The Daily Princetonian: March 1, 2024

‘Unparalleled wit and unyielding reliability’: Remembering James Li ’27

By Christopher Bao & Allan Shen Assistant News Editor & Senior News Writer

James Li ’27, a member of Yeh College, passed on Feb. 16 after being struck by the Princeton Dinky shuttle at the Faculty Road crossing. He is remembered by friends for his wit and care and was a devoted student of languages and philosophy.

Li was born on Jan. 10, 2005, and moved to Princeton from Oakland, California in 2017. He subsequently attended Princeton Middle School — then John Witherspoon Middle School — and Princeton High School (PHS), where he graduated in 2023. A semifinalist for the National Merit Scholarship, Li also was a member of the fencing team, Classic Films Club, and

Physics Club.

A talented linguist, Li “had formal training in Japanese, Spanish and Italian, and was self-taught in Welsh, Romanian, German, and Russian,” according to an email sent on Saturday by the Yeh College Office. He participated in the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition.

Shinji Sato, director of the Japanese Language Studies Program and lecturer in East Asian Studies, who taught Li in the JPN 101–102 Elementary Japanese sequence, described Li as a shy and kind student who excelled in his classes.

“[James was] very quiet. When he speaks, even in English, or Japanese, it’s a very soft voice. You don’t forget his smile. Sometimes, he doesn’t speak, but he has a big, nice, charming

A Palestinian prime minister, at home in Princeton

By Miriam Waldvogel Associate News Editor

Salam Fayyad is fascinated by how Princeton works.

In the scope of the global political stage, Fayyad’s current title — a visiting senior scholar in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) — is one of the less significant roles he has held. His office, a second-floor suite in Bendheim Hall with plenty of beige wall still showing, gives few hints that he was once the secondmost powerful man in the Palestinian Authority.

Fayyad served as prime minister from 2007 to 2013, pursuing a reformist agenda that included improving security, strengthening the economy, and reducing corruption — a “technocratic revolutionary,” New Yorker writer David Remnick ’81 called him. His philosophy of “Fayyadism,” as it became known, centered around building the institutions of Palestinian government to achieve statehood. International observers noticed, and in 2011, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund declared that the Palestinians were ready.

But while he was widely respected by Western governments and many Israelis, Fayyad struggled with building a popular image at home, and he resigned

in 2013 over policy friction with President Mahmoud Abbas.

In the aftermath, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Fayyad’s government “the best Palestinian peace partner Israel and the U.S. ever had.”

“Add another nail in the coffin of the two-state solution,” Friedman wrote at the time.

On Monday, the Palestinian Authority saw a major shakeup with the resignation of Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh and the rest of cabinet. Recent diplomatic efforts spearheaded by the United States have envisioned a revitalized authority that could govern post-war Gaza.

For all his prominent accomplishments on the international stage, Fayyad has remained a relatively unassuming figure on campus since coming to Princeton in 2017.

“You’d think that he’d have a bigger ego, but he really doesn’t,” Dan Kurtzer, the former United States ambassador to Israel, SPIA professor, and longtime friend of Fayyad, told the Daily Princetonian. “He’s shy in many respects.”

Having spent the better part of a decade in this small campus in New Jersey, Fayyad has immersed himself in the routine of Princeton life.

“I liked about Princeton its self-

FEBRUARY 27, 2009

running character, the sense of things all systematized and happening when they’re supposed to happen,” he told the ‘Prince.’

In an hour-long interview, Fayyad remained focus on classically Princeton issues: studentcentered campus conversation, civility, and institutional neutrality.

His adoption of the archetypal Princeton persona goes further. Like many of his colleagues, Fayyad himself was reluctant to directly engage on the issues of proPalestinian activism and protest that have embroiled American college campuses since Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7.

“It’s not that I don’t have views. I don’t want to really get into this controversy,” he said. “I really would like to stay within the confines of the most strategic, longerterm conversation on this issue.”

What Fayyad means by longterm conversation is, quite literally, a conversation: the kind of lively but civil debate and discourse among students that universities are argued to be all about.

Creating that environment is another matter. For Fayyad, it starts with ensuring that administrators and professors remain neutral in order to avoid unfairly influencing student opinions. Because of this, he doesn’t teach

Opinion

Zero suicides is not just a dream. We can make it reality.

By Eleanor Clemans-Cope Head Opinion Editor

Content Warning: The following article includes mention of suicide.

University Counseling services are available at 609-258-3141, and the Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 988 or +1 (800) 273-TALK (8255). A Crisis Text Line is also available in the United States; text HOME to 741741. Students can contact residential college staff and the Office of Religious Life for other support and resources.

Back in February 2023, our Princeton community found itself in profound grief after the passing of Maura Coursey GS. In October 2022, we mourned Misrach Ewunetie ’24. This February, we find ourselves grieving again for two more students, both firstyears, lost. There is a mental and behavioral health crisis on this campus.

As I wrote last February, if Princeton had the national average rate of suicides among 15- to 24-year-olds, there would be one death each year. One death would still be too many, but our community has experienced tragedy far beyond that: We have grieved seven preventable deaths in the past three years.

This is heartbreaking and unacceptable. But leadership is defeatist, disengaged, and complacent: At the Council of the Princeton University Community meeting on Monday, President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 said that “there are tragedies that take place, even when people do all the things that they should be doing.”

This perspective is dangerously misguided. While peer institutions have struggled to find sufficient solutions to the mental health crisis, we can look to clinical settings to find successful programs that are increasingly

See ZERO page 11

This Week In History

As students prepare to enter midterms week, The Daily Princetonian looked back at the history of Princeton’s rare A-plus. One professor said with regards to her grading policy, “You get an A-plus for blowing the top of my head off.” Anonymous students who had received A-pluses in the past reflected on their experiences.

COURTESY OF SHIRA KUTIN

James Li ’27 on the field outside of Princeton High School.

Shoukfeh: “He had this very beautiful smile that lit up the room.”

smile,” Sato recalled. “He was a very, very good student from day one because learning Japanese is not easy, but he’s very, very, very good at it.”

George Kopf ’27 remembers Li as quiet, and someone who “never really talked about himself that much” in person. But, he had a quick, vibrant wit when communicating virtually.

Li and his friends often used Discord to communicate throughout high school and beyond. Connor Stewart, who first met Li in high school, said that “in our server, [Li] was a part of almost every conversation.”

“There’s a set of emojis in the server that were custom to the server, and we had an ongoing joke that he would communicate exclusively through emojis that were just [our friend] Andy’s face,” he remembered.

Stewart recounted that the night after Li passed, “a bunch of us in the server were on a call, and we were just looking through his past messages … And he just always knew what to say.”

Another of Li’s friends, Luca Balescu, also remembers Li for his humor, describing him as someone who was “extraordinarily funny” and “always had a good, very intellectual zinger to throw in any conversation.”

Zach Deng, another PHS graduate and friend on the Discord, echoed that there were times

when Li “would just drop some amazing one liner. A lot of people on the server agree there’s nothing that can replace his quotes, because they were … really good.”

Noura Shoukfeh ’25, one of Li’s Community Action (CA) leaders during his Orientation, echoed Sato’s description of Li’s smile and described him as an active participant in the CA experience.

“He had this very beautiful smile that lit up the room,” Shoukfeh told the Daily Princetonian. “He was always just so willing to engage at every opportunity we had in CA. It can be a nerve-wracking time for first-year students. Whenever [my co-leader and I] would ask, ‘Ok, we are gonna go do this. Are you ready?,’ James was always the first one to get up to get prepared. Just the sort of initiative that made everyone else comfortable.”

A friend of Li since middle school, Ethan Lee wrote to the ‘Prince’ about Li’s dependable nature and willingness to be there for his friends, saying that he “would always show up to club meetings and friend group events. He was consistently there. Almost without me realizing it, he became a rock in my life.”

A curious and avid learner, friends remembered Li’s particular interest in philosophy, especially the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Stewart also reflected that Li often liked to send screenshots of texts, noting that “He’d always be reading something in that vein.”

Li’s friend Shira Kutin empha-

sized his curiosity and love of learning from their time in high school. “He always just seemed interested in learning things,” she said. “In our physics class, half the time I feel like nobody knew what was going on — except for James.”

“There were times where all of us were just sitting there in the class because we had to be; he seemed like he wanted to be there,” she added.

In addition to his intellectual hobbies, Li also had a love for video games. “He liked to play video games and read a lot. He oftentimes enjoyed playing more single player strategy games or games with a good story, but he would occasionally play some co-op games with me,” his friend Andy Yao wrote to the ‘Prince.’

Lee reflected that Li had a way of imprinting some of his own passions on his friends. “A lot of things that he loved have become things I love. From his unique music taste and excellent choice in sci-fi books, to his love of frogs and Eurovision, he rubbed off on me more than I realize. It was kind of an unconscious process, but he had that sort of effect on people. He had a capacity for being very profound,” Lee wrote.

“When he opened up to people, they got the chance to see someone with unparalleled wit and unyielding reliability.”

Balescu told the ‘Prince’ that one of his favorite recollections of Li is from a set of activities their friends did at the end of their junior year, which they referred to

as their “Olympics.”

Balescu recounted that he was the videographer, but when it came his turn to participate in a relay race, he “handed the camera to James [and] told him ‘just try to film the race as best you can.’”

