this first year grad student, the only thing the blonde asshole can fall back on in his sorry self-defense is that he’s going to get a Harvard degree and make boatloads of money while Damon will be “serving my kids fries at a drive through on our way to a skiing trip.” (Damon gets the girl, by the way — how do you like them apples?)

The point is, Princeton students deserve better than to be represented by a caricature. It’s not the Post writer’s fault, of course — she was just reporting what she saw, which happened to be a near-perfect encapsulation of so many of the negative stereotypes levied against Princeton. What’s more, the tensions in the story gesture towards some real truths about Princeton. We aren’t a particularly politically active group of kids; the campus political bent is perhaps more conservative than our peers; a lot of us go into finance; and there hasn’t been the sort of public support for the Occupy movement that other schools have seen.

But those issues aren’t the reason why I cringe when I read the blog post. It’s how much “Brockton” resembles that Harvard kid, in all his smug superiority:

“The fact is, America is a society that values skill,” said Blodgett, after calming down. “If I was in their position and didn’t have a skill or job, I guess I’d do the same thing.”

Like his fictional Harvard counterpart, our impromptu spokesperson seems fluent in projecting his rosy future: the job he’ll have, the skills he’ll acquire, and the money he’ll make. But what makes our preppy douchebags different is that they don’t even pretend to be smarter than the people they disagree with; they just jump straight to the condescending entitlement. And it’s only one kid, or maybe a couple, if you count the chorus of “Get a job!”s being lobbed alongside his opinions. But when no one else seems to have much to say, it’s hard to ignore the yelling.

From www.collegeessayorganizer.com

A whopping 3547 students applied Early Action to Princeton this year, according to the Prince. That’s up from 2,275 Early Decision applicants in 2006 (Though this is not a fair comparison since Early Action is not binding and the number of high school graduates has risen since 2006).

As we all know from when we applied, Princeton has been without an Early Action or Early Decision Program since the 2007 application cycle, when it eliminated Early Decision in an effort to increase socio-economic diversity by making the application process more fair. At the time, President Tilghman told the Prince that “Early Decision was advantaging those who were already advantaged.” Harvard and UVa eliminated their Early programs around the same time.

All three reinstated Early programs last year, after it became clear that other Universities weren’t following suit and Princeton was losing students to other schools with Early programs. But the new program is non-binding, so that students can compare financial aid packages. Perhaps this is the best of both worlds — allowing students to pick Princeton as their first choice, relieving some applicants’ stress when they are admitted early, but not disadvantaging low SES students. Or perhaps this is just PR. What do you think?

Christopher A. Sims (image source: www.nobelprize.org, Denise Applewhite)

Thomas J. Sargent (image source: www.nobelprize.org, NYU Stern)

After almost four decades of work exploring the causal relationships between policy decisions and the economy, Sims and Sargent received the Nobel Prize this morning in recognition of their independent, but complementary, research.

While Sargent’s research focused on more long-term economic trends as inflation targets, Sims, the Harold H. Helm ‘20 Professor of Economics and Banking, focused more on short-term economic developments. Through statistical analysis, Sims and Sargent investigated whether changes in economic policy cause these developments, or whether policy-makers anticipate these developments when shaping policy.

And although the Nobel Prize website has yet to post details about the research and the winners, congratulations have already begun to flow in from around the world, some more cryptic than others. A personal favorite? “go VIKINGS we fianlly [sic] won.” Surely somebody gets it…

In an interview with the New York Times this morning, Sims said that his research holds real and important implications for the current state of global economic affairs, and recovery from it:

The methods that I’ve used and that Tom has developed are central for finding our way out of this mess.

When pressed for a simple policy solution, though, he hesitated. Whoever finds one of those, it seems, will be in the running for the next Nobel.

www.projectcarousel.org/

Over the past year, Princeton has come under attack for animal rights violations in psychology and neuroscience labs, many of them related to watering schedules of primates. Now a group called Stop Animal Exploitation Now! claims that the University continues to mistreat monkeys in neuroscience labs, according to pictures of abuse supplied by a Princeton worker. The United States Department of Agriculture will investigate the claims. (Earlier USDA investigations found six violations of monkey treatment last spring and 11 in 2010.)

But, apparently, we are not the only Ivy to be failing animal ethics. A recent report from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine ranked Ivy League schools by their treatment of research animals. Princeton tied with Yale for second worst. Columbia ranked highest for their treatment of animals. Penn trailed behind with a “Research Misconduct Score” more than double Princeton’s and Yale’s…. At least we’re not Penn?

About Meg — she just can’t seem to do anything without pissing others off in the process. Maybe its the backlash of having pumped more than 150 million dollars into her own gubernatorial campaign, or maybe its just her general demeanor, rumored to be not so great. But some of us in Whitman College can’t help but be a little happy for her. After all, if Meg Whitman has some overblown pride, it is certainly reflected in the residential college named after her. Party with Meg.

Then there’s Peter Hessler ’92, one of 22 MacArthur Fellows for 2011. Hessler is a long form journalist who drew on his experience as an English teacher and foreign correspondent in China in three books where he crafts “richly illuminating accounts of ordinary people in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China.”

He’s written about Peace Corps projects in Nepal, a Uighur money-trader seeking asylum in the US, the effects of China’s auto boom on industrial centers and nearly-abandoned villages … yeah, pretty much everything. So, what’s next for a genius writer with half a million dollars to burn? Hessler hopes to head for the Middle East in search of more stories – check out his interview for more.

If we were an iTunes single right now, we'd be "Moves Like Jagger."

Like a J-Lo summer pop single, Princeton has made a comeback, tying Harvard for #1 on the US News and World Report 2011-12 Ranking of the best undergraduate colleges in the United States.

After a year of being slighted by the Crimson menace, Princeton has returned to its former place on the leaderboard chart. One trivial beef I have: we always seem to inexplicably “tie” with Harvard and yet are listed after it– and don’t tell me it’s in alphabetical order.

I call shenanigans.

Changes from last year among the Ivies were sparse:

• Dartmouth falls from #9 to #11
• University of Pennsylvania is still tied in a pan-America five-way with CalTech, Stanford, MIT, and University of Chicago.
• Columbia’s holding strong after a huge four-spot jump to #4 last year (mirroring their plummeting acceptance rates with the adoption of the Common App, or, as my theory goes, the result of Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind”. See also: Brown’s Emma Watson effect.)
• Cornell: Still in Ithaca.

Other than that, rankings haven’t moved much. Methodology changes every year, and  people always debate the legitimacy of college rankings. Unfortunately, we can’t all be Sarah Lawrence.