It’s been a white world around here for the last couple of
weeks. To be sure, we
haven’t had the huge snow dumps that have kept Boston in the news. But repeated falls of an inch or two in
a protracted period of freezing temperatures that allow no thawing at all has
produced pretty dramatic results. As
in the old carol about Good King Wenceslas, “Snow had fallen, snow on snow.” You can clear it, but the piles just
grow higher. The aging process is
in one of its aspects an anthology of novel aches and pains; but the
distinctive muscular discomforts that follow a session of serious snow
shoveling are unchanging over the years and are almost comforting in their
familiarity.
On
Saturday, as a brief warming respite allowed the falling snow to ease for an
hour or two into what they delightedly call a “wintery mix”, I set out for the
campus for the one hundred and first Princeton “Alumni Day” conclave. Unlike the late spring class reunions,
this mid-winter event is fairly serious in its cultural content, and the centennial
character of this year’s meeting dignified it yet further. There are limitations to the elegance
achievable in gymnasium-floor dining; but the luncheon banquet for a thousand—quality
cold salmon and exotic grains chased by an orange and black cupcake—achieved the
maximal possibility. Where I was
sitting among the graying PhDs the chatter was brisk and sometimes challenging.
Queen Noor (Woodrow Wilson awardee)
There
is a variety of engaging ancillary events, mainly in the form of panel
discussions, but the principal business of the day is to honor some outstanding
students—past and present. There
are two big alumni awards: the Woodrow Wilson Award (undergraduate alum) and
the James Madison Medal (graduate alum).
The winner of this year’s Wilson Award was Queen Noor (née Lisa Halaby),
a graduate of Princeton’s first coeducational class (1973). She is the widow of the late King
Hussein of Jordan. Since his death
in 1999 she has been prominent in a number of international humanitarian
causes. The winner of the James
Madison Medal was Martin Eakes.
He is the founder of the Center for Community Self-Help in North
Carolina, and has been a prominent advocate of approaches to banking and
finance helpful to potential borrowers of slender means. The place is crawling with geniuses
around here, but only a select few, like Eakes, have diplomas of Certified
Genius from the MacArthur Foundation.
Martin Eakes (James Madison medalist)
Given
the abundance of brilliance and success on display—and I lack the time even to
mention the achievements of the dazzling prizewinners among current students—it
may seem perverse of me to identify the memorial “Service of Remembrance” as
the most moving moment of the gathering.
But it is my opinion that venerable institutions must justify their
venerability by the quality of their own venerations. The fine private colleges and universities of America, so
often mischaracterized by the unknowledgeable and the unreflective as mere
bastions of privilege, are in fact complex charitable institutions and powerful
engines of desirable social change.
Cornell, Chicago, Stanford—Pomona, Grinnell, Swarthmore—these places and
literally a hundred others have redistributed billions in the creation of
cultural capital not merely useful to the nation but absolutely necessary for
its ethical prosperity. This
didn’t happen by accident. It is
necessary to recognize how it did, and to honor those who did it.
Winter
was fairly pelting by the time I made it up to the chapel. These days one frequently hears
American collegiate Gothic deplored, even dismissed; but it gave us some of
the nation’s most beautiful buildings.
The Princeton chapel is a kind of mini-Amiens—a stunning collaboration
of a great architect (Ralph Adams Cram) and one of the art historical pioneers
of modern iconographical scholarship, Albert M. Friend, who created the basic
scheme of the windows. It is the
perfect setting for the Memorial Service, and especially for its most dramatic
feature, the construction of a huge floral wreath.
The University memorializes its members who have died in the preceding year
in the following dramatic way. Nearly
a hundred soberly dressed people, men and women of varying hue and age, each
wearing or carrying a white carnation, representatives of the undergraduate
classes, the Graduate School, the faculty and staff, form a solemn
procession. Moving in two columns down
the long central aisle of the nave, the procession splits at the chancel
steps. Its members then mount the steps and affix their carnation to a large board, which gradually
swells with its whiteness. The
view from the congregation is rather like that of a time-manipulated photograph
of the opening of a rose. Another
analogy, more recondite but perhaps almost more apt, occurs: the celestial rose
of the thirtieth canto of Dante’s Paradiso.
The
oldest undergraduate alumnus remembered was from the class of 1932, the
youngest from 2017. Of deceased
graduate alumni there were about 150—grouped by academic department. On the lists of old students I
recognized too many names, most only vaguely, of course, but one or two more sharply. When it came to the two pages devoted
to faculty and staff, the experience vivified as I saw the names of several
friends of forty years: Walt Litz, for long years among my closest; the
brilliant mathematical economist Harold Kuhn; my Rhodes near contemporary at
Oxford Dick Ullman, and others.
For each name in the memorial booklet—and my rough estimate is that
there were about a thousand—there are those who will have felt, sharply, that
bittersweet motion of the heart in which an affectionate admiration vies with the
sadness of human mortality.
Princeton University Chapel: a Service of Remembrance
