General Letters to the Magazine

We are 11 graduate school alumni (1967-68 MPAs) who have spent 16 months expressing concern over the standing and strategic direction of the School of Public and International Affairs. We have underscored three main concerns to Princeton’s leadership and made suggestions for addressing them.

First, we have flagged the decline in the school’s perceived standing since its preeminence in our day. U.S. News & World Report, which ranks Princeton as the top U.S. national university, ranks the SPIA 9th among graduate schools of public affairs. We have suggested sharpening the SPIA focus on U.S. policy and implementation as the surest way to build competitive advantage.

Second, we have questioned the value of increasing international student capacity at the cost of expanding the homegrown pool of U.S. public service talent. We have suggested prioritizing national challenges, especially improving the performance of the public sector, since doing so is the foundation of U.S. global leadership.

Third, we have urged a sharper focus on learning from skilled practitioners as well as scholars to equip degree holders to take on both policy and management challenges. We have suggested increasing access to practitioners through term appointments.

Our views took shape in response to a request from the SPIA dean in June 2023 to provide input into the strategic initiative that the school was framing. We had little difficulty reaching a consensus. We are all pragmatists committed to the SPIA who have kept in regular touch for years. We have decades of public sector, nonprofit, and private sector experience.

Our interest led to an amiable Zoom call with Dean Amaney Jamal in November 2023, a follow-up conversation with a strategic messaging group, and a joint letter to President Eisgruber ’83 and the dean in September 2024. The President’s full-page reply highlighted the outstanding scholarship of the SPIA faculty (a concern we never raised) and endorsed current SPIA priorities.

Princeton’s leadership has not ignored us, but also has not engaged us on the substance of our concerns and suggestions. Since the new SPIA branding video welcomes alumni engagement, we hope others will join us in trying to make that engagement happen around the future of the SPIA.

Alumni interested in further discussion should contact John Yochelson (johnyochelson@me.com).

In the 1952 Glee Club tour photo (From the Archives, November issue), I am in the picture, first row, kneeling second from the left. Peter Reese is kneeling to my right and Ben Aiken is kneeling to my left, behind me — all of us Class of 1954. Our director, Elliot Forbes, is in the first standing row directly above me. It was a great trip!

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The Princeton Glee Club embarked on a cross-country tour in the spring of 1952. The shows received glowing reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Kansas City Times, and The Denver Post. 

Princeton Alumni Weekly Photograph Collection

In looking at the cover of the latest PAW, I thought about some anagrams of its name and thought you might appreciate the following:

One of the many rearrangements of the 21 letters in “Princeton Alumni Weekly” reveals a commitment to highly regarded investigative journalism via the 21 letters in the phrase: “A truly ink-plow eminence.”

Does the PAW live up to this assessment?

As part of Google’s continuing saga to become the leader of the technology oligopoly, Princeton has subcontracted our email forwarding service to Google. This forces users to operate a separate email account with Google with storage limitations. much smaller than competing services like Yahoo. I wonder if others are as inconvenienced as I have been by this change? I am actively asking my friends to switch my email address to either my Harvard or Columbia forwarding accounts, neither of which has felt the necessity to introduce an extra link in the email process.

Princeton Alumni Weekly’s masthead confirms what I long suspected: “The magazine is published monthly with a combined July/August issue.” So isn’t it high time to change the name to Princeton Alumni Monthly?

My food memories, in no particular order.

• The wonderful meals prepared by Ms. Becky at Cannon Club.
• Freshman year: Making Pizzas, except for the already-made dough, at the Dennis Keller-founded Student Pizza Agency. I continue, 60 years later, to make pizza for my family. Also delivering them with my roommate Frank Morgan in a mid-’50s stick-shift Ford and getting instructions on driving a stick from Frank.
• Probably the least-popular meal at Commons: Purported to be lamb stew but believed by many to be mutton. If there was wind from the west, the aroma could be noticed at Chancellor Green.

Your latest edition of food stories (March issue) asks for input from readers. Here is mine:

During my sophomore year in 1955, there used to be a coffee shop (the “fast food” label was not known then) right on Nassau Street, named Renwick’s.

One day they announced a contest, open to any student, to provide the ingredients for a new sandwich. The prize was around $50 credit toward future food orders at Renwick’s. The sandwich would be included on their menu, and it would be named after the prize winner.

I submitted my entry, a combination of ingredients I derived from my younger years at a local restaurant in New Jersey. My sandwich entry was made from Taylor ham (sometimes called pork roll), grilled with melted American cheese, plus lettuce, tomato, mustard, and pickle relish, served on a toasted bun. They named it the Mackenzie ’57.