“As the race was happening, he ran back and forth across the field with such determination and dedication that he managed to get everywhere he had to be. The only issue, of course, was that there were also several minutes of footage of him panting and running with a camera pointed at the ground,” Balescu recounted while laughing at the memory.

Another friend, Ngan Le, most strongly remembered Li’s caring nature. “He loved his friends

and family — and I truly hope he knows how much people care and love him too,” Le wrote to the ‘Prince.’ “I deeply respect him. James was irrefutably a kind soul gone too early. Sincerely, I hope he rests in peace knowing that his legacy lives in our memories. We miss you, James.” Li is survived by his parents, Yiyun and Dapeng Li.

Christopher Bao is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’

Allan Shen is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’

Provocative signs at Yale game raise questions about permissible fan behavior

By Tate Hutchins & Hallie Graham

Sports Editor & News

In front of a screaming crowd at Jadwin Gymnasium on Saturday, Feb. 17, Yale star forward Danny Wolf missed close shot after close shot. Not far behind him, a Princeton fan held a sign that read: “I have scored as many points as D. Wolf.”

The sign proved to be a prophecy for Wolf’s performance, as the same player who took Princeton for 21 points in their last matchup failed to score a single point this game — though, he did turn over the ball twice.

This is simply not Danny Wolf’s night. The front runner for the Ivy League Player of the Year award has ZERO points in 32 minutes of game time.

The signs and spirit from the Princ-

eton student section seemed to frequently frustrate Yale as Princeton marched to a 73–62 victory, less than a month after the same matchup had the opposite result. With that, Princeton men’s basketball has rode the home crowd to a perfect 10–0 record at home this season.

The game, a rivalry matchup, was packed. The crowd showed their enthusiasm with cheers, as well as a sea of signs in the student section, crafted at the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) pre-game event. Many of the signs made by students, however, never made it into the stands or were confiscated while in use.

One notable sign that was seized read “Danny Wolf gets no bitches.”

Stacey Bunting, senior associate director of athletics, told The Daily Princetonian that their “events team did, in fact, remove some signs from the stands that were considered of-

fensive in nature.” Bunting explained that the signs that were taken had “expletive language involved.”

According to Bunting, the signs deemed objectionable enough to be taken away were brought to event staff’s attention by one of the parents of a player on the court.

The Princeton Stadium Visitor’s Guide, as well as the identical one published for Jadwin Gym, details the athletic department’s policy on banners, signs, and flags, reserving “the right to remove these items from possession if deemed inappropriate” by event staff. The policy states that signs must be “in good taste and not offensive in any nature” but does not clarify what language is prohibited any further.

Two of the signs taken away in the hands of event staff read: “Dick Cheney went to Yale,” in reference to the former vice president of the United States, and “Gilmore Girls fucking sucks,” in reference to the popular comedy-drama series whose protagonist attends Yale.

Jupiter Ding ’24 was in the student section as signs were being taken away. Ding told the ‘Prince’ that one poster called a player on the opposing team “an idiot” in Hebrew. The sign included a similar phrase in English on the other side. Event staff attempted to confiscate this sign as well.

While the shenanigans played out on the sidelines, the game was fiery on the court. Just 45 seconds into the game, starting sophomore forward Caden Pierce took a dive onto the hardwood after the ball, busting open his chin and starting the game off with stitches.

Despite the rocky beginning, the

atmosphere remained positively charged.

Senior guard Matt Allocco said in an interview with the ‘Prince’ that the atmosphere at the game was not hindered by any signs or the removal of them. According to Allocco, “it’s always a treat to play in front of a big crowd like that. You kind of feed off that energy. I think [the crowd] really helped us.”

Allocco said that most fan behavior does not make it to the court in any manner interpretable for a player. He explained that he can never hear “exactly what [the crowd] is saying, but [he] can hear their noise.”

Pierce said in an interview with the ‘Prince’ that he does not notice signs when he is playing. He added, “When I’m on the bench, I’ll do a scan, but I’m not really looking specifically for a sign.”

He said that he just “admired the amount of people that were there” on Saturday night.

The Yale Daily News reported on Sunday that “Princeton’s fans packed the bleachers in their home gym … As the game progressed, fans began to cheer sarcastically when Wolf, scoreless on the night, touched the ball on offense.”

The removal of signs from the student section added to an already rowdy environment.

The signs in question were made at the USG event prior to the game. The USG Weekly Newsletter sent to the student body on Feb. 15 encouraged students to “come by to show [their] school spirit with face-painting, signmaking, and hairspray stations.”

USG President Avi Attar ’25 told the ‘Prince’ that in conjunction with the

Athletics Department and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, he “hoped that USG was able to provide a welcoming and fun environment for students to show their support team.”

As for the sign-making portion of the event, Attar explained that USG does “not post rules about signmaking” and did not on Saturday. Saturday was not the first time there has been a USG-sanctioned sign-making event. When the men’s football team faced off against Yale on Nov. 11, there were also signs that poked fun at the Bulldogs with quips about topics from Rory Gilmore to the U.S. News and World Report rankings. However, no confiscated signs were reported following the game.

ESPN, the broadcast network for Saturday’s home game against Yale, has their own set of standards for fan signs that can be shown on television. According to the ESPN Gameday Guidelines, “No vulgar signs, .com, .net, .org, political or religious signs are allowed. For fans entering the pit, signs cannot be on poles or oversized.”

Ding said that he did not think the student section experience was too negatively affected by the confiscations. Ding said, “We still had solid energy even after the signs were taken away. There were still a few signs around, and we were still coming up with chants and cheering on the team.”

Tate Hutchins is an associate Sports editor for the ‘Prince.’

Hallie Graham is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’

Climate organizers on campus rebrand from ‘Divest Princeton’ to ‘Sunrise Princeton’

By Elisabeth Stewart Assistant News Editor

Student climate organizers on campus finalized the transition from Divest Princeton to Sunrise Princeton at a launch event on Saturday. The transition to Sunrise Princeton ushers in a “new era of climate justice organizing on campus,” cocoordinator Alex Norbrook ’26 said at the launch event on Saturday.

Norbrook is a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

The rebrand also means the organization will join the national Sunrise Movement, a political action organization that aims to “stop the climate crisis.” Since its founding in 2017, the Sunrise has lobbied for the Green New Deal and gained national attention for leading a sit-in in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside Justice Democrats and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Divest Princeton — comprised of current students, alumni, and faculty — has led campus climate activism efforts since 2019. However, since the University announced its plans to fully divest from all publicly-owned fossil fuel companies in fall 2022, undergraduate student activists saw a need for a “new kind of organizing on campus,” co-coordinator Eleanor ClemansCope ’26 told the ‘Prince.’

Clemans-Cope is the head Opinion editor for the ‘Prince.’

“Divest, dissociate, and decarbonize are all very important. What we’re also moving towards is demanding that Princeton invest in global climate solutions, to invite frontline perspectives and protect people in the community, and to innovate climate solutions on campus,” she said.

“We recognized that it was time for us to move out of just the financial space and also the reinvestment space, into what Princeton can do for its community,” she continued.

Princeton has adopted a number of climate initiatives as part of its 2019 Sustainability Action Plan. Recently, the New York Times featured Princeton’s geoexchange project, calling it “a new system that will keep buildings at comfortable tempera-

tures without burning fossil fuels” in a Jan. 23 piece. The project is part of Princeton’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2046, four years before the global deadline set by the European Union and the United States. Currently, Sunrise Princeton is “starting discussions with partners in the community” to address direct concerns about decarbonization.

Divest Princeton alumni organizer Lynne Archibald ’87 told the ‘Prince’ that the move to Sunrise Princeton is less of a “transition” away from Divest Princeton and more of a “branching out,” adding that she expects collaboration between the two groups.

“I think that there’s a lot of space available for environmental movements,” she said. “The more different groups that we have focusing on different things, highlighting different aspects of all the work that there is to be done, the better.”

In December 2023, the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) announced the completion of its plans to eliminate holdings in publicly-traded fossil fuel companies. According to a February 2024 update, the Board of Trustees updated the list of companies subject to dissociation, increasing the number from 90 to 2,371. The Board of Trustees also removed eight companies from the dissociation list.

As of May 2022, Princeton had invested $1.7 billion of its endowment in fossil fuel companies. According to correspondences with University officials obtained by the ‘Prince,’ public companies account for $1 billion of this investment. Divest Princeton speculates that the remaining $700 million that are invested in private fossil fuel companies.

“The climate crisis is getting more and more severe, and also more and more unpredictable,” Clemans-Cope said. “That kind of pushed us into a new conception of what Princeton can do because as the urgency kicks off, the action must also kick off.”

Elisabeth Stewart is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’

University pilot this spring will normalize more than one final exam per day

By Caitlyn Tablada & Nandini Krishnan Contributing News Writer & Senior

Writer

The University is launching a pilot which will “allow” students to take more than one final exam per day this semester, according to an email sent to undergraduates on Friday, Feb. 16 from Dean of the College Jill Dolan.

Typically, students aren’t expected to sit for more than one final per day, but the recent amendment will cap exams per day at two. Dolan cited “concerns from students whose exams were scheduled late during exam week in the fall” and the lack of a “break in the spring” prior to summer activities as one of the reasons for the change. The move will normalize students being scheduled for two exams on the same day.

