When I was a graduate student at Princeton, I wrote a regular column for the main student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. For my trouble, I occasionally got called names by the Undergrads. For example, in response to a column critcising an exclusive Undergraduate eating club (which only deigned to admit women when a court told them to in 1987), I received an email in which I was labelled 'a judgemental elitist'. Irony is not a strong point of the Princeton Undergraduate mind.
Here are most of the columns, for whatever bizarre branch of posterity is interested in them. Some of them (particularly the ones I got called names for) are of rather local interest. But here they are all the same. What's Civil Society about if you can't make some noise in your immediate vicinity?
Social
science meets the Nude Olympics.
Ran on April 6th. The problem of self-realizing expecations applied to
your propensity to get drunk, strip off, and run around naked in the snow.
Missing
the Bus to Fameville.
Ran on March 24th. A follow-up to the egg-sale article, detailing the
mass-media's persistent attempts to contact me for an interview, and my
natural gift for not being around when they phoned.
Eugenics
Redux in the Donor Market.
Ran on March 1st, and that very evening I
was called up by the Cornell Daily
Sun and, believe it or not, both MSNBC and CNN. I was out of town at the time, so I
missed my first step on the way to becoming a
full-fledged Sabbath
Gasbag.
Drink,
Death and Deterrence.
Ran on February 15th, the first pot-shot of
the year. Princeton's
phantom war on binge drinking continues. Kids, just say "Quarters."
Readers will receive a special prize if they spot the
misprint in this article. Hint: it ruins a perfectly good bad pun. I
told the editors the original wasn't a mistake, but they ended up
changing it all the same.
Grade
Inflation and the USG.
A Grade Inflation problem appears at
Princeton and the USG responds by telling the world how smart everyone
here is, really.
Lost in Translation.
The Internet allow members of the total
village to communicate each other perfectly.
What's the story Princeton Tory?
What is it about this magazine that makes it so unappealing? There are so many plausible
explanations...
It's
a grad, grad, grad, grad world.
This is a whine about my General
Exams, which I'd taken the week before.
Pour
me another.
Vomiting undergraduates yelling outside my house are a
fixture of my Thursday nights.
Free
Market or Market Fetish?.
Written in rebuttal. Two of my fellow
columnists, on successive days, wrote about the incomparable virtues of
free markets and the need for the abolition of government institutions.
(Bear in mind that these are Princeton Undergraduates.) My response
originally contained the names of the two offenders, but my otherwise
sensible editors removed them without telling me. I can
reveal here that the two in question are Ilya Shapiro, who ran the
College
Republicans, and Laura Vanderkam, a freshman Ayn Rand zombie who won the
Princeton Tory's essay prize that year.
A Premature Retrospective
Last column of the semester. Partly a response to another CCC
advertisement, partly making fun of some of the more offended people who
write to me.
Cottage lectures, Princeton Tradition
An exclusive Undergrad eating club runs offensive lectures, and just because our
correspondent complains, people call him an 'outsider' and condemn him as 'bitter'.
The New Campus Crusade
Evangelicals get on my nerves with a stupid advertisment. This one got some people
annoyed.
Send in the Clones
Sorry I couldn't think of a better title, but the implications of Dolly for Princeton
needed to be made clear.
Living in the Land of the Bland.
In the wake of Princeton's bizarre Bicker Week, a lone Graduate student speaks up
and says "Morons!"
Take Me to Your Leader.
In which the author complains that Sociology doesn't get its due, and reveals why.
A Ring of Truth at the End of the Line
This was supposed to be a test, but the paper ran it anyway. I see it as part of my
pre-political phase.