Evidently it became popular enough that it remained on their menu for several years, but with each rendition of a new menu, the name morphed. At one point, it was the McKinzie ’55, and eventually was dropped. It remained, however, as a fond achievement all my life.

In the February 2024 issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly that I received in the mail, there are no articles or information about Princeton’s major sports — especially basketball, hockey, wrestling, swimming, etc. Princeton Alumni Weekly going back over the years has always given some space to the major sports teams. After all, close to 18% of Princeton undergraduates currently are on varsity sports teams, so the lack of information or coverage is neglectful. Princeton athletes deserve the coverage. If Princeton alumni are informed as they should be about major Princeton University sports activities, then maybe there would be more alumni support and attendance would rise at various sports contests.

I just read in Princeton Journeys (supplement to the September issue) about Princetonians visiting the Civil Rights Institute in my hometown of Birmingham.

They may not have seen the names of the eight clergy addressed in Martin Luther King’s fabulous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The first of those eight names, my father, was Episcopal Bishop Charles C.J. Carpenter, Princeton Class of 1921. He was well known as the Eastern Intercollegiate Heavyweight Wrestling Champion. Many of the Civil Rights integrated meetings were held in his office because Andy Young told King and Fred Shuttlesworth that they would be welcome and safe there.

My father did not disagree with King’s letter saying that the local clergy were too slow in promoting integration, but he had been one of those who brought about the election in Birmingham to remove Bull Conner and he had been one of the clergy who had written an article in the Birmingham News urging local citizens to comply with school integration. To give a fuller picture of who Chuck Carpenter was, I wrote his full biography, A Powerful Blessing, 331 pages. I self-published it, and copies are available from me, carpenter.doug7436@att.net, for $20 which includes postage.

I read “A March Through Civil Rights History” in the Princeton Journeys supplement (distributed with the September issue) with great interest since I participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march and two years later worked as the special assistant to the president of Miles College, a Black college just outside Birmingham. I spent almost two years in that role, and, as a young white man, I enjoyed being introduced to both Black and white audiences as the “house honkey in the administration” by the Black president of the college. During my time at Miles, I experienced many disturbing events due to the overt bigotry and racism that were so prevalent in the South at the time, both in Birmingham and in rural Wilcox County, just west of Selma. For example, three of us — my ex-wife and I and a Black colleague — were asked to leave the local Episcopal church by the head usher, even before the service began. When I crossed the town square to meet a Black colleague of mine in Camden, the county seat of Wilcox County, good ole’ boys with shotguns started towards us from all four sides of the square. My colleague and I decided to meet elsewhere. Other incidents like these happened on a weekly basis. My time there was a fascinating, disturbing, and maturing experience, and one I will never forget. I only wish I could have been part of the recent Princeton civil rights history march.

The blockchain gathering report and the agenda for DeCenter (EQuad News, mailed as a supplement to PAW’s May 2023 issue) did not mention a critical item for societal change for the better: providing a way to prove ownership of real property (dirt) in countries that do not have the deed registry system. Here, the road to prosperity goes through the county clerk’s office. In 90% of the world, the landowners (the family has lived there for generations) can’t prove of record it is the “owner” so it can’t use the property as capital, or pass it down with certainty.

Princeton has had many generations of alumni who have served in our country’s armed forces, and many of those in the Army know of Fort Benning; traditionally home of the Infantry, now also of the Armor and Cavalry, and the Army’s Airborne and Ranger schools.

After too many decades honoring a Confederate general, the Department of Defense has approved the Naming Commission’s recommendation to recognize the contributions and values of Lieutenant General Hal and Mrs. Julie Moore, far more current “heroes,” by renaming the Fort in their honor on May 11. Here is a link which provides the rationale:  https://www.fortmoore.com/

Movie lovers will remember Moore as portrayed by Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.

While nobody wants a “PAM,” might it be worth considering a name change from “Princeton Alumni Weekly” to “Princeton Alumni Witness”? This would retain the “PAW” initials while eliminating the anomaly of a “Weekly” that publishes monthly, and it would connote a publication whose witness of the Princeton campus and community is independent of the University’s administration.  

I want to thank you for continuing to publish a regular stream of letters to the editor from some of this university’s most crotchety, implacable, condescending, and know-it-all alumni and alumnae. Your December 2022 issue was a gold mine of such letters. 

I know that no matter what else comes in the mail, 11 times a year, I can count on a good (and unintentional) laugh thanks to the PAW’s Inbox section. 

Having figured out the cure for cancer 15 years ago, I thought my fellow alumni might like to know what it is. Very simply, the tumor of cancer is an effect, not the cause of the disease. The cause of cancer is a failure in the “protective complex” (primarily immunity) which keeps us from forming tumors. More on this can be read in one of the editions of The Key To Cancer or its coming translations.

Someone beside myself may have figured this out also. No matter. Immunotherapy has developed from this concept to the point that it is now the preferred treatment option. See Jimmy Carter’s case. And my thesis has been accepted at the highest levels of clinical oncology. Trouble is, treatment pays more than prevention, maybe making some oncologists reluctant to go this route.

Bottom line: When dealing with something bad, fix the cause as well as the result.

I was appalled to read in The New York Times that Maitland Jones has been fired by New York University, and especially shocked that a major reason for his dismissal was the claim that he was thwarting students’ dreams of going to medical school, because I remember him as someone who went out of his way to help me realize mine.

I entered Princeton planning to be a physics major, but by the end of freshman year, I was questioning that decision and wanted to explore other options. With several chemists in my family, chemistry seemed like a logical option to explore. But that would require taking organic chemistry my sophomore year, and I hadn’t taken freshman chem, which was a prerequisite. So I went to Professor Jones, then the head of the chemistry department, to find out whether that would be possible.

Professor Jones was accessible, friendly, and helpful. After a brief meeting, he said he thought I could handle the course and was willing to sign the necessary permission form. (I had a much harder time persuading the head of my residential college, who also had to sign!)

I did do well in the course, but ultimately decided that chemistry was not for me. Instead, I majored in electrical engineering, then switched professions after graduation and have spent the last 30 years working in journalism. But almost 40 years later, I still remember Professor Jones’ kindness in giving me the option to pursue chemistry if I so chose, and I remain grateful for his help.

The arrival of the latest edition of PAW occasioned a twinge of embarrassment for me for not having realized earlier the school colors were no longer appropriate for its front cover. Of course I have always known that the orange and black represented the toxicity of male dominance pervasive at Princeton prior to coeducation, but given that any color chosen as replacements will offend someone, even the insipid lavender gracing the current issue, I am puzzled you chose any color at all. 

To accomplish your goal to banish even the appearance of micro-insult, may I suggest your PAW covers be transparent. Naturally no print could be placed on it, since a color, especially black, would send students and alumni to the nearest safe space. And, since the interior pages would be visible through the cover, they also would have to be likewise transparent and print-free lest a mad rush to the school shrink ensue. 

Configuring your magazine in this manner would have many benefits to your readers. First, nobody is offended. Second, there is total transparency. Third, your editors won’t have the impossible, mind-numbing task of satisfying the burden imposed by the intersectionality theory. You editors can know your readers can see through your publication to the individual, the logical end to trait selection.

I have to assume that the irony of receiving a Princeton Innovation supplement to the November PAW wrapped in a plastic bag was not lost on my fellow Tigers. If PAW editors were comforted by the exhortation to recycle the bag after carefully removing the address label (Inbox, November issue), they probably shouldn’t be. According to a recent issue of Consumer Reports, only 8.7 percent of plastic is recycled in the U.S. Plastic film is particularly difficult to recycle. 

In a future issue, I would love to learn about innovators in the Princeton community who are working to tackle the world’s enormous plastic problem. 

Regarding the “Affiliated Groups” page (Class Notes, July/ August issue), I believe the relevant song title is “It’s Been a Long Time Coming.” Clearly something is broken, and one suspects it will be a while before that same something is fixed. But of course, in the long annals of wisdom: The longest journey begins with a single step. So we keep walking, Tigers collectively, stepping out in motion together. A locomotive here wished to all!

Like most people who read the alumni magazines of various universities, I normally leaf through them to see if anyone I know has died or if anything interesting has happened lately on campus. However, the May 2021 issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly far exceeded my expectations. The article about Albert Einstein, one of the great men of the 20th century, was a fascinating and informative tribute to its subject. Princeton should be proud that Einstein chose to live there after he was forced to flee from his native country.

As an added bonus, I enjoyed the article about James A. Baker III ’52, and I will try to find the new biography of him that is mentioned in the article.

I wish only to express my appreciation to PAW for its faithful production of a regular, dependable print edition of the magazine. I have been so accustomed to its regular arrival that I would have continued to take it for granted — had it not been for the announcement of the end of the print edition of yet another of the publications I still receive. 

It may be that in this digital age I might have to resign myself to relying on a screen and smartphone for the news and edification in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, Locomotives to you for continuing to send me something which I can hold before me, whose pages I can turn back or forward, as I learn about campus issues and classmate news. Please don’t rush to go all-digital!