In an email to The Daily Princetonian, Dolan wrote that the pilot this semester “will actually affect very few students,” adding that only “about three percent of the current undergraduate student body would have two assigned exams in one day (168 out of 5590) this spring.”

Previously, when students were assigned two exams in one day, the registrar would proactively contact these students, but Dolan noted that they frequently said they were “fine with two exams per day and prefer to leave their schedule as-is.”

Dolan also responded to questions about increased stress for undergraduate students as a result of the policy. In her email to the ‘Prince,’ she wrote that Princeton remains “the only Ivy League school that doesn’t require students to take more than one exam per day.” She also wrote that “Princeton has a rigorous curriculum and an assessment period that requires us to be flexible to meet often conflicting needs.”

Sophie Williams ’27, a first-year enrolled in CLA 212 last semester, explained to the ‘Prince’ that her longer final exam schedule was not ideal for her in the fall.

“I had my Classics final on the last possible day, at the last possible time. I had turned in all my other work over a week before this, and so it was tough that I couldn’t go home until three days before Christmas,” she stated. “Obviously it was out of my control, but it would have been nice to have a shorter exam schedule.”

With the fall semester final exam period stretching to Dec. 23 in some years, some students have raised concern over difficulties returning home for breaks. The length of the finals period has been contentious and was central to this winter’s USG elections.

During the USG vice presidential debate in December, suggestions for revising the final exam period included establishing a shorter exam period and starting the fall semester earlier in the year to allow for an earlier winter break.

While the length of the exam period will remain the same this spring, Dolan wrote that it would allow administrators to “study how to move to a shorter exam period in the fall.” Dolan also wrote that the University would consider student feedback following the pilot process to guide additional steps.

This policy of working with individual students to adjust exam schedules as needed will continue this spring.

“As always,” Dolan’s announcement stated, “if an assigned exam schedule would cause undue hardship for a particular student, the Registrar’s office and our residential college deans will help shift the student’s schedule.”

The updated exam policy states that requests to reschedule in-person exams will be accommodated “under

very few circumstances,” including “religious obligations,” “personal emergencies,” and “more than two examinations scheduled on the same day.”

Dolan explained that the pilot “is one component of a longer-term initiative to decompress the final assessment period and to give students more control over planning their end-of-term work.” The University recently updated the Dean’s Date policy to allow faculty to grant short-term extensions in emergency circumstances without the approval of a dean.

In addition to this change, Dolan explained, allowing students to potentially take two exams per day is necessary “to introduce more flexibility and efficiency within the final assessment period.”

Dolan also spoke to the way final exams at Princeton have changed in recent years. On top of a shift this year towards more exams scheduled to be administered during the afternoon rather than the evening, take-home exams have become more commonplace.

“It’s true that, especially post-pandemic, faculty are giving fewer seated examinations,” Dolan wrote. “The changes to the process on which we’re continuing to work include inviting faculty to think differently about ‘take home’ exams and their timing; about end-of-semester assessment in general, to open up more options than ‘final exams’ to assess student work; and alleviating the pile-up of work that some students experience on Dean’s Date by moving towards a staggered final assessment schedule.”

Caitlyn Tablada is a contributing News writer for the ‘Prince.’

Nandini Krishnan is a senior News writer and for the ‘Prince.’

‘Lack of transparency’: Members of dissolved Town Council commissions reflect

By Abby Leibowitz Senior News Writer

Following a contentious move on Jan. 8 by the Princeton Town Council to consolidate three of its volunteer commissions with little notice, some members of the dissolved committees are questioning the Council’s intentions. In their view, the decision is a reflection of deeper issues of trust within the Council.

The commissions joined together were the Civil Rights Commission, the Human Services Commission, and the Affordable Housing Board. These committees were all staffed by volunteers from the community, as opposed to elected council members.

“The lack of transparency, it was for me the most shocking part,” Veronica Olivares-Weber, who served as chair of the nowdefunct Human Services Commission, said in an interview with the Daily Princetonian.

In an interview with the ‘Prince’ earlier this month, Councilmember Leighton Newlin defended the decision. At the time, he affirmed that the consolidation was made with the potential impact of the newly consolidated committees in mind.

“It’s not about hurting our feelings, it’s about doing things right,” Olivares-Weber told the ‘Prince.’

Linda Oppenheim, a volunteer with the racial justice organization Not in Our Town Princeton (NIOT), said the council’s consolidation reflected a larger disconnect with the community, referencing the Princeton Community Needs Assessment as an example.

In collaboration with Princeton University, the Human Services Commission created and admin-

istered the Princeton Community Needs Assessment as two surveys between 2020–2022 to determine what gaps and struggles exist in Princeton, and presented it to the Council in December 2022. However, according to Oliveras-Weber, the commission was told that the assessment was “just a presentation.”

“This was a huge disappointment, as people were working on this for years,” she said.

Councilmember Eve Niedergang told the ‘Prince’ that commissions often propose valuable initiatives, but many cannot move forward, because the “Council simply doesn’t have the bandwidth.”

Oppenheim, however, linked the dismissal of the survey to a “disconnect” that was “astounding.” She further claimed that council members “justified the decision to consolidate with a need for professionalization of the work those committees were doing” at the Jan. 22 public hearing.

“The previous commissions had professionals, were committed to gathering data through the survey, but were ignored,” Oppenheim added.

Niedergang told the ‘Prince’ she doesn’t recall using the word “professionalization,” but stated that the Council was referring to expanding professional capacity with regards to the number of staff. She added that the Council’s decision to consolidate the committees did not imply the other members were not professionals.

Maria Juega, another community member who served on the now-defunct Affordable Housing Commission and a founder of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the ‘Prince’

that “all three boards and commissions have been struggling for years in trying to take initiative and make recommendations to Council. Almost everything we were proposing was set aside, ignored. It was like they didn’t want to listen to us. We were just a rubber stamp.”

Overall, Olivares-Weber, Oppenheim, and Juega viewed the larger problem as a refusal from the Council to listen to ideas outside the body. “If an idea doesn’t come from a governing body, it’s not a good idea. Even if we have research and data,” Olivares-Weber said.

According to Olivares-Weber, she and another member of the Human Services Commission met with Princeton Mayor Mark Freda and Councilmember Leticia Fraga in 2023 to express frustration with a lack of transparency and that they were feeling ignored.

Oliveras-Weber recounted that she felt “so disrespected” after the meeting.

Fraga told the ‘Prince,’ “From my part as liaison, I don’t believe there was any miscommunication. There were some members that were not accepting the limitations of the scope of what they could do.”

Mayor Mark Freda did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Fraga shared that every year, the Council decides on priorities and liaisons share these priorities with the commissions. With regards to the Community Needs Assessment Survey, Fraga said “I don’t know where the communication broke, but it was just a presentation, because there was never any directive from Council to tell the Human Services Commission to act on it.”

After analyzing the survey’s results, the Human Services Commission wanted to spearhead a project that would centralize mental health services into an accessible calendar to enhance service provider collaboration and community accessibility. Olivares-Weber likened it to the Human Services’s food distribution calendar.

“We appreciated the work that went into [the survey] … it was informative and identified the need for more access to mental health services, and we all understand this,” Fraga said.

Fraga said the chair and vice chair were told that the Council was already in the process of entering into agreement with Catholic Services to meet the mental health needs of those without insurance, and that the provision of mental health services was not under the jurisdiction of Human Services.

“Whether you call it miscommunication or willfully not accepting that it wasn’t their role, they were taking it on as their

initiative,” Fraga said. While Olivares-Weber will not be applying to the new consolidated commission because of her negative experiences, she “hopes not to see only people [the Councilmembers] are friends with and who they like.”

She added, “I think it’s important for Princeton students to be informed, particularly on issues related to underserved communities.”

Oppenheim echoed this, saying, “I would like to see greater recognition from students of the University’s role in town. The University really affects what happens in this location.”

Juega also encouraged Princeton students to rise up to issues of equity using resources provided to them.

“Things get done in Princeton behind closed doors … let’s open up the discussion, let’s be more democratic,” Juega said.

Abby Leibowitz is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’

Emailed threat of violence against campus Jewish community assessed as ‘low credibility’

By Olivia Sanchez Associate News Writer

Members of the Princeton University community received a TigerAlert on Friday, Feb. 23 about an email sent to multiple community members containing threats against the Jewish community on campus. According to the alert, members of other U.S. university communities received identical emailed threats.

According to the alert, the Department of Public Safety (DPS) “assessed the credibility of the threat as low.”

“DPS is continuing its investigation with local, state, and federal authorities and is increasing patrols on campus,” the message continued.

The University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, and Cornell University also received violent messages targeting Jewish community members on Friday.

The Penn Division of Public Safety described the threat as using “hateful rhetoric based on religion and political affiliation.”

The Dartmouth, which obtained the email, specified that the email was “threatening violence against Jewish students and professors on campus.”

The threat to Cornell contained “hateful, incendiary language”

and “threat[ening] violence,” according to Cornell Associate Vice President for Public Safety David Honan.

In an email to The Daily Princetonian, University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss confirmed that the incident “remains under investigation.”

