In Short

Luke Cheng ’14

Published Jan. 21, 2016

Eight faculty members, with 204 years of teaching at Princeton among them, are moving to emeritus status this year. The number stands in sharp contrast with 2013, when 32 retired, many as a result of the University’s 2010 retirement-incentive program. This year’s list:

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, philosophy, 12 years on the faculty;
ROBERT BAGLEY, art and archaeology, 29 years;
MICHAEL BENDER, geosciences, 17 years;
WILLIAM HAPPER *64, physics, 34 years;
GILLIAN KNAPP, astrophysical sciences, 34 years;
PAUL LANSKY *73, music, 45 years;
LARRY PETERSON, computer science, 16 years;
ALEJANDRO PORTES, sociology, 17 years.

TOBIAS KIM ’17, a member of the swimming and diving team from Richardson, Texas, died April 25 in Argentina. A University spokesman said Kim was not enrolled at the time and that his death was reported to be accidental. “Toby was a terrific young man with a great energy about him,” said head swim coach Rob Orr.

Luke Cheng ’14

The eating clubs hosted the first PRINCETON TRUCKFEST, a food festival billed as “the alternative Prospect 11.” The April 25 event raised more than $20,000 for charities that fight hunger in Mercer County.

The University reached an agreement with the town of Princeton to pay $21.72 million in VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS over seven years, plus $2.59 million for several municipal projects. This year’s contribution will be $2.75 million, and each subsequent year the amount will increase by 4 percent. Negotiations “were conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect and an understanding of the shared interests of the University and the town,” said Princeton council president Bernie Miller.

Denise Applewhite/Office of Communications

IN MEMORIAM: Professor emeritus PAUL SIGMUND, a member of the politics department faculty from 1963 to 2005 and former director of the Program in Latin American Studies, which he helped to establish, died April 27 in Princeton from complications of pneumonia. He was 85.

Sigmund wrote, edited, or translated 19 books in two fields, political theory and Latin American politics. He was a “seasoned observer of Latin American political development going back to the early 1960s,” said Professor Jeremy Adelman. Sigmund lectured in nearly every Latin American country, and was a visiting professor at the University of Chile and the Catholic University in Santiago.

A devout Roman Catholic, he espoused the liberation-theology movement and had a long relationship with Princeton’s Aquinas Institute.

Published in the June 4, 2014, Issue

2 Responses

Jonathan H. Young ’69

8 Years Ago

Back in the days when most men couldn’t type and I did so for pin money, I typed several manuscripts for Professor Paul E. Sigmund (On the Campus, June 4), including his book on natural law and another one representing his editing of a number of articles from, as I recall, Cuban newspapers.

After making my way through many hundreds of pages of diatribe about American revanchist, revisionist, imperialist, running-dog capitalist lackeys of Wall Street, I delivered a batch of typescript to the professor and asked, somewhat nonplussed, “Is the United States really an imperialist country?”

I have never forgotten his response: “How do you think it got so big?”

Jon Holman ’66

8 Years Ago

I noted in the June 4 On the Campus section that Paul Sigmund has died.

Professor Sigmund was my thesis adviser. I think he pretty much got stuck with me; he was the politics department’s expert on Latin America, and my thesis was on a gubernatorial election in Puerto Rico, where I had grown up.

He helped me get a summer research grant so I could sit at the Library of Congress after junior year; he held the hand of that very callow youth and finally made me understand that “thesis” had a meaning — it was not a history paper, but one that argued a position. He was kind when he easily could have been condescending, and because of him I actually ended up writing something that I can look back on with some pride.

I didn’t and don’t know his family, but I want them to know he was a good and honorable man, someone who made a difference to me.