The Daily Princetonian: October 7, 2022

As Nassau Starbucks faces staff shortages, unionization pressures rise

By Julian Hartman-Sigall and Isabel Yip

Contributor

The Nassau Street Starbucks has been severely understaffed since the beginning of the school year, resulting in de creased hours and sudden store closings. Weekday hours have been reduced to 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

These issues occur in the wake

of unionization at the Hopewell Starbucks, the first location in New Jersey to unionize, and the rapid increase in Starbucks unions nationally. Recently, fly ers reading “No Contract, No Coffee,” urging students to sup port Starbucks Workers United (SWU), the same organization fighting for better pay and ben efits in Hopewell, have been put up around campus.

Bryce Springfield ’25, a mem

ber of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has promoted SWU through flyers and cam pus outreach as part of the work of the Central New Jersey Chap ter of DSA.

“A major goal of DSA is to support labor efforts — not only in organizing unions and winning union elections, but also helping workers through the process until they get a con

Student leaders in ICC, co-ops, USG propose counterplan to admin-backed dining pilot

By Annie Rupertus and Laura Robertson

A coalition of student lead ers released a five-point pro posal for the expansion of up perclass dining in an email to residential college listservs on Tuesday, Oct. 4. The plan is be ing put forth as an alternative to the pilot program the Uni versity plans to run in the up coming spring semester.

The pilot program, which

has yet to be officially an nounced by the University, would give all juniors and se niors five dining swipes per week to be used at any dining hall, co-op, or eating club, with a possible $1,500 tuition hike.

Student representatives of various interest groups have expressed doubts about its implementation, especially with regard to its potential increased financial burden on eating clubs, co-ops, and indi vidual students.

The students’ five-point plan includes an expansion of the already-existing “Two Extra Meals” program, which currently allows all upper class students two dining hall meals per week, to also include late meal and eating club meal exchange, as well as a new set of eating-club-hosted open nights which could occur weekly.

The plan also proposes that the new underclass dining

Graduate student in an undergraduate world

By Emily Miller | Contributing Prospect Writer

As a rising fifth-year graduate student, I have lived in Princeton lon ger than anywhere else in my adult life. Eating local produce means to matoes and blueberries — not the peaches from my hometown in West ern Colorado. My fridge is now stocked with beer from Cape May — not New Belgium, not Ithaca Beer Company, not Fly ing Dog in Maryland. I own more orange than I ever believed was pos sible. Over the past four years, I have traded my American Airlines miles for United’s so I am better prepared for the certain chaos of Newark Liberty International Airport. Yet, I often feel like a minority among the

U. AFFAIRS

graduate student body in claiming Princeton as my home.

The residential com munity of Princeton was honestly a big draw when I was deciding where to pursue my PhD. I loved the idea of having our own Graduate College, having our own bar, and being able to walk to campus. I was intrigued by the lack of law or busi ness or medical schools, as this meant that the majority of graduate stu dents would be PhDs, bonded together by a drive to learn more about our world — whether it be studying contempo rary challenges like cur ing cancer, capturing carbon, or delving into

U. sells most holdings in Lithium Americas Corp. as Protect Thacker Pass argues that’s not enough

By Miriam Waldvogel and Lia Opperman News Contributor and Assistant News Editor

The University sold the ma jority of its stake in the Lithium Americas Corporation during the second quarter of 2022, ac cording to Securities and Ex change Commission (SEC) fil ings released over the summer. As of last filing, the University’s holdings in the company are around $4.5 million, down from $92 million earlier this year.

Still, Protect Thacker Pass, a Nevada-based coalition of activists, has argued that the University’s holdings in the company remain unacceptable.

Max Wilbert, the co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, said, “We need far deeper and more significant change, including an end to car manufacturing, to stop the [ecological] crisis we’re in.” According to the U.S. De partment of Energy, lithium is used in most of today’s electric vehicles.

Lithium Americas is set to open a mine on Thacker Pass, a sacred site to the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone peoples in Northern Nevada.

According to the Nevada Divi sion of Environmental Protec tion (NDEP), Thacker Pass is one of the largest lithium deposits in the United States.

In a recent op-ed in The Daily Princetonian, Protect Thack er Pass argued that the mine

threatens the sacred lands on the site of a massacre of 31 Indig enous people by the U.S. Army in 1865. ABC News has also re ported that the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the Burns Paiute Tribe have accused the Bureau of Land Management of “failing to consult with them about an Historic Properties Treatment Plan guiding the ini tial archaeological dig required before mine construction can begin.”

In an email to the ‘Prince,’ Wilbert condemned Lithium Americas’ business practices. “Lithium Americas [is] a cor poration which has been impli cated in human rights abuses overseas and is violating the rights of [I]ndigenous people in this country right now,” he wrote.

Daranda Hinkey, a Native activist whose family has lived at the Thacker Pass for genera tions, told The Guardian that building a mine there is “like putting a lithium mine on Ar lington cemetery.” Activists have continually protested the site of the mines, making pub lic comments and filing law suits to protect the site.

According to The Guardian, the claim that the massacre took place at Thacker Pass is dis puted. Two Indigenous groups have lost federal lawsuits last year to block the mine as a sig nificant historical site, with the court stating that “no human

Alternate proposal includes Pay with Points expansion to upperclass students

points program be extended to include upperclass students.

The remaining three points of the proposal lay out longerterm recommendations, such as “social programming that opens the [eating] clubs spe cifically for all upperclass stu dents,” similar to last spring’s pre-Street Week block party.

They also recommend that the ICC “open a campus-wide conversation around exclusion ary aspects of the eating club system, including the recruit ment and selection processes and costs associated with mem bership.” This point of the plan also suggests that the Univer sity expand financial aid “to further cover the prohibitive dues at eating clubs (and other dining options) for lower in come and [First-Generation, Low-Income (FLI)] students.”

Finally, they suggest that the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) consider opening additional inclusive “supplemental social spaces” on campus. This could include the reopening of a campus pub that would serve all members of the University community.

The campus pub, which was in Chancellor Green, served students from 1973 to 1984, dur ing a period when New Jersey briefly dropped the drinking age from 21 to 18. Since its clos ing, there have been several at tempts to revive the campus pub, including a referendum which passed in Winter 2014, and a steering committee which then-president Shirley Tilghman appointed in 2011 to find a location. The pub has not yet been revived.

The proposed alternative plan was signed by Inter-Club Council (ICC) Vice President and Terrace F. Club President Alexander de Gogorza Moravc sik ’23, ICC and Ivy Club Presi dent Sophie Singletary ’23, Real Food Co-op President Naomi Frim-Abrams ’23, Residential College Adviser (RCA) Mutem wa Masheke ’23, USG President and independent student Mayu Takeuchi ’23, and USG U-Coun cil Chair and Charter Club member Stephen Daniels ’24.

“In a monumental move, the ICC and co-op leaders and USG are all working together to try and figure out a plan that works best for all of us,” Frim-Abrams said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “[A plan that] allows us all to be finan

cially and socially secure, and also starts to address some of the concerns, especially that the co-ops had regarding the exclusivity of eating clubs.”

She said that she thought the alternative plan was “a good compromise for what the administration was pushing for, which was fluidity in din ing and allowing people who couldn’t normally eat together to eat in new spaces.”

Takeuchi also noted in an in terview with the ‘Prince’ that she personally believes that the five-point plan would be more effective in furthering the goal of fluidity in dining. She also emphasized that her endorse ment of the plan does not repre sent an endorsement from USG, and that her primary role in the formation of the alternative plan has been as a facilitator to convene leaders from various student populations.

The University has yet to of ficially address the program or its pilot, and has made an em phasis on keeping discussions of the plan and its details by the University confidential.

Prior to the release of the al ternative plan to students, USG sent out an email in the after noon of Oct. 4, reminding the student body that “the dining

pilot and program are not USG initiatives.” They also provided a feedback form where students could “share [their] thoughts regarding the administrationdeveloped dining program and pilot, as well as junior and se nior dining more broadly.”

While Takeuchi and Daniels both signed the proposal, USG has not announced an official stance on the issue, nor does it plan to take an official vote as of now due to the fact that the University has not made an official announcement and “is maintaining confidentiality,” according to a message from Takeuchi to the ‘Prince.’

Takeuchi also told the ‘Prince’ that the plan has been “informed by student input” beyond just the six leaders who signed the proposal. Student input collection regarding the future of campus dining will be ongoing.

In their email, USG an nounced that a Student Assem bly would take place on Thurs day, Oct. 6 from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Frist Campus Center Room 302. This would be lim ited to students only and would provide the opportunity to “lis ten and share perspectives on the administration-developed dining pilot and program as

well as the upperclass dining experience more broadly.”

In a message to the ‘Prince,’ Takeuchi said that she has been meeting with “eating club members, co-op members, stu dents on meal plans, and in dependent students” since the University’s plan was covered in the ‘Prince’ in order to un derstand a variety of student perspectives on the issue. She said she plans to meet with se nior administrators by the end of this week with the goal of “amplifying student feedback.”

Frim-Abrams said that she was excited to see what stu dents were thinking.

“I think having as many stu dents as possible chime in and give us a bigger picture of what upperclassmen actually want is going to be really helpful,” she said.

Laura Robertson is a News staff writer for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at lr15@princeton.edu.

Annie Rupertus is a staff news writer and assistant data editor who covers USG for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at arupertus@ princeton.edu or @annierupertus on Instagram and Twitter.

‘When I was convicted, I felt like my country hated me’: SPEAR hosts discussion on women’s experiences in prison

By Abby Leibowitz and Bridget O’Neill News Contributors

Content warning: The following article contains mention of sexual as sault and suicide.

On Sept. 26, Students for Pris on Education, Abolition, and Reform (SPEAR) hosted students and community members for a screening of “Us Too: Women Si lenced Behind Bars Speak Out.”

The documentary, produced and directed by journalist Val Kiebala follows Cynthia Alvarado, a for merly incarcerated woman’s ex perience with the United States justice system and the trauma she underwent in prison.

After the screening, students participated in a panel discussion with Kiebala and Alvarado on women’s experiences in prison, specifically with sexual assault, and also watched a pre-recorded interview with Rose Dinkins, a woman who is currently incarcer ated.

The documentary followed Al varado’s conviction and sentence of life without parole for a murder she did not commit.

“I went to trial thinking I would go home because I didn’t commit the crime. When I was convicted, I felt like my country hated me,” Alvarado said during the discussion.

The Daily Princetonian sat down with Alvarado after the panel to ask her how Princeton students can get involved with criminal justice reform. She ex plained that education is a crucial step toward abolition and im plored students to attend events like SPEAR’s.

“We need your help. There are a lot of criminal cases,” she said. “Students right now could do re search on cases to see what went wrong. Was there some type of error, was there a dirty cop — things like that. [Students] could gather support in the courtroom so that people [on trial] know that they’re not alone, that people are watching.”

Alvarado also described facing many tragedies during her time in prison. She spoke of the 240 days she spent in solitary confinement — during which she contemplat ed suicide on multiple occasions — and of being raped by a guard, which triggered an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

“Who could I tell about the rape? The people who had the keys

to my cell? The same people who were oppressing me?” Alvarado said in the documentary.

In the documentary, she criti cized the #MeToo movement for its initial failure to include in carcerated women in its goals. In her interview with the ‘Prince,’ she said that she has since been invited to speak at a #MeToo event as a result of her advocacy.

In the discussion, Alvarado spoke about being a mother in prison and the fear inmates have that their children will also end up in the prison system. “As a mother in the carceral system, you feel like a failure,” she ex plained.

“The courts never talk about children. Kids will then end up going through the same process,” she said.

After several denials in the lower courts, Alvarado was even tually released in 2020 after filing a Habeas Corpus appeal, a right in the Constitution that protects people from unlawful imprison ment.

She explained in the discussion that she had spent hours in the

prison library reading about the law and her rights. She eventually came to understand that her con viction was a breach of her con stitutional rights, a matter that can be taken up by the Supreme Court. Independently, she fought until the appeal was granted.

“Judge Leeson restored my faith in humanity,” Alvarado said of the judge who granted her appeal.

After she was released, she vowed to never give up on the women she left behind in prison.

Audience members also watched a pre-recorded interview with Rose Dinkins, a currently in carcerated Black woman. She was a good friend of Alvarado’s while incarcerated and helped her get through life in prison, a primary motivation for Alvarado’s advo cacy against life without parole sentences.

Alvarado and Kiebala ex plained that Dinkins attempted to rob a store in the 1970s in order to feed her children. She was charged with two counts of murder of po lice officers, committed during the robbery in what she says was self-defense, and sentenced to life

in prison without parole.

