In Short: January 2026

Hadi Kamara ’26, a politics major and U.S. Air Force veteran from Alexandria, Virginia, has been named a 2026 Rhodes scholar and will pursue a master’s in international relations from the University of Oxford next fall. Kamara, a first-generation college student, received his associate’s degree in business administration and management from Northern Virginia Community College after serving as a crew chief in the Air Force. He entered Princeton as a transfer student in 2022. “Hadi and his fellow student veterans play an invaluable role on our campus by exemplifying Princeton’s informal motto, ‘in the nation’s service and the service of humanity,’” said Jacob Shapiro, a professor at the School of Public and International Affairs who advised Kamara’s junior paper, in a University announcement. 

Two-thirds of undergraduate course grades at Princeton were in the A-range (A-plus, A, or A-minus), according to the 2024-25 grading report distributed to the faculty in December. Historical data showed a particularly sharp jump in A and A-plus grades in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and a gradual increase since then, peaking at 45.5% last year. A-minus grades have remained roughly the same for the last three decades. In 2004, Princeton’s faculty adopted recommendations that each department limit A’s to 35% of the grades given in undergraduate courses, a policy that frustrated many students but managed to curb grade inflation for nearly a decade. Since the policy was dropped in 2014-15, A grades have risen and B grades have declined.  
The report, compiled by the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing, did not prescribe specific changes but called on professors to be more discerning when awarding A-plus grades and to “continue developing transparent and consistent grading standards” within academic departments.

William Lockwood Jr. ’59, the longtime director of special programming who brought Itzhak Perlman, the Alvin Ailey dance company, Lang Lang, and scores of others to McCarter Theatre Center, made a gift to endow his former position at the local arts institution, according to an October announcement. Lockwood has been associated with McCarter for more than 60 years and booked his first events there as an undergrad. Paula Abreu, McCarter’s director of presented programming, will the first to hold the endowed chair.

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Patricia Smith

Jonathan M. Sweeney / Princeton University

Creative writing professor Patricia Smith received the 2025 National Book Award for poetry in November for her collection The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems. Smith, who joined the Princeton faculty in 2023, taught an introductory poetry course in the fall and is working on her first novel, according to her department bio. Two other Princetonians were nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction: creative writing professor Yiyun Li, for Things in Nature Merely Grow; and Julia Ioffe ’05, for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.