The future of Princeton looks bleak.

A steady buildup of helium ash at the sun’s core will slowly increase its luminosity, along with the amount of radiation it gives off. That, scientists believe, could dry up the earth’s surface water, including the oceans, rivers, and Lake Carnegie. Combined with a loss of atmospheric carbon dioxide in about 900 million years, such a development could lead to the extinction of all animal and plant life on the planet. Even if it does not, in about 5 billion years, the earth may be incinerated as the dying sun swells into a red giant, or be sucked into its gravitational maw and crushed as the sun collapses into a white dwarf. Either way, the effects on that year’s P-rade and Annual Giving campaign can only be imagined.

But perhaps I project too far into the future.

That’s really the problem with looking forward, isn’t it? Cast your eyes too near and nothing changes. The Princeton of next year probably will look a lot like the Princeton of today. But you can’t set your horizon too far away, either, if it is to be meaningful.

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” economist John Maynard Keynes once pointed out. “In the long run, we are all dead.” So when Andrew Golden, president of the Princeton University Investment Co., or Princo, speaks of keeping the endowment strong for the next 250 years, he is announcing more of an aspiration than a particular investment plan. Still, sometimes it is necessary to peer more deeply into the crystal ball. When the University considers its investment strategy or whether to bring in certain restricted gifts, says Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, it must take a long-term view — sometimes as long as 50 years — because “an endowment is forever.” An endowed lecture series, for example, “had better be on something that’s a broad enough topic that it makes sense to ask people to steward it many decades into the future.”

Usually, a decade is the longest time frame in which planners can project with any confidence. University architect Jon Hlafter ’61 *63, who recently retired, has noted that in the early 1960s, architect Douglas Orr produced a master plan that envisioned Princeton’s full “build-out.” Few of his predictions became reality. So the current campus plan, which was under development in 2006 and released last January, runs through 2016.

A relatively short timeline and a judicious approach to change probably are good things. Attempts to transform the campus quickly and radically often end badly — the most famous Princeton example being the ill-fated proposals by Woodrow Wilson 1879 to abolish the eating clubs, create a system of residential colleges, and build the Graduate College on the main campus. (It took a century before aspects of Wilson’s “Quad Plan” were resurrected in the four-year residential colleges.) In 1970, President Robert F. Goheen ’40 *48 appointed a Commission on the Future of the College, which debated such revolutionary measures as reducing the number of years needed to obtain an undergraduate degree. It ended up making more modest proposals such as allowing qualified undergraduates to enroll in graduate courses and to obtain advanced standing through placement tests.

Knowing this, however, does not spoil the fun of peeking ahead.  

Harry Campbell

The campus

Much of the future campus already has been built. Whitman College opened in 2007, while the futuristic Lewis Library, designed by Frank Gehry’s Gehry Partners, welcomed students in the fall. New dorms and renovations to Butler College, which is scheduled to reopen next fall as a four-year residential college, are well under way. Also in the works are a new chemistry building to be completed in 2010, and new neuroscience and psychology buildings (construction on both had been scheduled to begin in June, but is being delayed for a year because of the economic downturn). All three will be built in a “natural sciences neighborhood” at the south end of Washington Road. “One significant challenge of the natural sciences neighborhood is integrating the increasing size and bulk of modern research buildings into the human scale of the campus,” the 179-page campus plan reports, noting that the buildings must be large enough to accommodate the required high-tech equipment and to provide sufficient classroom space. The solution to potential incongruity with the existing campus: a planning strategy that “positions these buildings at the southern edge of campus, where the natural landscape of robust woodlands and ravines will provide an appropriate visual and experiential buffer to their size, as well as a pastoral view from offices and labs.” The plan calls for a “modern architectural vocabulary, emphasizing lightness and transparency.”  

The much-talked-about “arts and transit neighborhood” anchored by the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts will rise along University Place and Alexander Road, beginning with a 130,000-square-foot complex with office, performance, and rehearsal spaces and a reflecting pool. But the recession has meant postponing construction of a satellite of the Art Museum, which also was planned for the neighborhood, until after 2016. (See page 19 for more information on the recession’s impact.) On the other side of campus, Frick, Green, and Hoyt halls — their occupants relocated to the natural science area — will be reconfigured for the humanities and social sciences.  

The plan also calls for revitalizing the historic gardens of the central campus and planting new trees. To knit the growing campus into a cohesive whole, walks and paths are to be created or landscaped. One part of that plan is the Streicker Bridge, which will provide a pedestrian walkway across busy Washington Road, spanning 300 feet and rising 23 feet above the street. You should be able to walk across it in the fall of 2010.

New buildings will be built in new ways, with greater energy efficiency. Butler College, like Sherrerd Hall, the just-opened building for operations research and financial engineering, will have a “true green roof” topped by soil and vegetation to lessen heating and cooling loads and reduce rainwater runoff. Princeton has set a goal of reducing campus carbon-dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and so all new construction must use 50 percent less energy than is required by current codes, according to Executive Vice President Mark Burstein. The plan also envisions cutting the number of single-occupant cars commuting to campus by 10 percent, and Princeton’s transportation office has requested about $250,000 in the 2009–10 budget to do that, largely through employee incentives to bike, carpool, or take mass transit to work. (In another strategy, beginning next September, sophomores — like freshmen — will not be permitted to park on campus.)  

A guiding principle of the campus plan is to preserve and maintain a pedestrian-oriented campus in which no point is more than a 10-minute walk from the Frist Campus Center. Despite that goal, care is being taken not to overbuild the current campus, leaving room for expansion within the University’s current geographic boundaries. For future needs, the University might draw upon more than 400 acres on the other side of Lake Carnegie that were acquired between 1922 and 1948 — almost as much land as the historic campus has. In 2001, Princeton purchased another 90 acres from Sarnoff, on the far side of Route 1. Though there are no plans for developing that land in the foreseeable future, President Tilghman says prudence requires Princeton to think ahead so that it does not one day find itself penned in by outside development, as Harvard, Penn, Yale, Columbia, and other universities have been.

The final chapter of Princeton’s published plan considers how the campus might develop beyond 2016. Planners envision future academic and “campus-life” development in the eastern part of campus along Ivy Lane between Washington and FitzRandolph roads, after outdated facilities there now are moved. In the west, the land north of Forbes College someday might sport new graduate housing or another residential college (the Ivy Lane area also is a leading candidate for a college site, among a few other options). The Alexander Street corridor could get more retail shops to support the graduate students living nearby, while parking for the growing University might be provided in an underground garage on Western Way and an off-campus lot in West Windsor, connected to Princeton by a shuttle. And what about that mainstay of Princeton transportation since the turn of the 20th century, the Dinky? The plan notes that New Jersey is considering a bus rapid-transit system with a line running parallel to the Dinky to supplement its service. That would allow more stations to be built, with more connections between the different parts of Princeton. “By using transit as leverage,” the report suggests, “the walkable campus can be extended beyond its current borders.”

123