When University trustees review conceptual designs for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment March 26, they will be presented with options to incorporate or to demolish the OSBORN CLUBHOUSE at Prospect Avenue and Olden Street. The University plans to build the 110,000-square-foot Andlinger Laboratory between the E-Quad and Bowen Hall.
The clubhouse, completed in 1892, provided athletic training facilities before its 1971 conversion to the Third World Center as a place for minority students to gather for socializing and for cultural and political events. The center, renamed the Carl Fields Center in 2002, moved across Olden Street to the former Elm Club in September. In a posting on the TigerNet discussion group Princeton Matters, architectural historian (and PAW contributor) W. Barksdale Maynard ’88 called for the preservation of the clubhouse, noting that it is one of 20 buildings on campus from before 1900 and citing its “important role in the 1960s desegregation of the Ivy League.”
VAN JONES, an environmental activist and former White House adviser, will become a 2010–11 visiting fellow in the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy. He will teach a course on environmental politics, focusing on policies that create “green” economic opportunity for the disadvantaged. Appointed by President Barack Obama as adviser to the Council on Environmental Quality, Jones resigned after less than six months when his previous political activities became a subject of controversy.
MORE THAN 630 ALUMNI AND STUDENTS have offered their views to a task force created to review the relationship between the eating clubs and the University. Among the most frequently cited topics are ways to reduce the cost of the clubs and the role of fraternities and sororities as pipelines to certain clubs, according to task force chairman Robert K. Durkee ’69, University vice president and secretary. Comments still can be submitted on the task force’s Web site, www.princeton.edu/ectf/. The group is expected to offer its recommendations by the end of May.
Three Princeton seniors — James Sears Bryant, Katie Hsih, and Fatu Conteh — have been awarded PRINCETON REACHOUT 56-81 FELLOWSHIPS for year-long public-service projects, including the group’s first international fellowship.
Bryant, from Enid, Okla., will use his $30,000 award to make available on the Internet documents from the National Indian Law Library of the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit in Boulder, Colo.