In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Center for Jewish Life (CJL) Executive Director and Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91 said that the threat was sent “to a random assortment of people at Princeton.” He reported that some recipients no longer work at the University.

“Somebody got a hold of some kind of list somewhere and sent it – that’s the impression that I have and it was a letter threatening the Jewish community on campus. I spoke to campus security even before the TigerAlert came out, and they assured me immediately that this is not a credible threat, because the same letter went to other universities as well,” Steinlauf said.

In an emailed statement to the ‘Prince,’ Rabbi Eitan Webb, co-founder of the Chabad House and a Princeton University Jewish Chaplain, wrote, “The Department of Public Safety and the Princeton Police Department are both a pleasure to work with and

I cannot thank them enough for their attentiveness. Princeton’s administration deserves a shoutout here too. They take these threats seriously, and they are responding. I am grateful for that.”

Steinlauf also praised the DPS’s response to the threat, and said, “The Department of Public Safety works incredibly closely with the CJL, particularly after October 7. We are in constant touch with them.”

“They in turn have a strong relationship with local law enforcement authorities, if God forbid anything should happen. So there is a strong concerted effort to keep our students safe,” he added.

Both Steinlauf and Webb attributed the threat in part to the rising antisemitism on college campuses and in the United States as a whole, with Webb writing, “It is certainly true that the demonization of Jews and of Israel has an effect. When people preach hatred, threats of violence increase.”

Steinlauf said, “What that threatening email does represent is the very measurable increase in antisemitism across the country and around the world right now. And that’s a very serious concern.”

Steinlauf also emphasized the importance of education in combating antisemitism.

“Education is the most impor-

tant thing. We are a university and the more people understand … what antisemitism is and where it comes from and how to recognize it, it can only create conditions for better dialogue across the differences and political … divides that we have on our campus,” he said.

Steinlauf pointed to the various educational workshops hosted by the CJL about antisemitism. These workshops are open to faculty, students, and staff, and the CJL is now working with the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS) to host another session specifically for students.

“From our end, we’re providing information on antisemitism. People need to be educated about Islamophobia, and all other kinds of bigotry and hatred that can arise. We’re very fortunate that Princeton University is not as bad as other campuses in terms of some threats and actual violence that do happen on other campuses. And we’re all working very hard to keep it that way,” Steinlauf added.

Webb and Steinlauf both emphasized the importance of positivity and Jewish celebration on campus.

“I want to remind the entire Princeton community that positive can be as infectious as nega-

tive. If one person can set an entire campus on edge, then one person can also set it right,” Webb wrote. “In Hasidic parlance this is called shtus dikedusha – holy folly. There are times to be overwhelmingly positive, far out of balance with what is expected, and this is one of those times,” he said.

Webb added that while hatred has an effect, “negativity does not last. Positivity does.”

“We will protect ourselves when we need to and we will be vigilant, but most of all, we will educate, and we will celebrate,” he wrote.

Steinlauf said that students were “entirely unfazed” by the TigerAlert.

“We had a tremendously wellattended Friday night service, as we always do. We honored Dean Dolan and her wife, Professor Stacy Wolf. It was a send-off Shabbat, because Dean Dolan will be retiring,” he said.

“It was a beautiful and vibrant Shabbat even with the TigerAlert … We were unfazed and all too happy to celebrate Jewish life and the people who we honor in the Jewish community at Shabbat. It didn’t affect us.”

Olivia Sanchez is an associate News editor for the ‘Prince.’

LOUISA GHEORGHITA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Princeton Town Council consolidated three committees into one last month.

Rec Pool opens after delay, welcomes annual cardboard canoe race

By Vitus Larrieu News Contributor

After 19 months of closure and a delay due to “unforeseen circumstances” related to the shipment of materials to the construction site, the Campus Recreation Pool at Dillon Gymnasium reopened on Feb. 16. This marks another step towards the completion of phase one of Campus Recreation’s renovation project, which includes the renovation of the Class of 1986 Fitness and Wellness Center, which opened on Jan. 29, and new athletics facilities in the Meadows Neighborhood. The redesigned pool will allow for the return of open rec swim hours, Princeton Swim Club, and Campus Rec-sponsored activities, and prompted the revival of the annual Cardboard Canoe Race.

During the pool’s renovation, DeNunzio Pool — which is next to Jadwin Gymnasium — expanded its hours to accommodate all students who wanted to swim, including the Princeton Club Swim team. The availability of open swim hours on campus were reduced during the Dillon pool renovations, as DeNunzio typically serves as a space exclusively for the varsity swim and dive teams.

Renovations to the Rec Pool include the installation of a new filtration system, ceiling, lighting fixtures, tiling around the pool,

U. AFFAIRS

grout between the pool tiles, and a new bulkhead between the wading pool and the lap pool. The next phase of renovations will introduce elevator access to the pool and other parts of Dillon Gym, making the gym facilities “more like 80 percent accessible.”

The lobby and the two group fitness rooms above the lobby will remain inaccessible to wheelchair users.

Jessica Ward, Senior Associate Director of Athletics for Campus Rec, highlighted the importance of the improvements made to gym accessibility in an interview with The Daily Princetonian.

“It was always really hard to explain … to someone, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t get you to the pool,’” she said.

The re-opening of the Rec Pool has also allowed for expanded programming. After spring break, children’s swim lessons will begin, taught by students hired as swim instructors — a new campus job offering. Ward also detailed Campus Rec’s plans to offer swim lessons and “divein moves” to students and staff, as well as other efforts to bring people to the pool “even if you’re not a swimmer.”

Princeton Club Swim, which practiced in the Rec Pool team before its closure, has mixed feelings about their return to Dillon from DeNunzio. “In some ways [it’s] made our practice times a

bit easier because it’s closer to where most people live,” Club Swim President Maddie Machado ’25 told the ‘Prince.’

Machado expressed her concerns about scheduling conflicts with open swim hours and varsity teams’ use of the Rec Pool.

“It’s been a bit of a puzzle to get times that are not crazy late at night,” she said. As a result, the team has had to reduce practice from five to four days per week.

Overall, the hours at the pool available for students to swim have increased. The open hours include 6:30–10:30 a.m. on weekdays and 1–4 p.m. and 5–7 p.m. during the weekend. On Sundays, there is a 45-minute block reserved for women’s only swim from 12–12:45 p.m. Following the opening of the Rec Pool, DeNunzio’s recreational swim hours have been reduced to Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.

The re-opening of the pool prompted the resurrection of the annual Cardboard Canoe Race, marking the first time since 2019 that the race was held without pandemic mitigation procedures. 25 pairs of students formed teams to create and race a cardboard canoe, competing for the fastest time, best boat design, best capsize, and best costume.

The costume theme for this year was dynamic duos, inspiring participants to dress as a myriad

of characters. Costumes included Donkey and Shrek, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and the winners of the best costume competition, Spiderman and Doctor Octopus.

Two of the teams were sibling duos, each made up of a first year and senior who had participated in the race in a previous year.

One of the teams, Joseph Roberts ’27 and Christopher Roberts ’24, received extra support from their father Chris Roberts, who was visiting from Outer Banks, N.C. to watch the race.

The winning team for fastest time was made up of first-year students Manuel Garcia San Millan ’27 and Ian Liu ’27. Their boat, “The Spanish Junk Armada,” consisted of a single flat sheet of cardboard that they used as a

kickboard to swim their way to victory.

In a post-race interview, San Millan told the ‘Prince’ that his team “went into the cardboard boat race thinking, ‘What [does] the rule set actually say?’” He explained that there were no requirements to “paddle with a paddle.”

While their boat did not break any current rules, San Millan added that he was told a rule will be implemented next year to prevent their strategy.

“I’m happy that I have a rule named after me now. It’s a funny experience,” he joked.

Vitus Larrieu is a News contributor and head Podcast editor for the ‘Prince.’

Plans for Frist Health Center prompt calls for graduate student center

By Claire Meng News Contributor

Plans to move University Health Services from McCosh Health Center to the still-unbuilt Frist Health Center has led to speculation about what will occupy the vacant space. While the University has yet to announce an official plan for McCosh, students have speculated on possible uses for the site. Graduate students have shown particular interest in the building, citing a current lack of designated campus spaces for graduate students.

In November 2023, the University announced a plan to replace McCosh Health Center following a “major gift” from Dr. Thomas Frist Jr. Construction of the new facility is expected to be completed in 2025.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, Amari Tankard GS, the president of the Graduate Student Government (GSG), said that the GSG talked with the administration about a graduate student center back in 2019, but, since then, talks have stalled. She cited the decentralization of graduate student spaces and lack of easy access to meals as the main issues leading to these desires for a dedicated space for graduate students.

Tankard compared the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) office space in Frist Campus Center to the GSG office in the basement of Campus Club. She said the GSG space frequently has accessibility and sanitation issues. She added that the facilities workers at Campus Club use the GSG office as their lunch room. “I’ve had meetings in there where they’re just sitting on the other side of the table eating lunch …  It’s a hot mess.” Tankard also said that there were sometimes mice in the office.

Tankard shared that she complained to the head of Facilities at Campus Club and the former Assistant Dean for Student Affairs but nothing was done to address the issues.

“When the University is made aware of concerns by GSG, we work to quickly address those concerns and will continue to do so,” University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss wrote in an email to the ‘Prince.’

