Princeton’s Focus on Faculty Excellence

When Princeton’s trustees in 2016 enumerated a list of priorities for the University’s strategic framework, they put “faculty quality” at the top. 

“No university can be great without a great faculty,” the trustees said, observing that the “professoriate not only conducts its teaching and research programs but also plays an indispensable role in the governance of the University.”

The trustees’ recognition that scholarly excellence is the essence of our University—reaffirmed every three years since—has been an important reminder to keep our eyes on the ball amid a period of potentially distracting culture war brouhahas. 

Last year was an especially successful one for our faculty, even by Princeton’s high standards. In the accompanying box are some highlights of scholarly honors our faculty received, which testify to their high standing in the eyes of other leading experts in their fields. 

These examples are merely a subset of a much longer list. The professors mentioned nevertheless span nearly half of Princeton’s academic departments and all four of its divisions (the arts and humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and engineering).

A pervasive spirit of excellence matters for many reasons, and not least because the faculty defines the scholarly ethos of a university. A great faculty is driven by a quest for truth and scholarly achievement, not by political agendas or a thirst for celebrity. Its members should be constantly curious and unsatisfied with conventional thinking and their own opinions. They should prod, poke at, and challenge ideas in a never-ending effort to discover error and improve understanding.

Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University from 2002 to 2023, captures this attitude with a story from early in his teaching career. He recounts being told by a senior colleague that “he had passed by a student speaking privately to a professor who, listening carefully, finally said: ‘But have you considered …?’ That, [the colleague] said … is the essence of a great education.”¹ 

This model—in its emphasis on both careful listening and insistent questioning—is different from the commonly invoked (but conceptually imprecise) formula of “viewpoint diversity.” That phrase embraces competition between entrenched advocates who might have little interest in considering the deficiencies of their own positions. Debate has its value and its place at a university, but a truth-seeking university must be very different from a debating society.

An excellent faculty with strong scholarly values is the bedrock for the achievement of other academic ideals, such as civil discussion and robust inquiry. With such a faculty, difficult episodes can be weathered and errors in policy overcome; without such a faculty, the best policies will be insufficient to achieve the university’s aims. Culture war uproars are often distractions from what matters most, which is scholarly quality.

My predecessor Bill Bowen liked to quote the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Val Fitch, who once declared, in the course of pleading with Nassau Hall to retain another of our eminent scientists, “excellence cannot be bought but it must be paid for.”

Indeed, attracting and retaining top-quality academic talent is an expensive proposition. The Venture Forward campaign reinforced the University’s capacity to do so by raising critical gifts for sixty-nine new professorships, multiple state-of-the-art buildings and facilities, and initiatives in fields such as quantum science, artificial intelligence, and cancer research.

I am grateful to my fellow alumni for the gifts that make possible the hiring and support of a faculty such as ours, and I hope you take enormous pride, as I do, in the national and international honors they receive.

At Princeton, of course, these world-class scholars are not only great researchers but also engaged teachers of both undergraduates and graduate students. The honors that our faculty received this year are evidence of this University’s defining commitments to scholarly excellence and to ensuring that our students learn from extraordinary minds in the fields that they study.

¹ Lee C. Bollinger, University: A Reckoning (W.W. Norton, 2026), 43.

Some recent scholarly honors

• Eight faculty members were inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which we believe is the highest single-year total in Princeton’s history: Cliff Brangwynne in chemical and biological engineering, Chris Chang in chemistry, Maria Chudnovsky in mathematics, Jianqing Fan in operations research and financial engineering, Sabine Kastner in psychology and neuroscience, Sebastian Seung in neuroscience and computer science, Daniel Sigman in geosciences, and Christopher Skinner in mathematics.
• Seven faculty members were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is among Princeton’s best single-year records but not an all-time high: Mark Aguiar in economics, Adele Goldberg in psychology, Noreen Goldman in SPIA, Jenny Greene in astrophysical sciences, Melissa Lane in politics, Atif Mian in SPIA and economics, and Mansour Shayegan in electrical and computer engineering.
• Yiyun Li in creative writing at the Lewis Center won a Pulitzer Prize, Patricia Smith in creative writing received a National Book Award, and Beth Lew-Williams in history and Asian American studies earned the Bancroft Prize (among the highest prizes awarded in the field of American history).
• Nine Princeton faculty members and lecturers won Guggenheim Fellowships: Nathan Arrington in art and archaeology, Matias Cattaneo in economics, Christopher Harris in visual arts at the Lewis Center, Kristina Olson in psychology, Alexander Ploss in molecular biology, Silas Riener in dance at the Lewis Center, Bridgett vonHoldt in ecology and evolutionary biology, and Lewis Center visiting artists Suji Kwock Kim and Kyle Abraham. Eleven alumni also won fellowships, meaning that one small university in central New Jersey could claim at least partial credit for 9 percent of this year’s 223 total awards.
• Two Princeton faculty members were elected permanent fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Dean of the Graduate School Rodney Priestley in chemical and biological engineering and Z. Jason Ren in civil and environmental engineering.