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Chapter two FAREWELL TO PRINCETON The twentieth century dawned with Edgar Odell Lovett feeling on top of the world. In June of that year he was promoted to the rank of full professor of mathematics at Princeton University, with a substantial raise in pay, and that fall he and his wife began a glorious sabbatical year in Paris. Returning to New Jersey in 1901 after the Parisian sojourn , he was refreshed and eager to reenter the world of teaching and research. He discovered the Princeton social and academic life to be very pleasant indeed, and the community welcomed his wife and him graciously. He could easily imagine spending his entire scholarly career at Princeton. In 1900 the university had formally founded its Graduate College, which began operation in 1901. There had long been graduate work at Princeton, but the intent of the new college was to raise the prestige of the program, emphasize research, and begin the process of awarding graduate degrees. Lovett, of course, would have fully agreed with this development. Even more pleasing to Lovett, however, was the naming of Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton on June 9, 1902. A phenomenally popular lecturer at the university, Wilson had long been thinking about ways to bring Princeton into the twentieth century by changing its curriculum and invigorating its teaching. He wanted to transform the university, which had been a leisurely idyll during which affluent students practiced their social graces, into a high-powered academic dynamo where students were challenged to think, to analyze, and to develop skills that could be translated into affecting the real world. Wilson entitled his inaugural address “Princeton For the Nation ’s Service,” which represented a subtle revision of the ideas of his 1896 Sesquicentennial Address, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” Within weeks of his October 25 formal inauguration as Princeton’s president, Wilson began pushing his educational reforms. He called for a complete overhaul of how most of the teaching was done. Although 36 University Builder himself a gifted lecturer, Wilson knew that many students often slept through lectures and then crammed via purchased lecture notes at the end of the semester. He proposed to hire fifty young faculty—all with their doctorates, all talented and energetic and committed to the life of the mind—and have these so-called preceptors participate in the teaching . Wilson wanted to drop one of the lecture periods of the week and substitute small (no more than five students) discussion classes led by the preceptors. No longer could students coast along in the anonymity of a large lecture class. They would instead be inspired to read, to think, and to discuss. Hiring this many preceptors would increase the faculty by a third and cost more than $2 million, but Wilson sold the idea to the trustees and alumni by persuasively arguing that it would literally revolutionize teaching and learning at Princeton. By 1904 Wilson was personally selecting the preceptors, who were appointed as untenured assistant professors, and the program got under way in the fall of 1905. The preceptors instantly infused energy and intellectual ferment into the campus, making Princeton the most academically exciting campus in America. Dozens of brilliant young faculty came to Princeton precisely because of the power of Wilson’s ideas and his visionary personality. He had a kind of steely resolve that commanded the respect of many idealistic young scholars and made them desire to hitch their careers to his rising star. Wilson then quickly moved to advance his curricular reforms, reforms that were integral to his preceptorship program and reforms that garnered quick and widespread support among the faculty and would subsequently have much influence on colleges and universities across the nation. Wilson sought a middle ground between the still common but old-fashioned rigid curriculum that allowed students practically no choice and the new elective system pioneered at Harvard (and adopted at several other institutions) that offered students almost total freedom—some thought too much—in choice of courses. The elective system, after a flutter of popularity in the two decades before 1900, had come under widespread criticism in the next few years. Wilson wanted to reform the traditional curriculum but still channel students’ choices to an extent. He called for grouping the university’s offerings into twelve departments; students for the first two years would take a Farewell to Princeton 37 broad variety of essentially introductory classes in different fields but at the end of the second year would...

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