Prepping for College, ‘Lydia’s Scholars’ Probe Historical Erasure

The Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity’s newest college-prep initiative for high school students — the Lydia’s Scholars Program — is named after an enslaved woman whose entire known history comes from a 1799 bill documenting her sale to a Princeton professor for $160.

For the last two summers, Lydia’s scholars — 16 this year, 14 last year — have explored the everyday implications of historical erasure and memory. The program’s curriculum centers works with Princeton connections, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved, along with classics such as Aristotle’s Poetics.

Rising seniors from Hamilton West and Nottingham high schools near Trenton from lower-to-moderate income backgrounds are invited to apply to the program, which is free for students, and are selected based on academic performance and personal characteristics such as commitment to community service and leadership. Preference is given to those who will be first-generation college students.

The program was designed to prepare students for college success by developing critical thinking and leadership skills as well as providing practical college access information. Students not only evaluate texts and the emotions they evoke, but also discuss recurring themes of “absence and historical forgetting,” according to the website.

Naming the program after Lydia was a “way for us to start a conversation with first-generation, lower-income students … [about] whose stories are told and how and why, and whose stories are remembered and how and why,” said Jason Klugman, senior director of college preparation initiatives at the Emma Bloomberg Center.

“We wanted the program itself in the name to shoulder the work of carrying on the memory of an individual” who was part of a group that has been largely effaced from history, said Dan-el Padilla Peralta ’06, a former Princeton classics professor who helped launch the program before leaving to teach at Arizona State University.

Lydia’s Scholars got off the ground when Alice McCrum, now a fourth-year graduate student in the history department, applied for a job at the Emma Bloomberg Center. As an undergraduate at Columbia, she had worked with the Teagle Foundation’s Knowledge for Freedom initiative, which supports “underserved high school students” as they “study humanity’s deepest questions about leading lives of purpose and civic responsibility,” according to the organization.

McCrum worked closely with Klugman and Padilla Peralta in 2024-25 to get the program running. She and Padilla Peralta taught the first summer; this past summer, Lexi White and Jael Hernandez-Vasquez, two graduate students in Princeton’s classics department, served as lead instructors.

Students lived on campus for three weeks and started their days with three-hour morning seminars full of conversations, group presentations, and sometimes performances that blended the assigned readings with contemporary music.

“Our lecture halls often felt more like Broadway than a classroom,” said Diamond Tran, a Lydia’s scholar and 2026 graduate of Hamilton West High School, at a graduation dinner recognizing the first cohort.