Two other graduate students also spoke to the ‘Prince’ in an interview, expressing their support for a graduate student center. David Whyman GS mentioned how “the undergrads and grads are people at different stages in their life,” and that it would be better to have a specific space for graduate students.

Rose Guingrich GS echoed these sentiments and shared that “Frist student center doesn’t seem very grad student-oriented.” Guingrich and Whyman both hope to have a space for offices and meetings, and cited the lack of permanent office spaces in certain departments and social areas to build community.

While originally conceived as a space for the entire student body and faculty, Frist Campus Center is known today as a hub for undergraduate students. The center hosts the USG office, McGraw Learning Center, Frist Theater, cafés, and several other gathering spaces for student activities. Frist also draws in students on the unlimited meal plan, largely underclassmen, for late meal.

Tankard echoed many similar desires along with spaces such as “cafés, convention centers, perhaps even like a large room for speaker events [and] a playroom for children [of graduate students].”

She adds that grad students who

are on campus “24 hours a day” have very few spaces to eat which she says is especially difficult because graduate students live far off-campus.

Last spring, Princeton Graduate Student United (PGSU) cited affordable housing deficiencies as a major issue for graduate students. With the cost of living in Princeton being increasingly inaccessible, many graduate students have been forced to find accommodations in surrounding areas.

Anthony Taboni, a graduate student in the politics department, claimed in an interview with the ‘Prince’ last spring that he and his partner searched for four months, offering six months of rent upfront, and adding his mother as a co-signer, to no avail. He claimed that he reached out to the housing office, but their

suggestions were not feasible. In the end, Taboni wound up renting a onebedroom apartment in nearby Plainsboro, N.J., for $2,000 per month.

At Harvard University, Tankard explained, her colleagues have a different experience with individual offices, a convention space, and a conference room.

Tankard expressed that she felt these differences in treatment “[speak] to what is important to the school at the time, and I wish that we had a little more of an important space to be in.”

While “the Graduate School supports the idea of a Graduate Student Center and is continuing to collaborate with the GSG and other partners to explore future options,” University Spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote in an email to the ‘Prince’ that the University “will consider the viability of a

wide range of potential uses.”

Another idea students have proposed for the space is a campus pub.

At a USG meeting last fall, former USG president Stephen Daniels ’24 named McCosh Health Center as a potential location for a pub.

“Because we are still in the planning phase, any locations for the potential events are still being determined,” he wrote in an email to the ‘Prince’ at the time.

As of now, it remains unclear whether these wishes will be granted. Morrill added that future plans for McCosh Health Center have not been initiated yet.

Claire Meng is a contributing News writer for the ‘Prince.’

TYLER DURAN / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

The Campus Rec Pool reopened with a cardboard canoe race.

USG allocates funding and approves upcoming Midterms Celebration Trip

By Alena Zhang Staff News Writer

The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Senate convened for its third meeting of the spring semester on Sunday, Feb. 25, confirming funding for requests presented to the Projects Board and an upcoming midterms celebration trip.

In a series of funding allocations, the Senate approved financial support for several student organizations. The Princeton Ethiopian and Eritrean Students Association (PEESA), Taiwanese American Students Association (TASA), Center for Jewish Life (CJL), Princeton University Wind Ensemble (PUWE), and E-Club received approval for funding.

PEESA secured funding for their upcoming Adwa celebration scheduled for March 3. TASA received financial support for two upcoming events: a documentary screening on April 12 and the TASA Night Market on April 13, which features Asian cuisine and performance groups.

The CJL received financial backing for their Middle Eastern Jewish Alliance Intercultural Shabbat and Hamantaschen on March 21, while E-Club secured funding for their upcoming HackPrinceton event from March 29 to March 31. The PUWE was also granted funding for additional music equipment and their spring concert.

Campus and Community Affairs (CCA) Chair Genevieve Shutt ’26 proposed a midterms celebration trip scheduled for Friday, March 8. The proposal received unanimous approval from the Senate, securing $2,933.35 for a trip to Hudson Yards in New York to visit the Edge observation deck and have dinner.

“It’s really just a place for students to come together and explore New York, especially for students who aren’t able to travel or aren’t able to leave,” she explained.

This is the second trip the Senate has approved funding for this year. At the USG’s first meeting, U-Councilor Isabella Shutt ’24 received funding for a trip to lead a group to see a play in Trenton.

During the meeting, two presentations were given: one from Shutt and another from Tommy Guan ’25 from the Princeton Student Veterans organization.

Guan presented on the unique challenges faced by veterans on campus. He emphasized the organization’s role in creating a supportive community and stressed the need for resources in areas such as childcare to assist veterans in navigating university life successfully.

“I always like to say yes, [combat is] stressful, but Princeton is actually more stressful, and I don’t say that as a joke. It’s really true, it’s just a different type of

stress,” Guan said.

“No matter what the experience of a veteran [is], they’re always going to have that struggle of adjusting to a different lifestyle, a different type of pressure, a different type of hard work. And that challenge, although it’s always going to be there, I think it can be lessened, or at least helped along quicker, so veterans can make that transition quicker. What we want is for veterans to succeed here,” he added.

Shutt gave a presentation titled “Senate Mapping & Your Constitutional Powers,” which under-

scored the importance of policy advocacy on campus and outlined the paths to achieving policy change in Princeton. Shutt outlined various actions that Senate members could take to influence change within the University, such as proposing budget changes, reviewing faculty curriculum decisions, and suggesting constitutional amendments.

“When it comes to university policy we have very little direct authority, but we have a lot of connection to people up here where we can give voice to people down here,” said Shutt.

USG President Avi Attar’s ’25 recent engagements included meetings with Campus Recreation for potential partnerships and discussions on disciplinary processes with Vice President for Campus Life W. Rochelle Calhoun. USG meetings are open for all students to attend and are held on Sundays from 4 to 5 p.m. in Robertson Hall 016.

Alena Zhang is a staff News writer for the ‘Prince.’

PLI awards seed grant funding to 14 cross- departmental research teams

By Elisabeth Stewart Assistant News Editor

In its inaugural round of seed grant funding, the Princeton Language and Intelligence Initiative (PLI) awarded $798,000 to 14 different research projects that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs).

In September 2023, PLI launched in response to what director Sanjeev Arora called “revolutionary” progress in AI in the previous five years. To be used by Aug. 31, 2025, the seed grant funding will support the early stages of AI-based research projects across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.

“The seed grants were always part of the conception [of PLI],” Arora

said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “We should be supporting research going on in other disciplines, and people are very hungry to use large AI models in their research.”

LLMs are models that have been trained with a massive amount of textual data in order to perform natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text recognition, translation, and text prediction.

PLI’s executive team evaluated 27 proposals from 20 different departments. Applicants submitted three slides describing their project’s application of large AI models.

“The grant process was really easy, and I very much appreciate that, because in my field, I work on other grants for four or five months that are for far less [money],” Andrea Di-

Giorgio, a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, told the ‘Prince.’

Her seed grant project, “Impacts of Social Media on Wildlife Conservation,” builds off of three of her previous research projects to investigate how social media posts advertising conservationist causes with photos of wildlife “can inadvertently lead to negative outcomes with the public.”

“When people see these images, they want to then study orangutans and they want to then have an orangutan as a pet,” she explained. “We’re trying to find ways to still post and capture public attention, but not do so in a harsh way that inadvertently creates or exacerbates these problems for animals.”

DiGiorgio started her project in 2016, when she individually ana-

lyzed and coded Facebook posts after spending a year researching orangutan populations in Indonesia on the island of Borneo.

“Primatologists are not always the most tech-savvy, and at the time there just wasn’t as much that AI could do,” she said. DiGiorgio and her co-writer at the University of Miami later used MonkeyLearn to process 10,000 posts a month for free, but could not find funds for the technology to process larger amounts of data.

“This grant will let us get back into bigger AI now,” she said. Moving forward, DiGiorgio intends to analyze data from more social media and tourism platforms, consider a greater number of animal species, hire undergraduate and graduate students to assist the project, and present their findings at the American Zoological Association Conference next year.

Likewise, professor of linguistics and computer science Christiane Fellbaum GS ’80 and postdoctoral researcher Happy Buzaaba’s project “Infrastructure for African Languages” has brought together an international team to create “treebanks,” a body of data that annotates a language’s syntactic and morphological information.

“The whole idea of the project is to increase the representation of African languages in natural language processing research,” Buzaaba said.

Fellbaum and Buzaaba hired three native speakers to annotate approximately 1,500 sentences for each of the 11 African languages in the project. Researchers have developed treebanks for well-studied languages, but this project has the potential to “test” the suitability of treebanks for understudied languages.

“And it’s this universal scheme that is supposed to fit all languages. So the question is, will it fit these languages? And if so, linguists are going to be very happy,” Fellbaum said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ However, any “adjustment” to the treebank schema “should be seen positively, because it will tell us more about the richness of human language,” she added.

For their project “Toward Foundation Models in Time Series,” computer science professor H. Vincent Poor, postdoctoral research associate Hao Huang, and Yuqi Nie GS intend to “establish the first open-source comprehensive foundation model specifically tailored for a broad spectrum of time series applications,” according to their proposal.