In the discussion, Alvarado ex plained that she wants to change the perspective around Dinkins’ story. She told the audience that Dinkins was a Black woman in the 1970s who could not find a job due to her race and gender and thus resorted to robbery. In prison, Dinkins obtained her GED and associate’s degree and is now a paralegal.

Today, Alvarado said she works to eliminate the injustices of the system she was placed in through education and policy change. In her home state of Pennsylvania, she said, she is fighting to end a statute of limitations on rape against incarcerated women and life without parole sentences.

According to Kiebala, there are ways that the carceral system keeps prisoners’ stories shielded from the public. Kiebala explained that when she set the interview with Dinkins, Alvarado was re moved from Dinkins’ visitor list, which she said she believes was because prisons want to hide the truth of what occurs behind bars.

Amber Rahman ’24 and Alan

Gutiérrez ’25, SPEAR’s co-presi dents, co-led the discussion. “It is so important to center the voices of incarcerated and formerly in carcerated people, particularly women of color who are systemi cally silenced by the carceral state,” Rahman explained.

Rahman also emphasized the unique obligation that Princeton students have to help women of color who are incarcerated.

“We uniquely have access to power that we must use to fight to stop the incredible harm that prison, solitary confinement, and criminalization does against women of color particularly,” she said.

Abby Leibowitz is a news contribu tor for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at al6080@princeton.edu, @abigal leibow1 on Twitter and @abby.lei bowitz on Instagram.

Bridget O’Neill is a news contribu tor for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at bo1815@princeton.edu, and @ bridgetroneill on Instagram and Twitter.

confirms passage of

management

hears

on Lawnparties

By Annie Rupertus

The Undergraduate Student Gov ernment (USG) Senate met on Sun day, Oct. 2 for a second vote on an elections management resolution and to hear committee updates, in cluding a report on this semester’s Lawnparties.

The elections management re form, which amends the USG Con stitution to establish the role of Deputy Elections Manager, unani mously passed both of the two con secutive votes required for a consti tutional amendment in meetings on Sunday, Sept. 25 and Sunday, Oct. 2.

The change, which is the result of the work of USG’s reform project, aims to provide additional support to USG’s Chief Elections Manager.

Social Committee Chair Madison Linton ’24 delivered a report on Fall 2022 Lawnparties, noting that the Social Committee received positive feedback from students who enjoyed the change in genre this semester from rap to indie rock. Linton also reported that, with regards to the headliner performance, of those who responded to the Lawnparties survey, “more people were satisfied than dissatisfied.”

USG also received constructive criticism in the survey. As a result, the Social Committee is considering ways to improve the variety of food at future Lawnparties and to make food available for longer amounts of time, as well as putting up more easily readable signage.

Linton explained that while the most common piece of negative feedback the committee received re garded “the lack of student involve ment in the choice of the headliner,” they will likely be unable to imple ment a new system of direct student input in future headliner choices because of limitations inherent in the bidding and contract processes with artists.

U-Councilor Chair Stephen Daniels ’24 suggested that USG con sider adopting a Battle of the Bands structure with student performers and allocating the large headliner budget into other areas, noting that he believes that the social aspects of Lawnparties are more central to the experience for students than the headliner.

Housing and Facilities Task Force co-chairs Sean Bradley ’24 and Mari am Latif ’24 gave a report on the task force’s box fans initiative, which dis tributed 625 box fans to students in non-air conditioned dorms. While the task force ran out of fans after their initial order of 500, they were able to acquire an additional 125 fans to dis tribute, Bradley and Latif reported.

Bradley said the effort was a “very successful pilot program” that the task force hopes to institutionalize in the future.

”Not having air conditioning was very much a mental health burden on the students [surveyed by the task force],” said Bradley.

The Senate briefly discussed pos sible options for fan collection and distribution in the future, including an idea about dropping off box fans in non-air conditioned rooms prior to move-in.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Chair Braiden Aaronson ’25 gave an update on their committee and its plans for an international student brunch mixer on Saturday, Oct. 8. The committee is collaborat ing with the Graduate Student Gov ernment (GSG) on the event with the goal of facilitating “meaningful connections” between undergradu ate and graduate international stu dents.

Aaronson also gave an overview of the DEI committee’s structure for the semester. The committee encompasses seven subcommittees focused on dining accommoda tions, campus accountability, gen der equity, student spaces improve ment, eating club transparency, transportation accessibility, and absence equity regarding religious observances.

Campus and Community Affairs (CCA) Chair Isabella Shutt ’24 pro vided an introduction for her com mittee as well, which has formed working groups focused on Tigers in Town, Pay with Points, social im pact internships, local government, Community Action (CA) orientation feedback collection, promoting local happenings, and working towards Princeton’s standard of service learning.

Specific project ideas mentioned included exploring possibilities like getting students to sit on local boards and committees and imple menting a service learning distribu tion requirement.

Following Shutt’s presentation and the vote to establish a Deputy Elections Manager, the Senate voted unanimously to enter a closed ex ecutive session, ending the meeting to the general public.

USG Senate meetings are held in Betts Auditorium in the School of Architecture at 4 p.m. on Sunday af ternoons and are open to all.

Annie Rupertus is a staff news writ er and assistant data editor who covers USG for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at arupertus@princeton.edu or @an nierupertus on Instagram and Twitter.

Heyler: There was this one mass quitting where seven people left

tract,” he said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.

With a frequently shortstaffed location across the street from campus, DSA’s promotion of SWU is focused on “try[ing] to get students involved in sup porting people who work at Starbucks locations,” Spring field said.

Despite efforts to improve working conditions via union ization from SWU, the current employees seeking work face serious struggles.

While employees used to re ceive their schedules up to two weeks in advance, changes in operating hours have left em ployees with fluctuating, un certain schedules. A minimum number of employees are re quired to operate the store dur ing a normal shift, so occasion al store closures have resulted from staff unavailability. Pro cedures like new staff training and store cleaning require the store to be closed, which also reduces the available operating hours.

For Nubia Morales ’25, a Star bucks barista, the “hours are very unreliable.”

“It used to be two weeks in ad vance or a week in advance, but because the [operating] hours change within the week, some times I won’t get the hours that I need,” she said.

Morales has also worked at four other Starbucks locations. She said that Nassau’s location was “the busiest [she’s] ever worked at.”

Recently, the store closed un expectedly for a day after a store supervisor caught COVID-19.

“If there’s no one that could cover and there’s not enough people to run the Starbucks that day, then we will close for that day,” Morales said.

She also pointed out that once the store was kept open during a new barista’s training, “which is not usually how Starbucks trains partners, but in this loca tion, it’s the only way it works.”

Some baristas noted that their hours have changed due to other employees suddenly not coming into the store, or some temporary summer employees, like high school students, no longer being available to work.

“There was this one mass quitting, where seven people left … I think it was a lot of peo ple fed-up with working hours, pay, and not enough benefits,” Maddy Heyler ’25 said, who worked at the store last semes ter.

To combat understaffing, Starbucks typically contacts other partner stores in the area for more temporary employ ees. However, workers at other branches are warned about the customer base at the Nassau Street Starbucks.

“With all the other baristas that I’ve talked to who work in New Jersey, not just at this loca tion, this location has had the most difficult customers to deal with,” Morales said.

Starbucks employees must work an average of 20 hours a week in order to receive ben efits over a 6-month period. As a result, student employees at Starbucks find that the store’s demands and Princeton’s aca demic workload are incompat ible. According to Morales, the store currently has only three Princeton student employees.

“[With] the new policy, where you need to work 18 hours a week … it makes being a student and working there very, very hard,” explained Nick Masters ’25, a former employee at Starbucks.

“Students work at Coffee Club, and that is much more of a Princeton-centered, socially more aware campus group, be cause people that come in are typically students,” Heyler said.

The understaffing that has affected Starbucks has not been seen by Coffee Club. In fact, in their most recent round of hiring, Coffee Club had 75 ap plicants for 25 available slots, according to Manager Paige Sil verstein.

Reflecting on the disparity between Coffee Club and Star bucks, Masters said, “if Star

bucks wasn’t as understaffed, I think more people would be willing to [work there]. But right now, with the way things are, it wards people off.”

Sara Mughal, SWU organizer and employee at the unionized Hopewell Starbucks, explained that most of the workplace problems do not exist in a vac uum.

“The problems snowball, and it gets so crazy. The company could prevent it [but] they don’t, and it keeps happening,” Mu ghal said.

As for unionizing at the Nassau Street Starbucks, cur rent and former employees de scribed discussions that took place following nationwide unionizations.

“We were all ears about it, but not really talking about it when there were people nearby,” Mo rales said.

However, unionization at the Hopewell location nearby encouraged conversation, she added.

“I have noticed that this con versation has gotten less and less scary after people bringing it up more often, and I think that was because we did hear about the [Hopewell location] unionizing.”

Unionization, for Masters, is a potential fix to the problem of understaffing, making the store a more attractive place for student employees.

“It may attract new employ ees to a point where they can finally go back to their normal schedule and not have people working from open to close, be cause that’s the problem right now,” he said.

Julian Hartman-Sigall is a news, podcast, and newsletter con tributor for the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached on Twitter @Julian_h_s, on Instagram @julianhartman, or jh8991@princeton.edu.

Isabel Yip is an assistant news editor and newsletter editor who typically covers University Affairs and student life. She can be reached at isabelyip@princeton.edu or on Instagram at @isaayip.

Wilbert: We need far deeper and more significant change

panies, one of which is Lithium Americas.

By Michelle Liu Staff Constructor

remains have been found as evi dence of a massacre site there.”

Despite the University selling the majority of its stake in the company, Wilbert argued after the sale that Princeton is still a “major investor” and is not do ing enough to divest from min ing companies.

“Princeton University is actively profiting from an in dustry that is violating human rights, destroying habitat, and polluting our planet,” Wilbert wrote. “The [U]niversity should divest from mining companies just as it has divested from fos sil fuels.”

The University recently dis sociated from 90 fossil fuel com panies, including Exxon Mobil, and wrote in a recent statement that the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) would eliminate holdings in publicly traded fossil fuel com panies in the endowment.

The University itself, as op posed to PRINCO, is currently a stakeholder in only three com

Asked for comment, Uni versity Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss told the ‘Prince’ that the University does not com ment on individual holdings of the endowment.

During the first quarter of 2022, the University was the fourth-largest investor in Lithium Americas, holding ap proximately 2.4 million shares worth $92 million. After its sale earlier this year, as of the latest SEC filing, it holds only 224,000 shares, valued at $4.5 million.

The University’s endowment is currently worth $37.7 billion.

In an email to the ‘Prince,’ Virginia Morgan, the senior di rector of investor relations and environmental sustainability governance (ESG) at Lithium Americas, emphasized the company’s relationship with the University as an investor.

“Lithium Americas is pleased to have the support of all our shareholders, including Prince ton,” Morgan wrote. “Our objec tive is to maximize shareholder value by executing our lithium projects in Argentina and the

US to production.”

Morgan also referred the ‘Prince’ to the company’s lat est corporate presentation for more details on their products and execution. With regard to the Nevada mines in particular, Morgan wrote that the Thack er Pass project is “focused on developing the largest known lithium deposit in North Amer ica,” and the company expects to “start early-works construc tion in 2022.”

SEC filings for the most re cent quarter will likely be re leased in November 2022, which will provide the most up-todate information on the Uni versity’s stock holdings.

Miriam Waldvogel is a contrib uting news writer for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at miriamwald vogel@princeton.edu or on Insta gram @miriam.waldvogel.

Lia Opperman is an Assistant News Editor who often covers Uni versity affairs, student life, and local news. She can be reached at liaopperman@princeton.edu, on Instagram @liamariaaaa, or on Twitter @oppermanlia.

Students react to University’s dissociation from fossil fuel companies

By Cole Strupp News Contributor

On Sept. 29, the University an nounced that its Board of Trustees voted to dissociate from 90 com panies in the “thermal coal and tar sands segments of the fossil fuel industry,” which included Exxon Mobil. Thermal coal and tar sands oil were identified by a “panel of expert faculty” as producing espe cially high carbon dioxide emis sions compared to other fossil fuels.

The University also announced last week that the Princeton Uni versity Investment Company (PRINCO) will “eliminate all hold ings in publicly traded fossil fuel companies” and “ensure that the endowment does not benefit from any future exposure to those com panies” as part of the Board’s “com mitment to achieving a net-zero endowment portfolio over time.”

This decision comes after al most a decade of student and alumni activism, largely led by the group Divest Princeton.

In a recent press release, Divest Princeton called the announce ment “a huge deal for Princeton and for the world.”

“We at Divest Princeton view this as a necessary step, especially in light of the severe climate im pacts currently faced all over the world, especially during this hur ricane season,” the organization said in the statement.

Sean Bradley ’24, a student in the School of Public and International Affairs, stressed how the policy change will help the University live up to its motto.

“To truly be in the service of hu manity, Princeton must not fund fossil fuel companies that spread disinformation and pollute our planet,” Bradley wrote to The Daily Princetonian.

For other students, such as James Daniels ’26, the announce ment came as a disappointment.

“Regardless of the shortcom ings of fossil fuels, the University has a fiduciary obligation to gener ate the greatest return on invest ment, not to play politics with the endowment,” Daniels wrote in a message to the ‘Prince.’

He raised concerns about po tentially diminished returns on investment for PRINCO’s portfolio after cutting fossil fuel holdings. Daniels said the dissociation move is “unwise and eliminates sound investment options for the fund’s managers.”

On the contrary, Bradley viewed divestment from fossil fuels as a profitable investment strategy.

TOWN

“Fossil fuels are, at this point, more expensive than renewable energy,” he said. “I think that we will begin to see that continuing to hold those investments is a poor financial choice.”

Other students argued that sim ply dissociating from fossil fuel companies does not go far enough in supporting climate activism.

In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Wyatt Browne ’26 noted that “in terms of real change, it’s more impactful for the University to actively invest in green energy or sustainable industry than passive ly withdraw money.”

As of May 2022, the University’s endowment held a 4.5 percent ex posure to the fossil fuel industry, with 0.03 percent directly invested in the industry, according to Princ eton Alumni Weekly.

Another contentious issue was the University’s decision to stop accepting research funding from the companies listed for dissocia tion, such as ExxonMobil. The oil and gas giant has held a research partnership with the University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment since 2015.

“We’re really lucky to be able to [cut research funding from fossil fuel corporations] because of our substantial endowment. I think it is a lot of progress,” Claire Gold berg ’26 told the ‘Prince.’

Still, some believe that the Uni versity’s dissociation was not com prehensive enough.

“It is regrettable that Shell and BP, two of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, respon sible for devastating and ongoing damage, are not on the list,” Di vest’s press release stated.

Divest Princeton also cited two instances of the University’s recent financial partnerships with these corporations — Shell’s 2021 con tributions to a startup spun out of Princeton in 2019 and BP’s funding of the Carbon Mitigation Institute.

Like the student organizers with Divest Princeton, Bradley support ed an end to research funding by fossil fuel corporations — even if the money financed clean energy research — such as the case with the ExxonMobil partnership.

“Fossil fuel companies who in vest in our clean energy research while continuing to pollute our planet are simply trying to im prove their appearance and green wash their legacies,” he said.

To make up for funding lost from dissociation, the University also announced the creation of “a new fund to support energy re search at Princeton.”

Nate Howard ’25, a student coor

dinator for Divest Princeton, said he has high expectations for the program.

“We’re excited that the alterna tive funding for the research from the University is clearly a program that can be built upon and expand ed, and we hope to see it expand to replace all fossil fuel funding for research,” he wrote in a message to the ‘Prince.’

Howard is a contributing col umnist for the ‘Prince.’

Going forward, some students hope to see the University broaden its dissociation policy.

“I think that limiting the dis sociation criteria to the coal and tar sands industry limited the ef fectiveness of [the policy]. I believe that our endowment portfolio

should be clean of any and all fossil fuel interests,” said Bradley.

Daniels, on the other hand, be lieves that further limits on the University’s investments would be unfeasible.

“If every political movement on campus had their way, there would be nothing left to invest in,” he wrote.

As for Divest Princeton, the group plans to continue advocat ing for complete dissociation from the fossil fuel industry. They also seek to implement “measures to ensure transparency in invest ments and adequate enforcement of the new divestment measures” along with “responsible, non-ex tractive reinvestment of the divest ed assets, particularly in climate

resilience in frontline communi ties.”

Bradley also took time to reflect on the role Divest played in bring ing about the policy change.

“Without student activism, we would have remained at the status quo. The decade of activism that the University is trying to ignore has brought us to today and I am incredibly grateful for all who were involved,” Bradley said.

The University has not acknowl edged Divest Princeton in any of its public statements.

Cole Strupp is a news contribu tor from Asbury Park, N.J. He can be reached atcolestrupp@princeton.edu or on Instagram @colestrupp.

Farmers’ market moves closer to campus, making produce more accessible to University community

By Tess Weinreich and Simone Kirkevold Assistant News Editor and

Contributor

Princeton Farmers Market has moved to the Dinky parking lot, situated just south of campus in front of the Wawa. This location, which is significantly closer to the University compared to its previous site of operation on Franklin Avenue, has increased access to produce and other prod

ucts for the University commu nity.

The market was first estab lished in 2009 by the JM Group, a cooperative of restaurants in the Princeton area. Now, in its 13th year of operation, the farmers’ market partners with 21 local and regional vendors.

“We have an assortment of vendors,” said Natalie Fiorino, who has worked as the mar ket’s manager since early July, in an interview with The Daily

Princetonian. “We have two or ganic farms, two fruit orchards, a whole grain bread company, exotic mushrooms, dog treats, flowers, pasture-raised meat and eggs, kombucha, a granola stand, empanadas, and I’m probably missing some,” Fiorino contin ued. This assortment of vendors is local to the Princeton area, except for Lost Bread Company, which comes from Philadelphia to sell their bread on the bi-week ly schedule.

According to Fiorino, vendors are scheduled on an alternating basis to ensure new options each week for returning shoppers. She reported that the market is fre quented by a “solid following of townsfolk” each week, in addi tion to students and visitors.

“It’s important to shop local because you’re giving back to the community. You can come and talk to the farmers, you know what you’re eating and about how it was grown,” Fiorino said. “It’s good for everyone. It’s good for the earth.”

Chickadee Creek Farm, a Pen nington-based vegetable, flower, and herb farm, has been a partner with the Princeton Farmers Mar ket for seven years. Darci Burns, a farmhand at Chickadee Creek, has run the farm’s stand at the market every year since.

Burns told the ‘Prince’ that the farm brings up to 35 differ ent items to the farmers’ market each week, with produce options varying throughout the season, as different crops are harvested.

“Today is a big day because we grow ginger,” Burns said in an in terview with the ‘Prince.’ “It’s not very easy to grow in New Jersey, and we’re kind of known for it.”

In addition to produce, the Princeton Farmers Market also offers prepared foods and snacks; The Granola Bar, which sells bagged granola and to-go bars from locally-sourced oats, has been a vendor at the market since 2019. Company founder, Advah Zinder, was trained as a pastry chef and originally started ex perimenting with granola bar recipes several years ago when she worked as an employee at a golf club.

“They would put them up for sale on beverage cart, and they would sell out constantly. I couldn’t keep up,” Zinder recalled in an interview with the ‘Prince.’

With the growing popularity of her granola, she had to start creating “crazier and crazier fla vors,” she said, in order to accom modate the wants of her buyers — maple cranberry granola and lemon blueberry bars are among her bestsellers.

In addition to the many food options, the market also features artists based in New Jersey.

Susan Freeman, founder of Whimsy Design and a self-ac claimed “lifelong artist,” sells homemade jewelry, notecards, windchimes, and masks at the market. She shared in an inter view with the ‘Prince’ that she of ten gleans inspiration from upcy cled materials and “found items.”

Freeman described her prod ucts as ranging “from funky to fancy.” At her table, she had ear rings on display, each made from a different “found item,” such as old keys, shark teeth, acrylic but terflies, and children’s toys.

Many of the market vendors accept New Jersey’s Supplemen tal Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides aid for low-income families to acquire food and groceries. The market, which began for the summer sea son in May, will continue to oper ate every Thursday until Nov. 17.

Tess Weinreich is an assistant news editor for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at tw7353@princeton.edu.

Simone Kirkevold is a news con tributor for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at simonek@princeton.edu or on Instagram @simpne.b.k

KRISTAL GRANT / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

This Week in Photos

By Angel Kuo, Natalia Maidique, Zoe Berman, Keeren Setokusumo, Jun Choi, and Rodolfo Arzaga

Photo Editor and Staff Photographers

Hum r

Remaining walkways around campus to be turned into obstacle courses for ‘engaging’ student commutes

By Walker Penfield Humor Contributor

As several major construction proj ects spring up around campus — such as Hobson College, the School of Engineer ing and Applied Sci ence, an expansion of Dillon Gym, and Fine Hall’s conver sion into a for-profit prison — Princeton students are familiar izing themselves with new commutes and detours.

Some have spoken out about how these new routes have dis rupted their routine paths and woken them up early in the morn ing with raucous con struction. Students have also noted the lack of communica tion from University administration, who reportedly throw

darts at a campus map each morning to de cide which walkway will be torn up.

In response to these concerns, the Univer sity Administration has developed the “Princeton Builds” initiative to “put our values of greenwash ing and inaccessibil ity into action with cute posters and ta glines,” according to PB spokesperson Sy Dwok. The initiative’s banners have been placed across several construction sites, and signage has been “sensibly strewn” all over Frist Campus Center.

In the next step of their campaign, PB is attempting to “beau tify and reimagine” students’ commutes through “engaging” obstacle courses along main campus walk

First-year planning on dabbling in divestment activism says he’s totally out of luck

ways. Dwok told the Daily PrintsAnything that PB had “heard students were frus trated with the new detours across cam pus, and wanted to do something fun and fresh to liven things up.”

“I used to be falling asleep during my 8:30 am lecture in Jadwin Hall,” said Earl Lee Byrd ’25, “but now that I have to trek over sus tainably-sourced hot coals on Goheen Walk, I’m wide awake!”

Forbes student Ann Nex ’26 said that she feels “thoroughly entertained” by the series of swinging blades that she must carefully hop through on her way past the Lewis Center for the Arts.

PB announced that a gate to Prospect Street will be built to only

allow passage to stu dents who successful ly solve a riddle posed by a statue of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ’72.

As students engage with these new ad ditions to campus, Princeton Builds says it is “excited to make students’ journeys across campus as en joyable as possible.”

At the time of pub lication, University Health Services re ports that just 11 stu dents have been in jured along the newly renovated walkways.

Walker Penfield is a sophomore from Men don, Massachusetts, who has absolutely no ill-will towards Campus Con struction (maybe he’s just afraid of change). He can be reached at wpen field@princeton.edu.

By Tyler Wilson Humor Contributor

Following the recent news that the Board of Trustees has directed the University to disso ciate from 90 fossil fuel companies, many stu dents have celebrated the decision and some have even voiced a com mitment to further cli mate activism. But for one student, the news came as a disappoint ment: He had wished that the fight had gone on for just a few more semesters.

Res Ume ’26 had been looking forward to join ing Divest Princeton since he learned about the group at the Involve ment Fest. He admired their cardboard signs at last week’s protest from afar — and would have attended the protest, he said, but was held up at

a mandatory Handshake meeting by a McKinsey & Company recruiter.

With the recent news from the Board of Trust ees, however, he noted that he feels “shit-outof-luck.”

He continued, “I know it’s good news, it’s just kind of annoying that I don’t get to hold up one of those signs and take some credit for getting Princeton to divest. All I have to show for my time here is a Google Form and an acceptance email. Is the ‘Prince’ still taking writers? Maybe I can sign up for that in stead.”

Tyler Wilson is a con tributing writer for The Prospect and Humor at the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at tyler.wilson@princeton. edu, or on Instagram at @ tylertwilson.

Abbr.

of Princeton

of NNE

Nobel laureate from

crying

out!”

History Month:

of

often referenced

again

business?

Twain’s “___!

Like a Woman!”

who said “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”

after a party

many in middle

worker, for short

to 36-Across

research

E.

Mulaney’s

in Honduras

coast time zone,

Nadal,

sheep

of tape that sounds like an animal

of cake?

out

in

By Michelle Liu Staff Constructor

Does Princeton protect progressive speech, too?

As

soon as the Class of 2026 arrived on cam pus, Princeton’s ad ministration plunged us into a series of orientation events. Among the presenta tions about University values, one stood out: “Free Expres sion at Princeton.” It was early in Orientation, it was required, and University President Chris topher Eisgruber ’83 addressed our class for the first time — the administration clearly pri oritized it.

First-years filled McCarter Theatre; from the stage, Presi dent Eisgruber read at length from the University’s Statement on Freedom of Expression and student speaker Myles McK night ’23, president of Princ eton Open Campus Coalition, a group known to host conser vative events, encouraged stu dents to stand up for free speech and be open to challenge in pur suit of finding “truth.”

Calls for free speech on cam pus are not new, and neither are the anxieties that often provoke them. At least since the second Red Scare in the late 1940s, the United States has been con cerned with “liberal indoctrina tion” in higher education. Re cently, this has manifested as panic over professors teaching about racism, concern about hostility toward conservative views on campus, and alarm surrounding “safe spaces.” In 2015, Princeton adopted the Uni versity of Chicago’s principles, a policy change publicly celebrat ed particularly by right-leaning professors.