I notice lately that in the Inbox there is a continual bashing of conservative alumni who can easily be made targets and at same time ignoring the many conservative Republicans that have contributed so much to the University as well as to society. The name I bring up the late Dr. Julian Buxton ’50, who was All-Ivy League in wrestling and football and a graduate of John Hopkins surgery. He established a practice at Roper Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina. He was the first doctor, at his insistence, to perform an operation on a black man at Roper Hospital. Has it come to the time now that we ignore an alumnus of such notable accomplishments because he was a Republican? A man who raised huge sums of money for the University as well as encouraging many young people to attend, including some of his own offspring. It was his belief at the time that Princeton was the only University to attend. It is time now for those who knew him and loved him to stand up and be counted among the courageous. 

Princeton alumni have created a new nonprofit organization to support free speech and academic freedom at Princeton. Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS) is nonpartisan and focused exclusively on these core freedoms. It was founded by two members of the Class of 1970 but is supported by an increasing number of alumni from many classes, and its board also includes representatives from a number of classes.

The core of PFS is its website, princetoniansforfreespeech.com. We invite all members of the Princeton community to take a look. On a regular basis, we post articles relating to free speech and academic freedom that are Princeton-focused in one column, and in the other we post articles about other universities and beyond.

In addition, subscribers receive regular email updates from PFS. While we have only recently launched, already hundreds of Princeton alumni, faculty, and students have signed up for the free subscriptions.

In the future, PFS plans to host discussions and speakers on the internet and on campus. We believe that it is vital to our democracy and to the future of Princeton that free speech and academic freedom be strongly defended, and that alumni of Princeton are critical to that defense.

It would be informative if the Princeton Alumni Weekly published a comparison of the policy the University adopted toward tuition relief in light of its policies on presence on campus during the pandemic versus the practices of other Ivy league universities and the various schools’ size of endowments compared to Princeton's. In other words how much “tuition compassion” did Princeton offer versus other wealthy universities during the pandemic?

I was disheartened to read the commentaries regarding systemic racism in the PAW Inbox in the November issue. Some opinions from older alumni indicated to me not only that there is a lack of understanding of the issue of systemic racism itself, but that some of these alumni continue to hold racist opinions that they do not know are racist. Embedded racist norms are the definition of institutionalized or systemic racism. The fact that they would write these letters is proof enough that there is still a problem within the larger Princeton community.

President Eisgruber ’83’s discussion of systemic racism is all too important given this lack of understanding. Defending the legacies of long-dead racists, no matter how nuanced the argument, does nothing to advance the University’s goals and only seeks to disclude members of the Princeton community by claiming that Woodrow Wilson’s achievements were somehow greater than the lives of Black people — and people of color everywhere.

Symbols are important because they are representative of our beliefs. I commend the University on its continued work toward inclusion and diversity. Commentary from some of the same alumni reveals that our community continues to struggle with interwoven oppressive beliefs.

On that note, one alumnus wrote that the University should change its mascot to a dove or a chicken, due to their “feminine nature” being more appropriately symbolic of the University’s current tack toward systemic racism. As long as we’re making pejorative analogies, let’s note that such alumni are absolute fossils.

On the topic of social justice: The objective can be achieved if we work together and find the mutual benefit of our collaboration. I am reminded of the man cutting down the tree with a dull axe. A passerby suggests that he sharpen the axe to which he responds that he is in too much of a hurry to do that. We can continue to complain and pursue our own agenda or allow reason to prevail.

I recall my first year at Princeton. We were six sharing a suite. My roommate was of German descent and not happy to share a bunk in an area the size of a walk-in closet (6 feet wide by 10 feet long) with a Puerto Rican. In a moment of physical confrontation, I made it clear to him that I was there for my education and did not need his acceptance. I further clarified that after this moment in time we would probably never have to deal with each other again. That understanding held and maintained the peace.

If we rise above our petty inclinations, which are mostly driven by tradition, upbringing, or hermeneutics, we can achieve a greater purpose. Remember in a game of tug-of-war there is little movement unless a stronger force favors one side. If we pull together we can make a better future for the next generations that follow. It is difficult to see all the trees from within the forest, but step outside and see the abundance and variety. It’s our choice.

Belatedly comes the very sad news of the death in New York City of James Montel Polachek, 75 years old, on April 27, 2020, of COVID-19. Born in New York, Sept. 4, 1944, educated at Harvard and Berkeley, Jim was quite simply brilliant, first as a violinist and pianist, potentially professional; as a linguist; then — his true calling — as an Asianist. An esteemed friend, he was my predecessor as terminal assistant professor (1978–84) of Asian history at Princeton. Harvard University Press published his field-defining magnum opus, The Inner Opium War, in 1992.

