Critiquing the Campus Plan

While I’m appreciative of the University’s desire to expand, I was saddened to find in the campus plan supplement that lands that were farms in 1922-1948 are going to be largely covered with buildings and sports fields. Forget farm to table, this will be farm to tile and farm to foul line.

During my years at Princeton, I watched with sadness as ecology and evolutionary biology (staff and buildings) were decimated to expand molecular biology, and as the geology department struggled to find the staff to teach basic distribution requirements, while Bowen Hall was being commissioned for materials science. In a sense, this feels like a continuation of the same idea.

I worry that Princeton has forgotten that classical sciences like biology and geology matter, and that there is a great deal of essential science in a farm, particularly as we try to understand how the living planet will cope with the coming climate change disaster. A university that still subscribes to a Latin oratory at graduation would do well to consider what its students could learn from ars agriculturae.