Given the history of conser vative anxiety on college cam puses, paired with the speak ers chosen for the orientation event, the University has made clear it will protect conservative speech. This is a good thing; it’s important that the University, with all of its power, does not censor. But it raises a question: Will Princeton protect progres sive speech, too?

Princeton’s Statement on Freedom of Expression grants “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, chal lenge, and learn,” with one ma

jor exception: when “limitations on that freedom are necessary to the functioning of the Univer sity” (other “narrow” exceptions exist for scenarios like defama tion, genuine threats, and priva cy violations). Limiting speech to the “functioning of the Uni versity” may seem innocuous, but it effectively means that the University places itself above free speech. Thus the speech that is least free is speech that dissents from the University and its modus operandi.

Progressive activism is inher ently disruptive. Seeking to un dermine oppression and affirm everyone’s “humanity and right to exist,” in the face of systems that deny universal humanity demands the creation of trou ble. Conservatism, on the other hand, seeks to maintain the status quo, or turn back time. Progressivism is inextricably linked to protest.

Progressive, anti-racist, radi cally inclusive ideas are almost always met with resistance from authority. Disruptive protest was a critical tool for civil rights, labor, and feminist movements, and it’s also a vital tool for activists here on campus — the Black Justice League and Divest Princeton are two recent examples of important cam pus protest movements. In his podcast series “History is US,” Professor of African American Studies Eddie S. Glaude Jr. de scribes progressives’ burden in this moment as “going beyond having difficult conversations across party lines and finding middle ground. We are called to imagine America anew, and that will mean … committing our selves to the struggle to birth something new.” Progressives have to make what John Lewis called “good trouble,” peaceful disruption necessary to bring the University community to consciousness, attention, and action.

To some extent, limitations on disruption are understand able: Princeton has an ethical responsibility to function as a place where students can learn and academics can research at their fullest capacity. But the University’s limitations are far too strict to allow for peaceful and productive dissent, and the

punishments that students risk for breaking them are unclear. According to the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Stu dents, “the University reserves the right to determine the time, place, and manner” of protests and generally bans campouts occupying outdoor space, blocking any kind of pedestrian traffic, and forms of amplified sound. A fellow Divest Prince ton activist Nate Howard ’25 told me he has experienced activists being told to not place flyers on buildings and to not use bull horns at protests that occurred in the middle of the day. These occurrences are treacherous in fringements of free speech.

When it comes to progressive critiques of and protests against University decisions, another issue is introduced: the very people whose behavior cam pus activists seek to change are in charge of how activists are punished, with little in official policy to guide or restrict them. Rights, Rules and Responsibili ties says simply that students who break the rules of protest can be subject to “being barred from campus and/or arrested” and that “wherever possible, such decisions will be made by officers of the University,” a group that includes President Eisgruber and Dean of the Col lege Jill Dolan.

Since Princeton’s adminis tration is in charge of deciding what speech and protest should be protected and what should not, it follows that speech chal lenging the administration’s authority is most at risk. The lack of clear punishments for violations means that campus activists don’t reliably have the information they need to decide whether to engage in civil disobedience: when pun ishments are unknowable and could be extremely severe, it’s hard to assess risk. The lack of standardization and transpar ency in punishment also means that people of color are at higher risk. As Brittani Telfair wrote in 2020, recalling the Black Justice League’s 2015 sit-in in Eisgru ber’s office, “not all are equally protected when attempting to speak freely … minorities fight ing for change are often not protected when exercising [free speech].”

At the orientation event about free speech, the speakers em phasized students’ responsibili ty to uphold free speech on cam pus, and McKnight commented that “formal protections for free speech are important, but the informal culture … can be even more critical.” In reality, he has it exactly backwards: It’s important that students value and uphold free speech in their

individual interactions, but it is the University that has the most power, and therefore it is the University that bears the most responsibility for ensuring that it doesn’t use that power to trample on student speech.

Princeton’s “free speech” policy doesn’t allow for enough peaceful disruption; it has ex tremely restrictive rules about protest; and it has ill-defined punishments for violating those rules. The University has made it clear that while it may be com mitted to freedom of speech when it comes to right-wing controversial speakers, pro fessors making racist remarks about students, and seminar discussions, it is not interested in cultivating an environment in which real and necessary dis sent against the system is safe. Even as it claims to listen to all voices, the University can still shut its ears to progressives and still shut us down.

Eleanor Clemans-Cope (she/her) is a first-year from Rockville, Mary land intending to study economics. She spends her time making music with Princeton University Orches tra and good trouble with Divest Princeton. She can be reached on Twitter at @eleanorjcc or by email at eleanor.cc@princeton.edu.

Princeton should adopt oral exams

Henry Hsiao Contributing Columnist

AsSeptember concludes and October commenc es, the ebb and flow of Princeton’s academic calendar pulls students along to their next destination: midterms week. Princeton students are al ready busy preparing for written, in-class midterm exams, which dominate the University’s exami nation structure.

Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. By “it,” I mean that the current structure of midterm and final assignments — the old combination of papers and multiple choice or short answer tests — isn’t the only, or even the superior, method of evaluating student learning. And it’s for this reason that I propose something

new: an oral examination system in which students verbally re spond to questions from course instructors.

To be clear, I’m not calling for the elimination of papers or writ ten tests. They remain valuable pedagogical tools. But it is prob lematic that we rely on this com bination alone when other effec tive assessments exist, as well. Princeton should offer oral ex ams, an evaluation system with a particularly strong track record.

Oral exams, long-used and common in countries like Ger many, are beneficial for students — not just because they mirror the type of tasks required in aca demic settings, but also because they apply to a multitude of ca reer fields and have functional implications beyond graduation. You might not draft a 20-page re

search paper or take a three-hour test in your life again, but regard less of your profession, you’ll definitely interview for jobs, hold presentations, host meetings, or simply talk to people — aspects the oral exam imitates and ad dresses.

Thus, the oral exam, by vir tue of its configuration, allows students to hone their commu nication skills in a manner that papers or written tests cannot, while still testing what they would cover in terms of content. Speaking in an oral exam is quite similar, after all, to preparing an essay or short answer — except now, you need to say it aloud. The ability to speak lucidly and per suasively while engaging with diverse sources is just as impor tant as the ability to write in such fashion, and oral exams enable sufficient practice of the former.

Another major benefit of oral exams is that they make it harder to cheat: You walk into the room, and you either comprehend the material or you don’t. This fea ture also makes it difficult for students to slack off on readings — anything listed on the syl labus could be fair game on an oral exam, letting students dem onstrate how they’d relate their broad conceptual knowledge to distinct posed scenarios. As a result, implementing oral ex ams may serve as a motivator for students to study carefully and avoid embarrassing themselves, while reducing instances of aca demic dishonesty.

A third advantage of the oral exam is its versatility: It can be applied to a range of disciplines without much trouble. Initially, the oral exam seems most favor able for the humanities or social sciences — areas like politics, history, or foreign languages. But oral exams can be easily ap plied to STEM fields with slight modifications, e.g., providing for a chalkboard or necessary software, so that, besides merely answering questions, students can draw or show their processes when solving problems, as when proving a math theorem.

Oral exams even have some precedent at Princeton. As is the case with most American univer sities, they are administered at the graduate level for everything from computer science to phi losophy, and even exist in some form on the undergraduate level with senior thesis defenses in de partments like SPIA and History. So if anyone wanted confirma tion of oral exams’ feasibility, the University has already provided it by putting them into effect.

Granted, oral exams aren’t per fect. They’re often criticized as subjective; different students are asked different questions. That’s a valid concern — would grad ers fairly administer the exam?

The good news, however, is that the issue of subjectivity can be mitigated through a committee system, with panels composed of two or three course instructors, both professors and preceptors.

This design minimizes the risk

that a student’s grade depends on a single grader’s opinion, and it ensures a more representative faculty sample.

Another objection to oral exams is that they potentially disadvantage students who are nervous when speaking. I recog nize that fear personally — I’m hesitant, on occasion, to contrib ute to class discussions, because I imagine I have nothing valuable to say. But oral exams would not be a wholly new burden, on this count. Most Princeton courses already have significant “partici pation” components that encour age students’ engagement.

Though imperfect, oral ex ams have merits that papers and written tests don’t, from promoting greater academic in tegrity to fostering greater schol arly conversation. We shouldn’t be locked into believing that papers and written tests are the only — indeed, preferred — way to conduct midterms and finals. Rather, we should expand our view of academic assessment. Implementing oral exams as an option opens up another avenue for Princeton students to demon strate their critical analysis and communication skills, without sacrificing rigor.

It’s time, then, for Princeton to give undergraduate oral exams the chance they deserve.

Henry Hsiao is a first-year con tributing columnist from Princ eton, N.J. He can be reached at henry. hsiao@princeton.edu.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

president Thomas E. Weber ’89 vice president David Baumgarten ’06 secretary Chanakya A. Sethi ’07 treasurer Douglas Widmann ’90 assistant treasurer Kavita Saini ’09 trustees Francesca Barber Craig Bloom ’88

Kathleen Crown Suzanne Dance ’96

Gabriel Debenedetti ’12

Stephen Fuzesi ’00

Zachary A. Goldfarb ’05 Michael Grabell ’03

John G. Horan ’74 Rick Klein ’98

James T. MacGregor ’66

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Abigail Williams ’14 Tyler Woulfe ’07

trustees ex officio Marie-Rose Sheinerman ’23 Benjamin Cai ’24

Lacking student input, the half-baked plan to reimagine upperclass dining won’t work

Daily Princetonian Editorial Board

For some reason, Princeton’s administration thinks that it can completely change the University’s upperclass dining scene by radically revamp ing the eating clubs and co-ops through an opaque committee working in secret. It’s not going to work. If the administration re ally wants to reform campus cul ture, it has to work with proposals generated by the student body, not ones imposed unilaterally.

If implemented in its current form, the University program would guarantee five dining swipes for all upperclassmen at any eating club or co-op every single week. This proposal is still evolving but is set to be piloted this spring term. It’s worth tak ing a moment to recognize how much this would change the din ing scene. Eating clubs and co-ops would no longer exist as contained communities: rather, they would serve as more fluid dining venues with a rotating group of people eating there.

them to prepare food for people who don’t contribute. Eating clubs may also struggle with this new policy, as long lines form depend ing on the menus. This proposal could be paired with a hike in the board fee, which would even affect independent students’ meal allowance, further constraining their options.

To be clear, if the administra tion’s goal is to make the upper class dining experience smooth er, that goal is a worthy one. It’s ridiculous that the clubs’ meal exchange program does not be gin until almost fall break, and it should be much easier for in dependent students to eat with their friends in eating clubs and co-ops. While we certainly do not endorse preserving the exclusion of students for arbitrary reasons, we understand that tight-knit dining communities, like eating clubs, add meaning and value to the daily lives of many students.

lect committee of students bound to secrecy (where there’s clearly enough disagreement that dissent has leaked into the public view) cannot deliver that kind of buy-in.

There are many ways to im prove the upperclass student din ing scene — the most valuable be ing the extension of the fantastic Pay with Points program to up perclass students, giving them $150 on Nassau Street every se mester. This would allow the type of cross-meal plan community building that the administration claims to want to promote. Work ing together, the eating clubs may even want to give some arbitrary swipes each week to all students in order to ease the process of eating with friends in a different club or co-op, or friends under a different meal plan.

But these options must be gen erated by the student body, not the administration.

146th Editorial Board Chair

head audience

Rowen Gesue ’24

Meryl Liu ’25

cartoon

Inci Karaaslan ’24

cartoon

Ariana Borromeo ’24 head copy editors

Alexandra Hong ’23 Nathalie Verlinde ’24

copy editors

Catie Parker ’23

Cecilia Zubler ’23 head web design editors Anika Maskara ’23

Brian Tieu ’23 associate web design editor

Ananya Grover ’24 head graphics editors

Ashley Chung ’23

Noreen Hosny ’25 head print design editor

Juliana Wojtenko ’23 associate print design editor

Dimitar Chakarov ’24 head data editor

Sam Kagan ’24 head features editors

Sydney Eck ’24 Alex Gjaja ’23 head news editors Katherine Dailey ’24 Drew Somerville ’24 associate news editors

Kalena Blake ’24

Anika Buch ’24 Sandeep Mangat ’24 newsletter editors Kareena Bhakta ’24 Amy Ciceu ’24

head opinion editor

Genrietta Churbanova ’24 community editor

Rohit A. Narayanan ’24 associate opinion editor

Lucia Wetherill ’25 head photo editor Candace Do ’24 associate photo editor

Angel Kuo ’24 Isabel Richardson ’24 head podcast editor Hope Perry ’24 associate podcast editors

Jack Anderson ’23 Senna Aldoubosh ’25 Eden Teshome ’25 head prospect editors

José Pablo Fernández García ’23

Kerrie Liang ’25 associate prospect editors Molly Cutler ’23

Cathleen Weng ’24 head puzzles editors Gabriel Robare ’24 Owen Travis ’24 associate puzzles editors

Juliet Corless ’24 Joah Macosko ’25 Cole Vandenberg ’24 head humor editors Claire Silberman ’23

Liana Slomka ’23 associate humor editors Spencer Bauman ’25 head sports editors Wilson Conn ’25 Julia Nguyen ’24 associate sports editor Ben Burns ’23 Elizabeth Evanko ’23

The inclusion of co-ops in this plan shows how poorly thought out this proposal is — students in co-ops prepare their food ev ery day, and it’s absurd to expect

What the administration doesn’t seem to understand is that the communities created by up perclass dining options are key parts of the Princeton experience for many. Perhaps communities should be formed differently, but it is simply untenable to have that conversation without buy-in from the students involved. A se

Rooya Rahin

Members Genrietta Churbanova

Caitlin Limestahl

Rohit A. Narayanan

Abigail Rabieh

Mohan Setty-Charity

Ndeye Thioubou

Lucia Wetherill

There are still too many problems with Princeton’s isolation protocol

Ndeye Thioubou Columnist

Thefirst week back on campus was a whirl wind. With the mask mandate that’s been in place for the past couple of academic years gone, I found myself in many packed areas, unmasked — from the Wel come Back BBQ and the BSU B(l)ack Together Event, to the huge lecture hall for POL 345: Introduction to Quantitative Social Science. I believe that it was at one of these venues that I contracted COVID-19, which put me out of classes for the entire second week of school.

This was my first time hav ing COVID-19, and therefore my first time going through Princeton isolation protocol, which had changed signifi cantly since previous academ ic years. I want to share my experience and make some suggestions regarding the current isolation process to maximize support and mini mize hardships students will face.

the University had relayed to students that isolation space would be more limited and that roommates should make isolation plans in case one per son tests positive. It’s possible that the University assumed that the other roommate would eventually test positive, but there needs to be more support when the roommate has not contracted COVID-19.

Exhausted from reaching out to those who were supposed to assist me, I did my best to disinfect our room and keep as much distance from my roommate as possible. The fear of infecting my roommate caused me a lot of anxiety dur ing what was already a stress ful week.

Joanna

Roma

Hu ’25 Dwaipayan Saha

Kohei Sanno

Pranav Avva

One simple logistical change that the University should make is reinstalling COVID-19 test drop-off boxes in all cam pus housing, especially as case counts have been high in the past couple of weeks. When I suspected that I had COVID-19, I had to walk from my dorm to Frist Campus Center to drop off my test sample. I definitely passed by many more people than I would have if I just had to go downstairs and then re turn immediately to my room.

And although I was wearing a mask during my test drop-off, the reality is that not everyone will wear a mask while they await test results.

Another challenge of my isolation process came when I was trying to avoid infecting my roommate, who had tested negative. Over the summer,

I reached out to the isola tion coordinators and my Di rector of Student Life (DSL) to explain my situation: my roommate was negative and all other options the University had listed (such as staying in the common room or me go ing home) were not feasible, and we would need housing assistance. I was told that I would not be assigned isola tion housing because those spaces were being prioritized for first-years, even though it would have made the most sense for me to move out so that my roommate could con tinue with her normal routine. With isolation housing inac cessible, the remaining op tion was for my roommate to secure alternative housing on campus.

A back and forth between my DSL and isolation coordi nator ensued about who was responsible for finding alter native housing for my room mate. I had reached out to the right people, but they couldn’t figure out who was supposed to assist me. At a time when I was already struggling with COVID-19 symptoms, this was an intensely frustrating expe rience.

Another administrative of ficial was copied on the email chain to settle the debate, but they never responded. I then looked to the Dean on Call, but after a one-night housing ar rangement for my roommate, there was no follow-up for the rest of my time in isolation.

A saving grace of my iso lation process is that all of my teachers and preceptors were very supportive and did their best to keep me updated through summaries of pre cepts and lecture slides while I couldn’t attend class. Yet even that process could have been made easier: as one of my pro fessors told me, faculty mem bers and preceptors have been discouraged from holding vir tual Zoom rooms during class — an option which would have been more helpful for looping in students in isolation.

The week following my iso lation period was still difficult in terms of having to catch up in some classes, but it was not as huge of a burden as it could have been. I have to ac knowledge that for the most part, my symptoms were very mild, which allowed me to do some work throughout my isolation period. For immuno compromised students or stu dents that just end up having more severe symptoms, these current accommodations will likely not be sufficient.

Having COVID-19 is already hard enough. The Univer sity should not be making it harder. If Princeton truly cares about the wellbeing of its com munity, then it should consid er making sensible changes to the current COVID-19 proto cols.

Ndeye Thioubou is a sophomore from the Bronx, N.Y. She can be reached at nthioubou@princeton. edu.

Free speech emphasis in orientation will reap benefits later

Julianna Lee

OnSept. 1, “Free Expres sion at Princeton,” a new first-year orientation event, was held in Mc Carter Theater Center, featuring speeches from University Presi dent Christopher Eisgruber ’83; Hannah Kapoor ’23, Vice President of the Undergraduate Student Government; and Myles McK night ’23, President of the Princ eton Open Campus Coalition.

This event was a direct response to a private letter sent by 46 un dergraduates to President Eisgru ber that raised concerns regard ing the ideological bias found in the mandatory programming for freshmen. The University should be commended for its commit ment to the democratic process.

A group of students raised a con cern, the administration was willing to listen, and reasonable action was taken when it became clear that this would be in the best interests of the incoming class.

Free speech itself is essential to a healthy democracy. Just as the University responded to student requests to hold this free speech event after a series of robust dis cussions, democracy works when everyone in society is permitted to voice their opinions, which can then be considered by all. In the pursuit of truth, there needs to be discourse. In the pursuit of the most effective policies, there needs to be discourse — there is no progress without criticism.

This year’s orientation event was a crucial opportunity for Princ eton to inform the incoming class of one of its core values, which I argue should be a primary goal and component of any college ori entation. The University has long affirmed its commitment to free speech. In 2015, Princeton faculty voted to adopt the Chicago Princi ples, which became the Universi ty’s statement on free expression.

The statement maintains that “Although the University greatly values civility, and although all

members of the University com munity share in the responsibil ity for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some mem bers of our community.” In his speech at this year’s orientation event, President Eisgruber ex panded on the original statement, arguing that the remedy to bad speech is more speech (rather than censorship), and that free speech and inclusivity are not conflict ing values. Just as this institution has historically made clear to in coming first-years that academic integrity and diversity and inclu sion are key aspects of the Uni versity’s identity, it laudably has begun including free speech as an additional core value. An educa tional institution is tasked with fostering an environment where students not only gain knowledge, but learn to be moral individuals.

Academic integrity is one way it does so, through which students learn to have honesty and humil ity. Learning about and practicing free speech is another way, as it teaches students to be active mem bers of society, listen to others and challenge them when necessary, and create healthy, vibrant com munities. Coming from the leader of a conservative organization, McKnight’s speech could have been mistaken as one promoting a politically motivated value, rather than a value common to everyone. McKnight, however, does not un derstand free speech to be a con servative or a progressive value, but rather, a “truth-seeking val ue.” In the university context, he argues, free speech is actually an “academic value,” much like how scholarship is. Some of the best discussions I have had on cam pus have been with those who do not share my opinions — discus sions that may not have happened without the University’s emphasis on free speech. These discussions have taught me to have a broader,

more nuanced view of the world. Many times, the best answer to a challenging situation draws from neither the right nor the left, and other times, the most seemingly extreme positions present the most creative or on-point ideas. Only when all of these views are expressed and entertained can students learn to be more openminded, curious, and effective problem solvers. Furthermore, through these discussions, I have been challenged to more fully un derstand and reflect upon my own positions, allowing me to better defend them. I have learned more from discussions with those who disagree with me than I could ever have hoped for from a textbook or those who hold the same views. I am grateful for the conversations that build me up and affirm my positions, but it is by interacting with those of differing opinions that I grow the most. Princeton has long been a champion of free speech. However, the University

has often failed to live up to its own ideals. Columnists Eleanor Clemans-Cope and Abigail Ra bieh both recently emphasized this failure, with Rabieh pointing out that departments and faculty have failed to exercise their free doms responsibly. Although the University still has plenty of room to grow, the most recent orienta tion event was a significant point of progress as it simply and clearly laid out the institution’s values and expectations of free speech for students as they begin their Princeton journeys. McKnight himself defended this position in his guest contribution, high lighting that his address to the freshmen identified “a further requirement of truth-seeking by admonishing students to pro mote a culture in which dissent is cherished.” In his speech, McK night recounted two anecdotes in which free speech was rejected and then affirmed, illustrating how, as individuals, students can

choose to foster a culture friendly to free speech. One of the protec tions that free speech offers is for minority opinions to be ex pressed. Rather than labeling and dismissing McKnight’s examples as “conservative,” it may be a good exercise in healthy civic discourse to give his words a chance. This event represents a monumental step forward: Princeton has start ed to proudly affirm its core value of free speech in front of the new est group of Princetonians eager to learn, grow, and be challenged. The University has taken the first step towards helping students be better communicators and civic participants, listening to others with an open mind and coura geously defending their own val ues.

Julianna Lee is a sophomore and prospective politics concentrator from Demarest, N.J. She can be reached by email at yl34@princeton.edu.

How the professional world takes advantage of classes like Maitland Jones’s

Rohit Narayanan Community Editor

Thestory of former Princeton professor Maitland Jones, re cently terminated from New York University after students signed a petition calling his organ ic chemistry class too hard, is all too familiar. You can find simi lar complaints about professors throughout the course reviews of Princeton’s intro classes, in asso ciate Opinion editor Lucia Weth erill’s deconstruction of weed-out pre-med classes, and in columnist Abigail Rabieh’s critique of MAT 202: Linear Algebra with Applica tions last spring. The complaints include midterms with absurdly low averages, seemingly nowhere enough office hours to meet stu dents’ needs, a lack of lecture re cordings, among a host of other complaints.

And yet, the response all over my Twitter feed to the story was contempt for the students who could not make it through the class. Legal blogger Ken White put it succinctly:

“Anyway now they’re your doc tors. Good luck!”

No one can seriously think that having a hard time with a sopho more course actually prevents you from being a good doctor, right? Students have consistently claimed that the problem with Jones’s class was not the content, but rather an outmoded standard of instruction that didn’t give stu dents the tools they needed to suc ceed. But this speaks to the fun

damental divide. Students want grades to reflect that given all the resources they needed, they mas tered the content. Society wants grades to show which students succeeded and which floundered in a difficult class. While we can’t say which is more valuable, schools should be optimizing for learning — not arbitrary faux-geneocratic sorting.

In order to see what students want in a class, we can look at the classes that they like. Among a sea of introductory STEM classes with poor or middling course ratings, COS 226: Algorithms and Data Structures stands out. The course is consistently popular. And there’s something else to know about COS 226: it gives a whole lot of As. Any student that gets above a 90 per cent average is guaranteed at least an A-, and many students hit that threshold because they can test all their programming assignments to see if they work before submit ting them. So maybe this proves the critics of the modern student right: all students want is higher grades.

No, sayeth the COS 226 defend ers, COS 226 is popular because it gives students what they need to succeed. Students have access to almost a decade worth of prac tice exams, with the promise that the exam they’ll take will be of a very similar style. Comprehensive slides are posted for every single lecture and there are daily help ses sions with experienced TAs to help students finish the lab. If a student didn’t grasp the material, they can remedy the problem, rather than

just struggling on their own. The grades aren’t inflated, students will say — students are just given the resources they need to perform at a much higher level.

This is the optimal model then — students learn more, get more support, and get higher grades. So it would make sense to petition the school when a professor is teaching a rigorous course without provid ing enough office hours, feedback, recordings, practice exams, and expectations to get students up to that level. If they did, it would be a win all around.

But haven’t we forgotten to ask someone? “No!” moans the McK insey interviewer. “No!” wails the med school admissions officer. “No!” whimpers the Amazon re cruiter. If everyone gets an A, they ask, how will we know which ones are the smartest?

“But why do you care?” we retort. We’ve already demonstrated that if you give students the tools to suc ceed, they all learn the subject bet ter. But the gatekeepers of the pro fessional class don’t care if you’ve, with time and effort, mastered organic chemistry or algorithms and data structures or linear al gebra. They want to know who the smartest students are. They want the students who somehow made it through a miserable class where all the lecture notes were scribbled down by a parrot with poor pen manship, the exams were unan nounced and based on a paper the professor never assigned, and the lectures were held at 3 a.m. on a Saturday and there was no record ing. They don’t care if that student

never learned a thing in that class or only passed with a 25 percent because only half the class hit the five percent mark. Because when Ken White is lying on the operat ing table, he doesn’t actually care if the doctor knows organic chem istry — he wants to know that the doctor has the highest IQ possible.

Princeton students don’t care about IQ. We may be skeptical about merit, but if you ask a stu dent to define it, it involves how you perform in a fair test, with all the resources you need to suc ceed if you tried. But for the highpaying roles that many Princeton students aspire to, society doesn’t care about subject knowledge or success under good circumstanc es. They’re paying for their em ployees to think on the fly — you can see that reflected in the light ning-round coding challenges that students have to complete to get jobs in Big Tech companies or onthe-spot problem-solving (known as “casing”) to get into consult ing. Companies and professional schools already sort applicants by leveraging the admissions process to preference students from elite colleges. But, especially in STEM fields, they further rely on weedout classes and a high variance in grades, not to ensure competence, but to capture those who can rise above their peers under subopti mal circumstances.

I can’t say for certain that the companies and medical schools aren’t right about this. Maybe succeeding in a course as wellstructured as COS 226 says noth ing about your ability to make it

in the real world or think on your feet. But ultimately it doesn’t mat ter. We as students can never buy into a system where we have no agency over the process. Even as the professional world tries to sort us by how fast our mind moves, it’s in our interest and our obliga tion to push to be judged on our accomplishments, knowledge, and skills instead.

It’s in the school’s interest to grade us that way, too. When pro fessors insist on an arcane teach ing system, it’s usually in pursuit of what they say is academic rigor. Professors may think that students will have to try harder when grad ing is harsher, when resources are more spare or when the pace of the course isn’t burdened by the need to review thoroughly in pre cept or subject to the constraints of a predictable exam. But as we’ve seen, academic rigor is best-served when students have the resources they need to succeed. Schools are supposed to teach students — and classes should fit that goal.

The professional world already has plenty of ways to judge us on our mental agility rather than our achievements — let’s not enable it further.

Hailing from McLean, Va., Rohit Narayanan’s mind moved a lot faster before he was a junior who serves as Community Opinion Editor. He assigns grades to each of his emails that he gets at rohitan@princeton.edu, but the average is inflating rapidly. His tweets @Rohit_Narayanan have never had below a 4.0 and tremble in fear at the prospect of an A-.

JOSÉ PABLO FERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Outside McCarter Theater Center

Features

U. professors honored by Queen Elizabeth II reflect on her legacy

By Julie Levey Assistant Features Editor

On Sept. 8, Queen Eliza beth II passed away at the age of 96. Upon her death, she was the United King dom’s longest reigning monarch, having served for more than 70 years. Over the course of her life, the Queen bestowed honors upon an array of Princeton professors who have made extraor dinary contributions to their fields. The Daily Princetonian sat down with several professors to discuss their award cer emonies and reflections on the Queen’s life.

In 2009, Professor of History David Cannadine was in Britain when he re ceived a brown envelope in the mail.

“[The letter inside] said in the event of my being offered a knighthood, would I accept it, and then there were two boxes to tick at the bottom — either yes or no … And so I ticked yes, of course,” he said.

In Great Britain, being knighted is one of the highest honors an indi vidual can receive. The reigning British monarch announces honors — in cluding knighthoods — twice each year: once for the new year and once on their official birthday. Cannadine was knighted as part of Queen Eliza beth II’s 2009 British New Year Honours List.

About six months af ter opening his letter, Cannadine arrived at Buckingham Palace for his knighting ceremony, which was preceded by a rehearsal.

“Those getting knight hoods have to kneel down on a very strange piece of furniture which is er gonomically rather odd,” Cannadine explained. “So that kneeling down and getting up is not as straightforward as you think it might ordinarily ought to be. So [we] prac ticed that.”

While Cannadine was honored by the Queen, then-Prince Charles per formed the actual knight ing ceremony on the Queen’s behalf, which took place in a ballroom in Buckingham Palace.

“It’s a great occasion,” Cannadine said, reflect ing on the ceremony. “And they do it very well. They know that for many people, it’s the great mo ment of their life. They make it memorable and splendid.”

Sir Cannadine is not the only knight on Princ eton’s campus.

For Professor of Chem istry David MacMillan, the past 12 months have constituted “the craziest year of [his] life.”

On Oct. 6, 2021, Mac Millan received the No bel Prize in Chemistry. In May 2022, MacMillan was in South Korea for the inauguration of the new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, when at around 4 a.m., the hotel contacted him and

told him that the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. was trying to reach him.

“[The Dame on the phone] said that as part of [the Queen’s] Jubilee cel ebration, you’ve been se lected to become a Knight of the British Empire … or words to that effect,” MacMillan shared.

MacMillan said he was very emotional upon hearing the news and be gan crying on the phone.

“I grew up as a working class kid, a steelworker’s son in the middle of Scot land. To be knighted … it’s amazing, wonderful,” MacMillan reflected.

MacMillan was named a Knight Bachelor as a part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2022 Overseas and International List. Also honored on this list is Sir Cannadine’s wife, history professor Linda Colley. In 2009, Colley was previously honored by the Queen with a Com mander of the Order of the British Empire. This year, she was promoted to Dame of the Order of the

her when he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2017. The Gold Medal is an award pre sented for outstanding work in poetry to any resi dent of the United King

Queen’s sense of humor, saying, “As it happens, we had a hilarious time together. I told her how much her 2011 visit to Ire land had meant and she mentioned how she still got a salmon each year from a fishmonger in Cork. I teased her about the possibility that an Irish salmon might be even better than a Scot tish salmon. She was amused by that.”

Muldoon added, “We discussed quite a num ber of topics, including the upcoming wedding of Meghan and Harry. She spoke of that in an ex tremely unbuttoned way.”

For Muldoon, the recent death of the Queen was emotional.

“I must say I was sad dened to think of her death,” Muldoon wrote.

its scale that any monarch has ever had.”

He explained, “In part, insofar as these occa sions have meanings, it was about the union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and North ern Ireland, highlighted by the whole set of new ceremonials in Scotland and by the fact that be tween her death and the funeral, King Charles, as he had by then become, went to Belfast.”

MacMillan said he was surprised by the magni tude of his own emotion al response to learning of her passing. MacMillan attributes that response to the weight of losing a fixture in British politics.

British Empire.

Dame Colley did not respond to requests for comment by the ‘Prince.’

Since that phone call, MacMillan has learned that knighthood comes with some special perks.

“So they’ve just contact ed me so that I can now receive a coat of arms, and then that coat of arms can be handed down from generation to generation which is totally bizarre to me,” he said.

MacMillan’s investiture ceremony — the process of giving someone power, a rank, or an official title — has yet to occur, and due to the timing of the Queen’s death, he finds himself in a unique situ ation.

“When I go over for the investment — where I have to kneel down and they put the sword on my shoulder — that’ll prob ably be King Charles who does that. So it’s kind of really unique and unusu al because you’re knight ed by the Queen, but the investiture will prob ably be performed by the King,” he said.

While neither Can nadine nor MacMillan actually met the Queen, Professor in the Humani ties Paul Muldoon had the opportunity to meet

dom or a Commonwealth realm.

“The ceremony involved meeting the Queen in Buckingham Palace,” wrote Muldoon in an email to the ‘Prince.’ “I understand that the pre sentation of the Gold Medal is often a very pe remptory affair, but I end ed up spending half an

“My sense of her was that she was a lovely person.”

Cannadine, born in 1950, recalled that his ear liest childhood memories are of the Queen’s coro nation, which happened when he was two years old. Now a distinguished professor of British his tory, Cannadine was in vited by the BBC several years ago to help with the

“However you feel about the monarchy or royalty, this is a person who’s just been there your whole life. It feels like a complete constant that has never really changed and then all of a sudden, she’s not there anymore,” he said.

Cannadine attributed the “sense of disorienta tion” surrounding the Queen’s passing to the fact that “she was the last great link with the Second World War.” “She had known 14 American presidents and seen all of them except LBJ [Lyn don B. Johnson]. She had 15 prime ministers. So it was a very long life.”

“She was a public figure for more than 70 years, and there’s almost no body who you can say that [about],” he continued.

MacMillan reflected on the fact that he was one of the last people to be knighted by the Queen. “It would have been re markable to go meet the Queen. But it’s still the same — it’ll be remark able. [I’ll] meet the King,” he said.

hour with the Queen. The person whom she saw im mediately before me was [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan of Turkey, so I must have seemed like a blessed relief after that.”

Muldoon recalled the

Queen’s funeral coverage when she died. He arrived in England the Sunday before the funeral to as sist with commentary.

“It was an amazing day,” he reflected. “I mean, it’s the grandest funeral in

Julie Levey is an assis tant Features editor for The Daily Princetonian. She can be reached at jlevey@princ eton.edu or on Twitter at @ juliehlevey.

Muldoon

“I ended up spending half an hour with the Queen,” said Professor of Humanities Paul Muldoon. “As it happens we had a hilarious time together.”

“I grew up as a working class kid, a steelworker’s son in the middle of Scotland. To be knighted... it’s amazing,” said Professor of Chemistry David MacMillan.

the PROSPECT.

In love I trust

By Abby Yuexi Lu | Senior Prospect Writer

Being a first-year is daunting. Faced with the plethora of choices at Princeton, I no longer saw a clear path through the stoic matrix of bodies, books, and gatherings. The moving scenery I always found comfort in started spinning uncontrollably, and I found nothing resembling the peace at the eye of the storm. The monotony and transience that carried me through years of high school had fallen apart, and I found myself desperately trying to reassemble it from a scatter of clogs, bolts, and scrap metal on the floor.

The basement of Holder Hall is an interesting place at midnight. The fluorescent glow and string of door frames down its corridors combine to create a liminal space where time is suspended. Where is the laundry room, the study room rumored to be blessed with air-conditioning, but most importantly, the exit? I often found myself utterly lost.

I’m slowly learning to hold every small interac tion at Princeton close to my heart. I appreciate the person who spoke to me about film on a couch at 48 University Place, my conversation partners down in the Holder basement during the wee hours of the night, the angel who brought cookies to Frist for me, and the ones who give warm, all-encompassing hugs that just make me melt.

In a small candle shop near an entrance to a Hong Kong subway station, a middle-aged gentle man spoke to me about astrology and life’s dreams. I kid you not. This random store owner asked, out of nowhere, if I was a Pisces. I am. “Love comes slowly, and life’s dreams could be within reach,” he assured me; I added this memory to my cache of interesting encounters. In rented studio spaces, I played card games with local college students whom I’d only met a few times. I sampled countless 1980s Cantopop albums on my late night taxi trips back home. I can imagine my memories of summer strung together by the countless hands of those I briefly crossed paths with — like dried persimmon that hang in markets.

I was a wanderer of my city, a crow dashing through the tangle of streetlights, buildings, and neon glows in search of … what, exactly? I found comfort in my perpetual motion and the knowledge I never truly had to settle. My walks around the city were a source of constant, stimulating changes of scenery. I would wave to a stall owner as I walked by her soymilk store and pet the cat in the fishing temple. I was at peace with the fact that I might never cross paths with them again. Belonging would come easy no matter where I went, so I was content with goodbyes. Human connections are just brief explosions of light on a revolving lantern whose beauty lies in its transience.

Just like that, the summer gave way to Princeton, a future that, for months, had seemed like simply a distant prospect.

I spent the unstructured first weeks of orientation looking forward to my classes and the semblance of structure they might entail. Yet with every commit ment I added to my schedule, sprinting from classes to sports to clubs to Firestone Library, to Chancellor Green to Frist Campus Center to my room to Holder basement, I felt increasingly lost and lonely. Every warm smile I received induced a rush of happiness, yet these brief moments compounded passionately, revoltingly, over time into nothing.

I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to 80s Canto pop during runs to Firestone. As I listened to “Happy are Those in Love,” by Shirley Kwan, scenes of lovers holding hands and running against the wind came to mind. Shrouded by fog under the moonlight, I felt the exhilaration of the characters connecting with one another, as I, in contrast, rushed by the people I passed on my way, never vvslowing down to exam ine their faces. More than the romance depicted in the song, I craved the kind of connection that would make me want to stay up talking all night, the kind that would make my heart ache, the kind that would make me want to hop on midnight train rides to New York to do nothing more than stroll the streets and talk.

Transience is a truth in life I accepted long ago: I was content with my goodbyes, parting gently and inconsequentially with the people who had entered gently and inconsequentially into my life. Relation ships were like clouds floating by, and I had accepted the impossibility of grasping onto this mist. Yet, suddenly, I didn’t want these moments to just pass by anymore. I wanted to feel the sentimentality exalted in the song and to one day be able to claim these thoughts as my own.

I’ve finally allowed myself to feel the paralyzing dread that shoots down my spine every so often when I am faced with a room full of strangers; the profound loneliness in realizing that as an interna tional student, I am a lonesome leaf drifting down the stream; the serenity of haunting the architecture building like a ghost. I’ve also become more attuned to the beauties and joys around me. There’s a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Now, I live for the sensational thrill of human connection — that first moment I dared to sway to the music in the Dillon Gymnasium Multi-Purpose Room, or sit down at a table in Frist with people I’ve crossed paths with only a few times before.

In allowing myself to feel, I’ve dared to move be yond the simple “hello” stage with my interactions. I imagine every moment split into a million stopmotion frames, and I am just now stepping into each individual frame, appreciating them as masterpieces in their own right instead of faceless building blocks of an empty memory. Transience may be a truth in life, but I must also feel the moment, so when parting does come, it will be consequential. For once, I am starting to embrace heartaches, because those, too, will pass and splash color in the painting of my life.

I find myself forever craving new feelings and searching for new colors. The man in the candle shop was right. Thinking back, that conversation with him was a result of my courage to interact with a world that otherwise would have been a stagnant pic ture, just a scene in my life where I pass by a candle store. Yet he was the muse I never knew I needed, a lighthouse whose call I heeded when I didn’t even realize I was lost. By taking the time to slow down, I opened myself up to a serendipitous salvation.

Love comes slowly — and when it does, I’ll be ready.

Abby Yuexi Lu is a contributing writer for The Prospect at the ‘Prince,’ from Hong Kong. She can be reached at al8944@princeton.edu, or on instagram @abbyaintgot abs.

An ode to Dunkin’

By Lauren Fromkin | Contributing Prospect Writer

In honor of the closure of Nassau Street’s Dunkin’, I’m taking a trip down memory lane. For the first-years who never even knew this Dunkin’ once existed, let me enlighten you: This Dunkin’ did not have particularly good coffee or stellar customer service. It wasn’t always tasty or pleasant. It didn’t have the local charm of Small World or the customizability of Star bucks. But it was always there for you. And it was always the cheapest option. It is not a controversial statement to say that Dunkin’ is the least consistent of popular coffee chains, but part of the thrill of going is the eternal question of whether you will get something akin to river water or an addictively deli cious beverage. On the customer ser vice front, the Nassau Street Dunkin’s espresso machine would frequently break; one time, they realized this af ter I paid. I spent the day exchanging phone calls and emails with Dunkin’ corporate to obtain a refund because they could not issue one in the store, much to my surprise and confusion. Oh, Dunkin’, how I miss the way you toyed with my emotions.

Starbucks, Sakrid, Small World, Coffee Club … I love you, but you never fail to put a sizable dent in my wallet. Meanwhile, at Dunkin’, I could get an absurdly-sized iced coffee and a donut or bagel for the price of a small latte elsewhere. Dunkin’ became the fuel for my most work-heavy days because it was the only place where I could be sufficiently caffein ated. Come midterms and Dean’s Date, I am sure I will not be the only one missing the

Nassau Street Dunkin’.

The Nassau Street Dunkin’ was also the site of many of my earliest Princeton memories. In February of my senior year of high school, I came up to Princeton for Tiger Tuesday as a newly accepted student. I remember getting a

trip breakfast consisting of coffee for me, tea for my dad, and a bagel for both of us.

Throughout my first two years at the University, the Nassau Street Dunkin’ was a behind-the-scenes contributor to my col lege experience. I’ve had both good and bad times there, and it has caffeinated me through my longest nights at Firestone. I will greatly miss hav ing Dunkin’ in my coffee rotation, whether it’s because I don’t feel like spending more than four dollars on coffee or because I feel like playing coffee roulette. Dunkin’ was never the best, and occasionally it wasn’t even open during regular business hours, but it was there for me during my first two years of Princeton, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.

coffee from Dunkin’ to stay warm as I spent the day battling the chilly winter weather while touring the campus. In March 2020, during my first year, my dad and I stopped at the Nassau Street Dunkin’ to grab a quick breakfast before we began our drive home all the way down the Eastern Seaboard to Florida. It did not dawn on us until a few weeks later that this was our last “normal” meal before the coronavirus lockdown: a hasty pre-road

Now, when I walk past the store front where Dunkin’ used to stand, I can’t help but feel confused about who let it close; surely, it must have filled a market gap in the local coffee scene. What value will the new shop add to Nassau Street? More impor tantly, will the new shop keep its current door handles in the shape of a “D” as an homage to Dunkin’? Although Dunkin’ no longer stands, I am still reminded of its memory every time I walk on Nassau Street. I look forward to seeing how its successor, a boba tea shop, compares to the New England staple that it has replaced.

Lauren Fromkin is a contributing writer to the Prospect at the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at lfromkin@princeton.edu or on Twitter at @lau renfromkin.

‘Graduate school is a never-ending exercise in deciphering what matters’

cancer, capturing carbon, or delving into the culture of the past. The graduate community is robust, with a dedicated staff, grad student re sources for skills and professional development, as well as affinity groups, a Graduate Student Government, and other student leaders that give up their free time to host events.

However, when I arrived on campus, my rosy picture of grad student life was challenged, as I was surrounded by the rhetoric of Princeton as an undergraduate institution. But, what I soon real ized was that the undergraduate ex perience and graduate experience are intertwined. I’ve helped teach the small courses that Princeton loves to tout. I’ve mentored under graduate students in their summer projects and theses. I’ve enthusi astically written letters of recom mendation, served on panels about job searches, and both formally and informally connected with under graduate students as part of my job as a resident graduate student. All of this builds a unique undergradu ate experience and helps connect me to this institution.

Yet, the famed “undergraduate focus” is sometimes impossible to ignore. Back in March 2020, I found out about the closure of the univer sity from an undergraduate group chat. There has been limited gradu ate student coverage in Princeton’s community newspaper. A recent report on campus mental health pointed out that the graduate student body only has one outreach counselor, despite graduate students comprising 37 percent of the student body.

Moreover, the prevailing attitude that Princ eton was not really a place graduate students call their home has been yet another barrier. When I came for visit days as a newly admitted student, the dominant message I heard was that Princeton was boring and dull, a place you needed to endure before moving on to bigger and better things. During my first year, no one else in my cohort lived in the Graduate College, and only a couple of students lived on campus at all.

Initially, admitting to liking life at Princeton felt like I was broadcasting my “uncoolness,” or that I was content with the University’s and

town’s shortcomings, or that I was okay with let ting the institution dominate my life. Once, I was told living in campus housing during the early days of the pandemic was “subjecting myself to tyranny.”

A selling point to Princeton hinges on what it is close to, New York and Philadelphia, not what is here. Granted, Princeton is lacking in some things, especially with cultural accommodations or the scarcity of religious communities. Simi larly, graduate school is defined by its temporal location, a mere stop on your way to, again, bigger and better things. People have strong at tachments to their undergraduate institutions and their first jobs, but graduate school? Nah.

Wawa’s coffees. I have somehow racked up over $15 in fines at the public library.

Where some may see a sleepy, swanky, or soul less small town, I see opportunity. I co-author and concert-go with friends. I have helped friends fall in love and grapple with grief. I improved at coding, writing, teaching, ice skating, singing, and interviewing.

One goal of my writing this year is to describe some aspects of the past four years that have made me come to think of Princeton as my home. At the same time, I know there are structural challenges that go beyond individual attempts to foster community and work-life balance. Gradu ate school is tough and, at times, all-consum ing. Last year, I wrote a guest essay about my challenges recovering from an emergency hospitalization. After publishing that, several friends and strangers reached out to me and men tioned they had similar stories and struggles. The message was clear: I was not alone.

I do not want a repeat of my under graduate life. I am at a stage in my life where I want parties to end, not start, at 11 p.m. Instead of figuring out how to pay tuition via loans and work-study, I am excited to earn a wage that is above the per capita median for Mercer County. In addition to reading research papers, I want to write them. I choose to call Princeton my home be cause I want to have a stake in where I live and where I work. I want what I do to matter, not just in the future, but today.

Part of this comes from the liminal status of being a graduate student. We straddle a line be tween being an employee and a student. We are independent adults, but also part of a residential community and subject to the whims of univer sity policy.

But, graduate school and Princeton are not transitory. Most of us will spend years of our young adulthood in this place. Many, if not most, of us will live here for longer than the undergrads. While some of Princeton is not built for students, graduate or undergraduate — I am looking at you, Hermès 2023 and Harvest Restaurant Group — I have found my favorite Indian restaurant, favor ite croissant place, and housewarming cards for my friends who are checking off traditional boxes of adulthood. I look forward to the seasonality of

Graduate school is a never-ending exercise in deciphering what matters. Pressure to produce top-quality research and publish in the best outlets is frequently pitched as the only thing that matters. My well-being, friends and family, and community matter too. I hope some of my pieces this upcoming year will provide ideas for you to help define your own time here. As a graduate student, you may go through it all having never worn a Princeton Homecoming shirt or owned something with a tiger, but, if you want to, you can.

Emily Miller is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Popula tion Studies and Social Policy from Palisade, Colorado, and is a contributing writer for The Prospect at the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at eenm@princeton.edu.

Tápies: The aging body, death, and spirituality in postwar European art

By Jaden Sharp | Contributing Prospect Writer

On Sept. 22, I had the opportunity to visit the Pace Gallery of New York for a viewing of one of the gallery’s most recent exhibitions, “Antoni Tàpies: Transmateri al.” Antoni Tàpies is recognized as “one of the leading artistic voices to emerge from postwar Europe,” according to the press release provided by the Pace Gallery. The exhibit showcases a number of Tàpies’s works, in which he considers death, spiri tuality, and the tense political climate of postwar Spain through his unconven tional use of textiles, spray paint, and everyday objects.

I was excited to experience the exhibi tion in person, so I rode the train to New York on an early Thursday morning. I ar rived at the gallery at about 10 a.m., shortly after it opened. I wanted to come into the exhibition with a blank slate, so I did little to no research about Tàpies prior to the ex hibition. I am by no means an art critic or a historian. Thus, I struggled to understand the exigency which inspired Tàpies’s art and the reasons behind his use of house hold objects like bed frames and towels, as well as earthy materials like dirt and sand.

The first piece I saw when walking into the exhibit appeared to be the silhouette of a bed with an assortment of random slashes and symbols, accompanied by a pair of sweatpants and a single loafer. The painting is divided into numerous frames, yet every stroke seems to reach past the confines of their borders. Across the top of the piece, the words “Atman,” “Brahman,” and “Purusha.” Translated from Hindi, each word refers to the “self-existent es sence of human beings,” “the supreme ex istence of all of reality,” and “conscious ness,” respectively. In this way, it can be argued that this piece in particular favors the idea that self-awareness and fruitful introspection being attainable from the most simple objects in life; the piece is, in essence, a deep look on viewing the inter nal from an external perspective.

I was then drawn to a piece that appeared to be a face laid on its side. The skin was composed of polished wood — the canvas of the piece — and the eyes were percep tibly carved out. I remember feeling a bit

curious as to why Tàpies would choose to depict this face in this way. I would later find more context for the piece through researching postwar Spain. The social and political climate of Spain following both World War II and its own civil war was tense; an authoritarian state under Fran cisco Franco enforced repression of civil discontent and censored press, around the time Tàpies was in his 20s. Citizens were effectively blinded and subdued by an op pressive government.

Though my interpretations of Tàpies’s work certainly could be limited, I grew enamored with the pertinence of his craft. The exhibit reminded me that numerous real-world connections can be drawn from a few simple strokes. It could prove ben eficial to take time to really analyze art of this nature. If nothing else, it offers invaluable perspective.

Throughout his artistic career, Tàpies, a Barcelona native, made contributions to world-wide movements including Ab stract Expressionism, Surrealism, and

Arte Povera. With “Transmaterial,” the Pace Gallery focuses on Tàpies’s fondness of finding beauty in oblivion; insight on postwar Spain; and personal interactions with existentialist wonderings, motifs commented on by all works featured in the exhibit.

I hope readers of this article will con sider visiting, in their own time, the Pace Gallery and other galleries to view Antoni Tàpies’s work, to be both bewildered and inspired to learn more about the deeper meanings hidden within his art.

All works by Tàpies covered here and more are on display at the Pace Gallery of New York until Oct. 22. The Pace Gal lery is located off of 10th Avenue and 25th Street in the Chelsea district of Manhat tan. Guests are able to view the gallery free of admission.

Jaden Sharp is a contributing writer for The Prospect at the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at js7549@princeton.edu or on Instagram at @ jadenxsharp.

The Prospect 11

Weekly Event Roundup

This coming week features multiple student-directed plays, concerts, workshops, and more. Take a break from midterms and check out these events.

1. Affecting Expression

Program in Theater

Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts complex Oct. 7–8, 8 p.m., Oct. 9, 2 p.m.

Eliyana Abraham ’23 directs an original tragicomedy about the entangled lives of Charlotte Cushman, Matilda Hays, and Hatty Hosmer, three queer women from history. “Affecting Expression” was written by Eliana CohenOrth ’21 and features Rosemary Paulson ’23.

3. Screening: La Bataille d’Alger

French and Francophone Society Theater 201, Madison Hall Oct. 12, 7:30 p.m.

The Ciné-Club of Princeton’s French and Francophone Society shows “La Ba taille d’Alger,” a film by Gillo Pontecorvo, at their first screening of the year.

Listen

5. Princeton University Orchestra

Department of Music Richardson Auditorium Oct. 7–8, 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Princeton University Orchestra performs Chopin and Mussorgsky. Tickets are available through University Ticketing with a discount for students.

7. Reading by Hodder Fellow Jamil Jan Kochai

Lewis Center for the Arts Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts complex Oct. 12, 4:30 p.m.

Jamil Jan Kochai reads excerpts from “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories centering the Afghan experience, and speaks with Director of the Program in Creative Writing Yiyun Li. Also, look forward to a book signing.

9. Hip-Hop Techniques and Foundations — Popping with Emily

Program in Dance Ellie’s Studio, Lewis Arts complex Oct. 8, 1:30–3 p.m.

Part of a series of co-curricular dance classes, this drop-in workshop teaches the basics of hip-hop dance. Open to members of the University community for free regardless of experience.

11. A Mandate of My Ancestors

Princeton African Students Association

105 Class of 1985 Room, Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding, Oct. 13, 9 p.m.

A teach-in on pan-African and transnational liberatory movements. This event is part of a semester-long series from the Princeton African Students Associa tion, a cultural organization on campus.

See

2. Celebration/Party Time

Theater Intime

Hamilton Murray Theater Oct. 7-9, 8 p.m.

Kat McLaughlin ’25 directs the second weekend of performances of “Cel ebration” and “Party Time,” two short plays written by Harold Pinter. Tick ets available through University Ticketing.

4. anticulation

Lewis Center for the Arts Colab Space Oct. 8–13

The show “aims to capture the particularities of Black, gay, and Black gay archival practices” through the work of 11 Black artists.

6. Atelier@Large: Conversations on Artmaking in a Vexed Era

Princeton Atelier Richardson Auditorium Oct. 11, 7:30 p.m.

Tony Award winner Anaïs Mitchell and composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane join Director of the Princeton Atelier Paul Muldoon for a discussion on art in contemporary society. The event is open to the public and tickets can be obtained for free through University Ticketing.

8. After Noon Concert

Office of Religious Life University Chapel Oct. 13, 12:30–1 p.m.

Part of the After Noon Concert Series consisting of weekly performances on the Skinner/Mander Chapel organ. This week, the University Chapel hosts Grant Wareham of the Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey, Pa.

10. Verse/Chorus: Songwriting Workshops with Kamara Thomas

Lewis Center for the Arts Godfrey Kerr Theater Studio, Lewis Arts complex Oct. 9, 4–7 p.m.

Princeton Arts Fellow Kamara Thomas leads informal workshops on songwriting that are open to all Princeton students for free. A piano and guitar will be supplied, though students are welcome to bring their own instrument.

Kevin O’Toole ’22: From Princeton pipe dream to the pros

By Kameron Wolters

Imagine a scenario where a Princeton Uni versity senior is in the midst of completing their thesis to earn their diploma while simulta neously trying to make the roster of a profes sional sports team. To most, this may sound like a strange combina tion of a dream and a nightmare. But for Kevin O’Toole ’22, this was his reality during the spring of 2022.

After an illustrious soccer career at Princ eton, one that included three First Team AllIvy selections, two Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year awards, and two Ivy League cham pionships, O’Toole was drafted 34th overall in the 2022 Major League Soccer (MLS) SuperDraft by New York City FC on Jan. 11.

Draft night was the start of a hectic couple of months for O’Toole.

“I was basically with the team beginning Jan uary 14,” he said in an interview with The Dai ly Princetonian. “And then, a few days later we were off to preseason in Florida.”

He described the dif ficulties of playing pro fessional soccer and completing his indepen dent work at Princeton at the same time.

“It was a bit of bounc ing back and forth from Princeton to New York,” he told the ‘Prince.’ “And then I had nice profes sors who, you know, I was able to Zoom into their classes at the end of the year, which was great.”

O’Toole, a North Jer sey native, said that be ing drafted by New York

City FC was convenient because he was able to stay close to home and close to Princeton.

“The fact that I was local worked out really well,” O’Toole said. “It’s also really cool to be kind of playing for my home city.”

The goal of becoming a professional athlete is often a dream for most children who grow up playing sports, but it is rarely the case that such dreams become a real ity. Even once athletes reach college, the odds are not in their favor. For O’Toole, he described the goal of going profes sional as a “pipe dream.”

O’Toole trained with the New York Red Bulls Academy throughout high school and had the opportunity to forgo a college career and play on a professional level.

“I think I kind of flirt ed with the idea of play ing professionally before college,” he said. “But, I don’t think I would have been ready at that point.”

O’Toole credits work ing with the Academy during high school in making his profession al dream feel a bit more real. He also noted that playing in college al lowed him to develop his game more and grow physically as well.

Despite the benefits of playing at Princeton, O’Toole’s collegiate ca reer was not all smoothsailing: when the CO VID-19 pandemic hit during the spring of his junior year, it meant his upcoming 2020 senior season was up in the air. With too many un knowns, O’Toole decided to take the year off from Princeton and focus on training instead.

“The fall [of 2020] was kind of low-key. There

weren’t many opportu nities to play with any teams because everyone was kind of shut down with COVID-19,” he ex plained. “But then when the spring came around, I was able to train with the Red Bulls second team.”

Although he was un able to play in any games as part of the Red Bulls due to NCAA eligibility rules, O’Toole says play ing with the team al lowed him to stay sharp and work on his game.

“I think it was defi nitely a big reason why I had a pretty good senior year,” O’Toole said.

During his senior year, O’Toole was a unani mous First Team All-Ivy selection and had the most goals and assists in the Ivy League dur ing conference play. He helped lead the Tigers to a 7–0 Ivy League record and an eventual league championship.

“That’s something I’ll remember forever,” O’Toole said.

The MLS Development Academies, of which the Red Bulls Academy is part of, works to serve as a pipeline for amateur players to make it to the professional level. MLS teams have the exclu sive rights to sign their Academy players, after which they are put up for the draft. The New York Red Bulls opted not to sign O’Toole after his time with their Acade my team, which meant he would be eligible for the draft.

“It was kind of ironic when I was drafted to New York City because that’s Red Bulls’ big gest rival,” O’Toole ex plained.

Upon being draft ed, it is no guarantee that you will make the

team’s final roster, yet O’Toole was able to do well enough in tryouts to earn a spot. On March 7, New York City FC an nounced that O’Toole had signed a contract with the club through the 2022 season.

O’Toole joined the club after an incredibly suc cessful campaign by the team, which culminated in New York City FC win ning the 2021 MLS Cup. During his first profes sional season, O’Toole had to battle through injuries and struggled to get consistent playing time. However, in recent games, he has started to see the field more.

“I’ve started to get some playing time these last few games, which has been amazing,” he noted.

The first of these games was the 2022 Campeones Cup, where the winner of the pre vious season’s MLS Cup plays the winner of Liga MX, the top division of Mexican soccer, in a oneoff match. In the 2022 edition, New York City FC defeated Mexicanleague winner Atlas FC 2–0 on Sept. 14 to win the trophy.

The second game ref erenced by O’Toole is the Hudson River Derby, the name given to the fiercely contested rival ry between MLS clubs New York City FC and the New York Red Bulls. In the most recent meet ing between these two teams on Sept. 17, New York City FC won 2–0.

O’Toole played all 90 minutes in both major games, despite not hav ing played a single min ute in an MLS game un til the Campeones Cup.

“I found out I was start ing that game and I was completely shocked,” he

said. “I really did not ex pect to be starting at all and honestly didn’t re ally expect to be getting any time at all in this first year.”

His strong perfor mances throughout both games allowed him to play the full 90 min utes, being deployed on the left side of the mid field as a left wingback. O’Toole explained that taking the field for the first time at Yankee Sta dium, where New York City FC play their home games, was “pretty sur real.”

Despite his success as a professional player, O’Toole has not forgot ten Princeton.

“I’ve been watching most of the games. It’s fun,” he said.

O’Toole has attend ed three men’s soccer games so far this sea son. The games he has not been able to attend he watched on televi sion. He also hopes to return to campus dur ing his off-season to watch some more soccer matches.

O’Toole and New York City FC are now focused on the upcoming MLS Cup Playoffs, which be gin on Oct. 15. New York City FC are positioned to be the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference for the playoffs, the same spot they were when they won it all in 2021.

“It’s coming at a pretty cool time, because I’m seeing some more play ing time. So I hope to be involved in those games, which would be pretty special,“ O’Toole said.

Kameron Wolters is a staff writer for the Sports section at the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at kw9217@ princeton.edu or on Insta gram at @kam.wolters.

Men’s

By Diego Uribe Sports

The Princeton Ti gers (4–3–1 over all, 1–0 Ivy League) defeated the Dart mouth Big Green (2–3–2, 0–1) to open up Ivy League men’s soccer play with a 1–0 victory.

Expectations are high for the Tigers this year as they de fend their league title, coming off an unblemished 7–0 Ivy League campaign.

The Ivy League pre season poll predicts the Tigers will once again finish atop the Ivy League. While aware of the expectations, the team remains fo cused on the work ahead. “We honestly didn’t pay any atten tion to the polls,” ju nior forward Walker Gillespie told The Daily Princetonian.

“We won every game in the Ivy League last year, so it was no surprise that we were favored coming in. However, we are a completely different team this year with a different identity but are still very confi dent in our ability to win the league.”

The Tigers looked to bounce back from a 2–1 loss to the St. John’s Red Storm against a Dartmouth team that hopes to defy expectations, as the same Ivy League poll predicts them to finish seventh.

The Tigers domi nated early, produc ing two shots on goal in the first 10 min

utes while also dom inating possession. The first real chance for the Tigers came in the 15th minute when first-year mid fielder Jack Jasin ski played a cross in from the right wing that was deflected by Big Green goalkeeper Costi Christodoulou. The rebound fell to the feet of senior mid fielder Ryan Clare, who attempted to slot the ball into the bottom right corner, forcing a save from Christodoulou who promptly cleared the ball out of Big Green territory.

Christodoulou’s play was one of the only bright spots of the first half for the Big Green, but his day was cut short af ter a rough two-foot ed tackle in the 30th minute earned him a red card, leaving Dartmouth a man down for the rest of the bout.

The Tigers kept up the pressure and dominated the first half. Although the score remained 0–0 after the first 45 minutes, the Tigers produced nine shots (five on goal), while the Big Green failed to record a single shot. More than 50 percent of the Tigers’ possession in the first half was held in the attacking third.

The Tigers’ persis tent attack finally paid off in the 56th minute as they broke the draw on the first corner kick of the half.

Senior mid fielder Mateo Godoy

played a beautifully curled ball to the back post where he connected with the head of Gillespie, who struck the ball into the bottom left corner. It was Gil lespie’s first goal of the season and Go doy’s second assist.

The Tigers survived a late surge from the Big Green to ul timately finish the game with a score of 1–0.

While the team is happy with the win, the road to repeat as Ivy League Cham pions is a long one. “Everyone on the team understands that,” said Gillespie. “And we aren’t tak ing a single game for granted because you have to win ev ery game if you want to win the league. While we’re excited about the win, we know that this is just the first of seven that we need to have if we want to win this year.”

The Tigers return home on Oct. 4 to take on the Monmouth Hawks (5–4 overall, 1–4 Colonial League) in a non-conference matchup, and then continue Ivy League play on Oct. 8 against the Yale Bulldogs (4–1–3 overall, 0–1–0 Ivy League).

Diego Uribe is a con tributor to the Sports and News sections at the ‘Prince.’ he can be reached at du5555@ princeton.edu or on Twitter @diego_u11.

WOMEN’S