“Most [important],” Huang said, “is trying to see whether we could make this great artificial intelligence more applicable in our daily life to contribute to a more sustainable world in different areas and domains,” including transportation, energy systems, weather predictions, and finance research.

Huang and Nie told the ‘Prince’ that the PLI grant will offer them a platform to be acknowledged by external funding agencies as the project develops.

“This is fully revolutionary,” Arora said of PLI’s research and outreach on campus. “I’m very thrilled that the University leadership recognized [AI technologies] and reacted quickly and is moving nimbly towards studying, leveraging, and expanding the use of AI campus.”

Elisabeth Stewart is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’

RYAN KONARSKA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

USG President Avi Attar ’25 outlines the agenda for Sunday’s USG meeting.

By the Numbers: First-years shine in week of Ivy League dominance

By Harrison Blank & Andrew Bosworth

Assistant Sports Editor & Head Data

Each week, Sports and Data editors at The Daily Princetonian analyze recent athletic competitions to provide analysis and insight on the happenings of Princeton athletics and individual players across the 38 intercollegiate teams at Princeton. Whether they are record-breaking or dayto-day, statistics deliver information in concise ways and help inform fans who might have missed the action. Read the past two By the Numbers articles about indoor track and field success and recent Ivy League titles.

Princeton Tigers Feb. 15–Feb. 22

Thirty-four games and matches were played across 18 sports and six U.S. states over the past week. Nine of these were track and field meets, swimming and diving meets, and golf matches, which are counted individually for each day of the competition. These were not included in the win percentage analysis as there is no winner of the meet overall, only of individual events.

Of the remaining 25 games, the Tigers won 17, a win percentage of 68 percent. The Tigers won 75 percent of their games when away compared to just 62 percent at home. This is an increase from last week,the Tigers winning 57 percent of their games both home and away. The Tigers won 89 percent of games within the Ivy League.

Tennis testing top thirty

Men’s tennis and women’s tennis each landed high in the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s rankings after wins this past week. Now No. 31 men’s tennis swept the Brown Bears, Yale Bulldogs, and Penn Quakers and were recognized in the rankings accordingly. Victories for No. 30 women’s tennis over the Cornell Big Red and the Brown Bears gave the ladies their own bump in the rankings.

Fabulous five for the first-year

In the No. 9 women’s water polo’s victory over the San Diego State Aztecs on Sunday, first-year utility Olivia Krotts cashed in five times, accounting for over a third of the Tigers’ goals on the day. Krotts is the second Tiger this year to put five shots past the goalie in a game, joining junior utility Kayla Yelensky, who has accomplished that feat twice.

Iron Man mush

Senior guard Matt “Mush” Allocco ’24 has been a permanent fixture on the Jadwin Gymnasium court for the Tigers over their last two games. In victories over the Brown Bears and the Yale Bulldogs, Allocco played all 80 minutes and won Ivy League Player of the Week. Allocco epitomizes the men’s basketball team — a team that ranks last in the nation in bench minutes, refusing to leave the court in the pivotal last games of the season.

Four-tifying their ranking

This week marks the fourth straight week the No. 25th-ranked women’s basketball team is ranked in the AP poll. A close win over the Brown Bears and a drubbing of the Yale Bulldogs solidified the Tigers’ place among the nation’s best.

Frightening fifty-five

Men’s volleyball has faced off against Penn State 64 times since becoming a varsity sport in 1997. The Tigers have emerged victorious only nine times — 14 percent. This past week, men’s volleyball played Penn State twice, losing 1–3 on Feb. 16, and 0–3 on Feb. 17.

Volleyball matches are played in bestof-five sets. Princeton last won a match against Penn State in 2022, winning 3–2 in the EIVA playoffs. Princeton won the EIVA championship two matches later.

Hundred helping hands

This past weekend, women’s hockey superstar senior forward and gold medalist Sarah Fillier netted five goals in two games where the Tigers tied the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Engineers 3–3 and defeated the Union College Garnet Chargers 5–1. Her performance was good enough for ECAC forward of the week.

Fillier is climbing up the women’s hockey assist record books. Fillier recorded her 100th career assist during the win against Union College. She now trails only Katherine Issel ’95, who has 122 career apples (assists), on the all-time list.

First-year firsts

Men’s hockey first-year forwards Michael Young and Carson Buydens each scored their first career goal in the Tigers’ 3–4 loss to the RPI Engineers last Friday night. Young and Buydens had each recorded an assist prior, but now they can say they’ve scored in Baker Rink

Fast and Furious first-years

First-year attacker tandem of Colin Burns and Nate Kabiri each produced hat tricks in both of the No. 11 men’s lacrosse team first two games over the Monmouth Hawks and the Manhattan Jaspers. Kabiri and Burns played together in high school at Georgetown Prep, where they were the third and twentieth ranked recruits in the Class of 2027. They both are chasing the record of 41 set by Tigers lacrosse legend Michael Sowers ’20 for most goals in a season by a first-year.

Twelve non-varsity finishers

On Feb. 18, Princeton’s men’s and women’s varsity teams competed at the Princeton Invitational alongside members of the Princeton Running Club. This was the final meet before the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships on Feb. 24–25.

Former USG vice-presidential candidate and running club member Warren Shepherd ’27 finished third in the men’s 1000 meter run with a time of 2:43.72. No Princeton Track and Field members competed in this event.

Board man gets paid Sophomore forward Caden Pierce continues to secure all the missed shots forced by men’s basketball’s stout defense. His 28.5 percent defensive rebounding rate — total individual defensive rebounds divided by team defensive rebounds plus opponent offensive rebounds — places him eighth nationally, above national player of the year candidates Hunter Dickinson (Kansas) and Zach Edey (Purdue), who are both over seven inches taller than the 6 feet 7 inches Pierce.

All in all, it was an especially successful week for Tiger athletics within the Ivy League. Winter sports approach their respective postseasons, and spring sports kicked off against non-conference opponents. Check back next week to stay updated on all things Princeton athletics — by the numbers. Remember, as Lou Pinella, former coach of the New York Yankees, once said, “Statistics are a lot like bikinis, they show a lot but not everything.”

Andrew Bosworth is a Sports contributor and head Data editor for the ‘Prince.’

Harrison Blank is an assistant editor for the Sports section at the ‘Prince.’

Spring 2024 Networking Career Fair sees increase in non-profit opportunities

By Mary Ma Staff Data Reporter

On Friday, Feb. 23, 99 employers from 17 U.S. states and two countries are scheduled to attend the Spring 2024 Networking Career Fair. Students will have the opportunity to network with representatives from employers such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), MongoDB, and McKinsey & Company.

This fair is one of six that occur during the academic year. The All Ivy Environmental and Sustainability Career Fair is also occurring this Friday at Columbia University, in partnership with all other Ivy League schools.

Employers will be meeting with students in Dillon Gym from 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Similar to previous years, there are many Princeton affiliated employers and New Jersey state departments at the fair this spring. Employers are seeking students of all years for internships and postcollege jobs.

The industry most represented in this career fair is “Non-Profit - Other” with 10 employers. In the fall, the most represented industry was “Investment / Portfolio Man-

agement” with 16 employers, while “NonProfit - Other” had 11 employers. In an email to the ‘Prince,’ Krystyn Kitto, the Senior Associate Director of Employer Engagement at the Center for Career Development, noted the difference between industry and job function, and encouraged students to view employers on Handshake to understand what type of roles they may be looking for.

“For example, New Jersey Transit is a government-owned organization that is hiring cybersecurity, marketing/communications, legal roles and more,” wrote Kitto. “So we encourage students to review the employers and their listings in Handshake to get a complete picture of the wide range of roles these employers are interested in speaking with Princeton students about.”

A dataset provided by the Center for Career Development split companies up into larger sectors. For the first time in the past three career fairs, the “Business, Finance” sector did not make up the majority of employers at the career fair, with most employers this year falling in the “Engineering, Health, Science & Technology” sector.

Similar to previous years, a majority of the employers attending are headquartered in New York and New Jersey. This spring, 38

employers are headquartered in New Jersey and 27 are headquartered in New York. 17 employers are located within the town of Princeton or on University grounds.

The Center for Career Development is also hosting a First Timer Career Fair Tour the morning of the Career fair from 10:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. According to Handshake, students will “learn how to navigate career fairs with confidence and how to approach employers.” Advisers from the Center for Career Development will also be in attendance at the event to help guide students based on their goals.

“For the spring fair, many organizations will be seeking candidates for upcoming internship and job openings, while others will be looking to meet with students to talk about their organization and how they recruit students,” Kitto wrote. “It’s a lowpressure way for students to learn about different opportunities and make connections.”

Mary Ma is Creative Director and staff data reporter for the ‘Prince.’

Head Data Editor Andrew Bosworth contributed reporting.

Hum r

Fire Safety conducts blindfolded inspections to avoid disturbing unclothed students

By Michael Hwang Staff Humor Writer

The following content is purely satirical and entirely fictional.

Students reported being suddenly awakened at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, as Fire Safety recommenced dorm room inspections, though in a new and improved format.

Lynn Jerée ’25 recalled hearing inspectors declare their presence, bellowing “Fire safety inspection. May I come in?” Three seconds later, according to Jerée, Fire Safety barged into his room. He groggily attempted to cover himself with a blanket, but it was too late. They had already seen everything.

