In a Sept. 2 guest essay in The New York Times, award-winning author, academician, and anthropologist David Treuer ’92 provocatively framed a curious and confessional reminiscence of his undergraduate experience titled “I Went to Princeton in Search of Greatness and Came Back Mediocre.” It was not truly about his years on campus, but a past and apparently still current reckoning with his heritage as the offspring of a Holocaust survivor father and Ojibwe reservation mother.
Treuer claims that he went to Princeton in search of greatness and came back home mediocre. Really? From someone who attended literature and creative writing classes taught by Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim recipients and whose thesis adviser was a Nobel laureate?
Maybe Treuer was attempting to sift through his origin story by resorting to a kind of thought experiment. No matter. He was blessed with the finest education one could possibly imagine for a person so enchanted by the written and spoken word. His subsequent literary and academic achievements can hardly be characterized as mediocre. Nor should the commentary have been fashioned by the Times as a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater.
In a Sept. 2 guest essay in The New York Times, award-winning author, academician, and anthropologist David Treuer ’92 provocatively framed a curious and confessional reminiscence of his undergraduate experience titled “I Went to Princeton in Search of Greatness and Came Back Mediocre.” It was not truly about his years on campus, but a past and apparently still current reckoning with his heritage as the offspring of a Holocaust survivor father and Ojibwe reservation mother.
Treuer claims that he went to Princeton in search of greatness and came back home mediocre. Really? From someone who attended literature and creative writing classes taught by Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim recipients and whose thesis adviser was a Nobel laureate?
Maybe Treuer was attempting to sift through his origin story by resorting to a kind of thought experiment. No matter. He was blessed with the finest education one could possibly imagine for a person so enchanted by the written and spoken word. His subsequent literary and academic achievements can hardly be characterized as mediocre. Nor should the commentary have been fashioned by the Times as a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater.