The President’s Bookshelf: Two Selections for This Fall

As the fall semester began, a Princeton junior emailed asking whether I might recommend books to him. His message reminded me of how special Princeton students are; some people worry that young people no longer read books, but this Tiger wanted suggestions to supplement his already heavy classroom assignments.

Princeton alumni also ask me for book recommendations occasionally, so I thought that I would pass along the two that I offered to our student. Both books make valuable arguments not only about the specific topics they address, but also about the mission of research universities and a liberal arts education.

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Princeton University Press

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo *87 and Frances Lee (Princeton University Press, 2025)

In Covid’s Wake, coauthored by two Princeton politics professors, is a scathing critique of America’s response to the pandemic. Macedo and Lee demonstrate how groupthink—and sometimes outright censorship—led policymakers and academics to make bad choices with lasting costs to the country.

In Covid’s Wake is essential reading for many reasons, including the light it sheds on arguments about the conditions required for robust, truth-seeking scholarship and debate at universities. Too often, people who talk about “viewpoint diversity” in higher education assume that it means having a balance of liberals and conservatives, or that it requires universities to mirror disagreements from the political realm.

That is the wrong way to think about scholarship. Macedo and Lee, who describe themselves as “liberal democrats,” have harsh words for “the Blue-state policy orthodoxy” about masking, school closures, and other nonpharmaceutical interventions.¹ Their argument defies categorization as “progressive” or “conservative”: they are skeptical about masks but bullish about vaccines, for example.²

Macedo and Lee warn us against “the premature moralization of disagreements,” and they insist on “the willingness to entertain doubts, listen to other points of view, and revise our own commitments.”³ That—not some sort of statistical liberal/conservative balance—is exactly what “viewpoint diversity” ought to mean in the context of a great research university.

I am persuaded by much of In Covid’s Wake but disagree with aspects of it. You might too. Good: thoughtful—and evidence-based—argument about what worked during the pandemic, and what did not, is exactly what America needs. We need to identify our mistakes now and correct them, before another virus engulfs the globe.

George Will *68 wrote in The Washington Post that In Covid’s Wake represents “social science at its finest.” ⁴ I concur enthusiastically.

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Ecco

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, Elyse Graham ’07 (Ecco, 2024)

PAW’s loyal readers may recognize Elyse Graham as the author of lyrical, illuminating essays about Princeton’s history that appear regularly in these pages. Her recent book tells an amazing story: how humanists from America’s research universities rebuilt the nation’s espionage operations and helped win World War II.

Book and Dagger introduces some fascinating characters, like Joseph Curtiss, a young Yale English professor who becomes agent 005 (I’m not kidding) based in Istanbul for the Office of Strategic Services.⁵

More generally, it describes how modern intelligence operations draw on core humanistic skills: the abilities required to translate, interpret, and find meaning in reams of text drawn from newspapers, dispatches, and other messages. No wonder the American and British governments recruited agents from universities and libraries.

While reading Graham’s book, I could not help but recall that when General Mark Milley ’80 visited Princeton during his service as Chair of the Joint Chiefs, he met with Professor Ekaterina Pravilova, a specialist on the Russian Empire and early Soviet history, so that he could learn more about how Russians viewed their history.

I remembered, too, that General Christopher Cavoli ’87, who served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (and, like Milley, is a recipient of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award) has a graduate degree in Russian and East European Studies and speaks four languages: English, French, Italian, and Russian.

As Graham notes, American lore, including movies like Oppenheimer, gives bomb-making scientists credit for winning World War II. She argues persuasively that humanists deserve far more credit than they get.

Book and Dagger is also a potent antidote to noxious claims that describe universities or professors as hostile to our country. The vast majority of the students and professors I meet on the Princeton campus love America and want to make it the best it can be. As Graham reminds us, we need their talents, not only in the STEM disciplines but also in the humanities, to build the future that our children deserve.

I’ll conclude (self-indulgently!) by mentioning one more book: my own Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right (Basic Books, 2025). I’ll be talking about the book with Princeton alumni at events around the country during the year ahead.