This has happened to too many of us. Thankfully, University Housing has recently implemented a program to eliminate the embarrassment of being caught half-naked during a fire inspection. Fire Safety will be patrolling the hallways of student dormitories blindfolded and performing inspections by touch in the hopes that students will be comforted by the fact that they will not be seen naked.

“We recognize that fire safety inspections may be invasive at times, so we wanted to ensure that

we’re not making any students feel uncomfortable,” said Housing Inspector Hugh Jass. When asked to demonstrate what a blindfolded fire inspection might look like, Jass proceeded to stumble around the room, feeling for candle shapedobjects.

Upon encountering an electrical wire, Jass slowly slid his hands up and down its length, feeling around for a surge protector. Displaying the thoroughness of a true

professional, Jass patted down everyone in the room, ensuring that they weren’t hiding any concealed “heat-producing appliances.” Licking his lips, he proudly declared the room was compliant with regulations and ran into the doorframe twice before finally finding the exit.

Despite Housing’s best efforts, it seems that this change is still insufficient in remediating tensions with students who have been

seen naked by inspectors. Many students have already stuck pins into their furniture in preparation for the next round of sightless fire inspections, and Jerée even plans on leaving live wires around his room.

Michael Hwang ’25 is a staff Humor writer and can be reached at myhwang@princeton.edu. Fire safety lasts a lifetime.

Forbes vs. the Elements

JEAN SHIN / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN A hallway in Yeh College.

By Austria Merritt Staff Cartoonist

“C rossroads ”

By Juliet Corless Senior Constructor

1 Charging device 6 Mythical ship guarded by Hera

10 18 and 21 are milestone ones 14 Iridescent gems

15 Neighbor of Bolivia 16 Pat on the back 17 “Akeelah and the Bee” actress [Square]

19 2015 Twenty One Pilots hit

20 “The very ___!”

21 Soccer's Hamm

22 Yammerer's sentence type

23 Soon-to-be NFL player, maybe [Avenue]

27 Rom-___

28 “Get ___ here!” 29 Happen

32 Famous ___ cookies

34 A DFMO, maybe 37 Arrowhead or MetLife [Drive]

41 Chain email abbr.

42 Castle protector

43 Sire

44 Farm letters?

47 Lovers mo.

48 Power of the mind [Road]

53 Broadcasting 54 Letters in the sand, maybe 55 White lies

58 Sub directors?

59 Five-man band “___ Boys,” or a hint to 17-, 23-, 37-, and 48-Across

62 Just makes, with out 63 Clog or pump

64 Change, in math 65 ___ soup

66 “___, shoots, and leaves”

67 S.U.V. alternative DOWN 1 Norse trickster 2 Mimicked 3 On a streak? 4 Plain as day 5 Medium talent 6 H.S. English class, for short 7 Plot again

8 Future Ph.D.’s test 9 Taylor Swift's “___ Song” 10 Sudden 11 Test subject 12 Urgent care pro 13 Exhausted 18 Radio toggle 22 Alphabet trio 24 Question asked at the eye doctor, maybe 25 Sleeping spot

Boot 29 Not working today 30 Intimidate 31 Card game with a spymaster 32 Standoffish 33 Citation style: Abbr.

35 See 36-Down 36 With 35-Down, fig. on a credit card statement 38 “Thanks ___!” 39 Cain’s brother 40 Owing nothing

“Indeed”

The Minis

By Allie Zhao Senior Constructor

46 It has a hammer and an anvil 47 Ado

48 Hookup need?

49 Mushroom in 65-Across

50 Fred’s neckwear on “Scooby-Doo” 51 Alternatives to Pepsis

52 Triangular traffic sign

56 Alpha follower

57 ___ Lee, longtime head of Marvel Comics

59 A.B. alternative

60 “I see now!”

61 QB’s stat

What recent defenses of legacy admissions get wrong

Anais Mobarak Columnist

As Princeton students, we are lucky that our education affords us endless opportunities. According to a recent study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, the chance of reaching the top 1 percent of the income distribution is boosted by 60 percent for graduates of Ivy League schools and peer private institutions when compared to selective public colleges. The same study also finds that the chances of attending a prestigious graduate school or working at a prestigious firm are doubled and tripled, respectively, for graduates of these schools.

In addition to these impressive outcomes, Princeton alumni are also entitled to the privilege of their children receiving a boost in the admissions process.

If already-privileged Princeton graduates are granted another benefit — one that helps their children secure a spot at a potentially life-changing institution that for many could be an engine of upward mobility — there must be a good reason. Recently, The Daily Princetonian has published two arguments for legacy admissions that highlight legacy students promoting institutional change and intergenerational culture. But some legacy students will be admitted to Princeton even without a boost, and these benefits can be realized through other means. These are insuffi-

cient reasons for preserving preferential admissions for legacy applicants.

Before diving into the specific arguments, it is important to establish the existence of a legacy “boost.”

Chetty’s study quantified that for Ivy League institutions and their counterparts, legacy applicants, when applying to the school at which they have legacy status, have an acceptance rate four times that of non-legacy students with similar test scores, but their acceptance rate is only slightly higher for other colleges. This suggests that the legacy preference is real and sizable, for if all legacy applicants were objectively more qualified, there likely would not be such a stark difference in acceptance rates depending on whether or not their application is read by the admissions committee of the school that their parents attended.

In defense of this policy, columnist Ava Johnson writes that, especially as the alumni pool diversifies, upholding legacy admissions is important because legacy students have “greater initial insight into how the school should change in the future” and “the ability to see and illuminate the path towards that change.” But this argument assumes that the cultural change driven by legacy students is inherently progressive and forward-looking. Whereas Johnson examines specifically what it means to be a legacy student who is also an underrepre-

sented minority, left unexamined is what it means to be a legacy student who does not come from the same background. Many different stories could be told about Princeton to future students: perhaps fathers from the Class of 1990 tell their boys about how wonderful it was to be in the formerly all-male Ivy Club, leading their future legacy students to desire to change Princeton by returning gender-exclusion to eating clubs.

Moreover, there are countless other ways to inspire studentdriven change without preferential legacy admissions. For example, the Princeton University Library works on initiatives, such as “Archiving Student Activism at Princeton Collection” with the purpose of enabling students to get involved in activism by preserving organizations’ records, preventing “gaps in institutional memory” and sustaining activist projects.

Another defense of legacy admissions comes from columnist Sarah Park, who argues that legacy admissions is valuable because it fosters “the intergenerational community Princeton values so strongly.” But this is a subjective opinion: there is no reason why legacy students are uniquely important to upholding the intergenerational Princeton community that extends beyond our time as undergraduates. Connections are built in many ways, such as through membership of a student organization or eating club.

Even beyond smaller communi-

ties within Princeton, simply having attended the same school can forge a powerful intergenerational bond. Princeton is known to have a particularly strong alumni network that extends worldwide — a connection extended to both legacy and non-legacy students. After all, who among us hasn’t bumped into someone in a Princeton sweatshirt and started up a long conversation?

Preferential legacy admissions may be one of many mechanisms for promoting an intergenerational culture — shared group membership and experiences, for example, may contribute as well. Indeed, attendance at Princeton reunions, a quasi-proxy for the strength of the intergenerational community, is notably high even compared to our peer institutions like Yale and Dartmouth that also employ preferential legacy admissions, indicating that legacy admissions alone cannot be responsible for fostering an intergenerational culture.

Overall, Johnson and Park justify preferential legacy admissions by focusing on the unique ways in which legacy students contribute to university communities. But even if these were truly unique contributions, their arguments confuse a world without preferential legacy admissions for a world in which no legacy students are accepted. If legacy students were no longer given a boost because their parents attended Princeton, it is incredibly unlikely that legacies would cease to be ac-

cepted. This is because benefits awarded to Princeton alumni can trickle down to their children — perhaps a Princeton graduate’s high-paying job could finance elite private schools, or help their child get an internship in the lab of their freshman-year roommate. As such, the children of alumni are probably already poised to submit strong college applications. Indeed, Chetty’s study concludes that without legacy preferences, legacy students would still have slightly higher acceptance rates because of their “favorable observable characteristics,” such as academic achievements, compared to applicants with similar test scores. Thus, ending legacy admissions would still leave room for legacy students to pave the way for change, as Johnson highlights, and an intergenerational community, as Park emphasizes. Legacy students will be able to contribute to Princeton’s community regardless of whether a preferential admissions system is in place because many will be accepted without a boost. A robust argument for preferential treatment of legacy students should indicate why the extra legacy students admitted under a system of legacy admissions are uniquely important — not just why legacy students overall are important for our institution.

Anais Mobarak is a junior from Newton, Mass. studying chemistry. She can be reached at am7880@princeton.edu.

Letter to the Editor: Faculty on unionization at Labyrinth Books

The following is a Letter to the Editor and reflects the authors’ views alone.

Labyrinth Books, among its many connections to Princeton, convenes a faculty advisory committee that meets once a semester to give advice on store policies in the changing context of the University’s curricular needs. The unionization of employees at Labyrinth is a decision that we as members of that committee greet warmly, expecting that it will only strengthen an institution that is both so vital to the Princeton community and so beloved. Furthermore, knowing the actors involved, we have every reason to hope that a successful agreement can be reached in a mutually respectful manner.