Truly a tortured soul, he married first Machiko Ichiura (divorced 1977) and then Elizabeth Allan (married 1981, divorced 1994). They produced two daughters. Sadly his enduring scholarship was paralleled by a fractured career (he turned, again with great accomplishment, to finance) that chillingly demonstrates how heedlessly our universities waste even the greatest talents. His daughter Jen Monroe, with him at the end, takes solace in his final escape from the devils that pursued him. We can only admire the raw courage he showed, wrestling them long and tenaciously enough to produce a truly great book: the supreme gift to his field, to his colleagues, and to his students today, and yet unborn. 

In 1967 or 1968 an African American Princeton undergraduate stood in front of a group of awestruck Black students at a segregated public school in Wynne, Arkansas. I was one of the wide-eyed students who packed the Childress School’s library that day. 

I was a seventh-grader. I don’t remember the undergrad’s name, but the impression he made was an inflection point in my life. I remember the effect he had — a poised, articulate young Black man wearing a black varsity jacket with a big orange letter “P” on the chest coming to our rural hamlet from a thousand miles away, reinforcing that Black kids in the segregated South could have big goals.

His visit has stayed with me over the decades. He empowered me (and I believe others) to imagine beyond our circumstance and societal limitations.

I hope this letter finds him. It would be great to close the circle he started more than 50 years ago and let him know one of the kids he inspired in that classroom went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in urban studies, spending a career in news reporting and public relations. I am fortunate and thankful that at a formative time in my life, fate sent a young Black dream merchant from Princeton to help Black students like me envision new horizons.

It's a tragedy that the cycle of repeated crimes met with increasingly harsh law enforcement has put citizens in urban war zones and the police on a collision course with each other. The reasons for it go deep, deep into our society: racism without a doubt, but there are other factors. My thoughts go back to the findings shared by psychologist James Garbarino in his book Lost Boys. The remedies he suggests to break the cycle are many, reaching far beyond improving community relations between cops and urban Black residents. The boys in question face a cradle-to-grave problem most whites can’t possibly understand. But one of the teenage prisoners Garbarino interviewed put it this way: “If you grew up like I did, you’d be just like me.” Personally, I don’t think my imagination can stretch that far.

On Aug. 19, 1862, my mother’s grandfather was commissioned a major in the Union Army and appointed Surgeon of the 66th Regiment Illinois Volunteers. He participated in the second battle of Corinth in November 1862; the 12 bloody battles of the Atlanta Campaign and Sherman’s March To the Sea in 1864; the Carolinas Campaign and the last action of the Civil War, the Battle of Bentonville, in early 1865. He then accompanied General Sherman to Washington, D.C., marching in the  Grand Review of the Armies on May 24, 1865. He was subsequently discharged from Union Army service on July 7, 1865. Almost 50 percent of the 66th Illinois died in action or were taken by disease. He returned to his home in Edwardsville, Illinois, to practice medicine. He died in 1919. 

The other side of the story. My father’s grandfather’s heart was in a different place. Living in Newport, Kentucky, he was drafted into the Union Army in 1863, but paid a $300 bounty to a black man to serve in his place, as was so often the custom during the last two years of the Civil War. For four years he refused to walk in the front door of his home under the U.S. flag flown there proudly by his wife. His heart was still in Northern Virginia where he was born.

Those were difficult times. These are difficult times. 

Too many of the same issues so prevalent then haunt our country today. Most particularly is our deep divide on issues which we, predominately raised in the long-standing Judeo-Christian tradition with its so simply stated moral code of “Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you,” do not share with significant equanimity.

Despite our so nobly stated declarations in 1776, 1787, and 1789 we, the whole body politic of this nation, have failed each other and ourselves in not applying these hallowed principles to our daily life since 1868 when we adopted the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, fully accepting all who are born or naturalized here as citizens of this nation to be guaranteed equal protection under the law. 

A significant number of us still, after over 150 years, do not accept the equality of our all of our fellow citizens, much less all humankind, nor do we practice even neighborly tolerance of so many of our fellow citizens, especially those who look different from ourselves or who follow the tenants of a religion different from our own. 

Worse yet, many of those in our country’s leadership today and those with significant authority and power to influence and control are not dedicated to uphold and equally enforce the adherence to the principles we espouse as a nation and have codified in the Constitution and its Amendments each of us has accepted and pledged to uphold. 

Once and for all, we need to apply ourselves with significantly increased vigor to include all of us together as equals, and to celebrate our diversity as the strength it has always been. This can wait no longer.

Once again, our future as a nation, and especially a great one, is at stake.