The advisory committee does not exercise any formal oversight over Labyrinth’s operations, and we speak here as individuals rather than on behalf of the committee. But our positions do afford us perspective on some recent criticisms of Labyrinth’s management aired in the ‘Prince’s’ coverage, which we want to address in the hopes that clarification will strengthen the foundation for successful bargaining.

Organizers have expressed con-

cern that the store has been deliberately reducing the number of staff eligible to participate in collective bargaining. A full view shows that staffing levels have been at consistent levels since the pandemic, despite a more than 50 percent decrease in course book sales since 2019. In the past four years, there have been between 17 and 21 full and part-time employees at the end of the spring course book rush, and there are 19 now. The spring is ordinarily the quietest time of year at the store, and though we cannot speak to the current workload, current staffing numbers are consistent with those of previous years.

If there were any indication that Labyrinth is attempting to “shrink the bargaining unit” to diminish workers’ power in negotiations, we would be gravely concerned. But, having been involved with the store for many years, we do not see evidence that this is happening. No one from the bargaining unit to which the union has agreed has been let go, and the only eligible employees who have left Labyrinth resigned. Any changes in staffing size are in keeping with the store’s past practices. We are not in a position to speak to all of the concerns voiced in the organizers’ Feb. 13 letter, but we found it important to address those of which we have some useful knowledge. We support Labyrinth employees’ desire to unionize and Labyrinth’s recogni-

tion of the union, and we have every reason to believe that the management of the store is prepared to work hard to arrive at a fair agreement. Labyrinth is a great institution because every time anyone walks in, they are greeted by people who are helpful, knowledgeable, and dedicated to books. We are grateful to everyone at the store, and we hope to see Labyrinth flourish in its indis-

pensable role as a campus and town center for critical and imaginative thinking, talking, and reading — a great place to visit and a great place to work.

Jeff Dolven is a professor in the Department of English. He can be reached at jdolven@princeton.edu. Andrea Graham is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She

can be reached at algraham@princeton. edu. Brian Kernighan is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. He can be reached at bwk@princeton.edu. Eldar Shafir is a professor in the Departments of Psychology and SPIA. He can be reached at shafir@princeton.edu. They all serve on the faculty advisory committee for Labyrinth Books.

Andrea Graham, Brian Kernighan, Jeff Dolven & Eldar Shafir Guest Contributors

editor-in-chief

Eden Teshome '25

president

business manager Aidan Phillips ’25

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

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

Danielle Ivory ’05

Rick Klein ’98

James T. MacGregor ’66

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Abigail Williams ’14 Tyler Woulfe ’07

trustees ex officio Eden Teshome ’25

Aidan Phillips ’25

148TH MANAGING BOARD

Ryan Konarska ’25

Naisha Sylvestre ’25

director of outreach

Lia Opperman ’25

Accessibility

Christopher Bao ’27

Education Charlie Roth ’25

Tess Weinreich ’25

Lucia Wetherill ’25

creative director Mary Ma ’26

Stipend

Elaine Huang ’25

Sections listed in alphabetical order. public editor Abigail Rabieh ’25

head archives editor

Raphaela Gold ’26

Kaylee Kasper ’26

Associate Archives editor

Elizabeth Clarke ’27

head audience editor

Paige Walworth ’26

associate audience editors

Zach Lee ’26

Amparo Sanchez ’27

head copy editors

Nathan Beck ’25

Bryan Zhang ’26

associate head copy editors

Lindsay Padaguan ’26

Elizabeth Polubinski ’25

head data editors

Andrew Bosworth ’26

Suthi Navaratnam-Tomayko ’26

head features editors

Sejal Goud ’25

Molly Taylor ’25

associate features editor

Raphaela Gold ’26

head graphics editors

Luiza Chevres ’26

Noreen Hosny ’25

head humor editors

Spencer Bauman ’25

Sophia Varughese ’26

associate humor editors

Sam McComb ’25

Mya Koffie ’27

head news editors

Bridget O’Neill ’26

Annie Rupertus ’25

associate news editors

Julian Hartman-Sigall ’26

Olivia Sanchez ’26

Miriam Waldvogel ’26 (Investigations)

head newsletter editor

Kia Ghods ’27

associate newsletter editors Victoria Davies ’27 Sunney Gao ’27

head opinion editor Eleanor Clemans-Cope ’26

community opinion editor Christofer Robles ’25

associate opinion editors Thomas Buckley ’26

Wynne Conger ’27

head photo editors Louisa Gheorghita ’26 Jean Shin ’26

associate photo editor Calvin Grover ’27

head podcast editor Vitus Larrieu ’26

associate podcast editors Senna Aldoubosh ’25

Theo Wells-Spackman ’25

head print design editors Avi Chesler ’25

Malia Gaviola ’26

head prospect editor

Isabella Dail ’26

associate prospect editors Russell Fan ’26

Regina Roberts ’26

head puzzles editors Sabrina Effron ’26

Joah Macosko ’25

associate puzzles editors Wade Bednar ’26

Lindsay McBride ’27

head sports editors Cole Keller ’26

Diego Uribe ’26

associate sports editors Tate Hutchins ’27

Hayk Yengibaryan ’26

head web design and development

editors

Yacoub Kahkajian ’26

Vasila Mirshamsova ’26

148TH BUSINESS BOARD

assistant business manager

Jessica Funk ’26

business directors

Gabriel Gullett ’25

Andrew He ’26

Tejas Iyer ’26

Jordan Manela ’26

chief technology officer Roma Bhattacharjee ’25

Sanh Nguyen ’26

software engineers

Anika Agarwal ’25 Carter Costic ’26

Jessica Dong ’25

“These deaths are preventable, and the University leadership has a duty to act.”

ZERO

Continued from page 1

proving the inspiring reality that at a committed, effective organization, suicide is preventable. Individual support, from a loving friend or parent, is not enough to reach zero suicides — this is a challenge that must be taken on by organizations. Princeton can be that organization.

The “Zero Suicide Approach” is effective at dramatically reducing suicide rates, although its implementation has so far focused on clinical settings. In implementing these evidence-based practices, a mental health center in Maine decreased suicide deaths by 60 percent, a New Hampshire mental health center decreased suicide deaths by 44 percent, and the Betty Hardwick Center for mental health in Texas got to zero, among many other success stories. Although these are mental health institutions with many high-risk patients, this approach is applicable to Princeton: We have the need for it, and we have the resources to screen, identify, and support every student that needs help. We can bring the Zero Suicide approach to the world of residential communities. This approach is not just a possibility but a necessity for the University.

So how do we achieve this?

Right from the start, the leadership of Princeton University — administration, faculty, USG, CPS — must fully embrace the Zero Suicide core value: “the belief and commitment that suicide can be eliminated” on our campus. This leadership piece is by far the hardest part. That’s why, at the beginning of this school year, I called for President Eisgruber to step up or step aside. This is still his burden. We must demand better. What we need now is new leadership.

And with that new leadership, we need to appoint a “Zero Czar.” The idea of appointing a czar to address a mental health crisis is not new, but a Zero Czar would be new for universities. This person, a top administrator with a singular focus

on preventing student suicide, must have the trust and confidence of the student body and access to as much money as they need to achieve the goal — don’t worry, the University can afford it.

Eisgruber’s misguided remarks give the false impression that a comprehensive strategy is already in place, but this is far from the reality. The Zero Czar has plenty to work on. The Zero Suicide approach has a few core strategies, with many components that Princeton hasn’t tried and none at the scale and depth that is necessary.

First is comprehensive suicide prevention that reaches every student. This would require an enormous and game-changing investment in evidence-based clinical care. We would start with a simple two question universal annual screening with follow-up questions for those with a positive screen. The continuum of care must reach a huge expansion of free, high-quality, immediate, evidence-based, unlimited clinical care at McCosh with supports as small or as intensive as students need — a departure from now, where some Princeton students are not able to access basic mental health care. Treatment must be provided with the “no wrong door” attitude — anything that a student does to indicate that they want or need care should be enough to get them immediate access to free, high-quality care.

The continuum of care for suicide prevention also encompasses state-of-the-art suicide postvention to support those at heightened risk after an event. As part of an effort to continuously improve, the University should also conduct a confidential internal review of every death on campus to examine the context and delivery of care in order to identify specific areas for improvement, similar to the CDC’s Maternal Mortality Review Committees (MMRCs).

From these reviews, the University needs to update its lethal means safety — “making a suicide attempt method less available or more difficult to access immediately” — after

every event. Although the University has already put a number of precautions in place, they can do better. The window of time between contemplating suicide and taking action can be alarmingly narrow — often less than ten minutes — and contrary to the common belief that individuals determined to end their lives will simply find another means if their preferred method is unavailable, evidence strongly suggests otherwise.

Another important strategy is an extreme culture shift towards viewing suicide prevention as a collective responsibility of our campus. To support this, leadership must put in place new evidence-based community structures to promote a radical increase in connectedness and belonging. The practical implications mean not just further supporting student social activities, but also recognizing the crucial role every campus employee plays in fostering student connections with every community member— every interaction has the potential to enhance students’ sense of belonging. When a student feels disconnected, encouraging interactions with instructors and graduate students can fill crucial gaps. This means all campus relationships are critical components of a comprehensive strategy to nurture a supportive and interconnected campus community.

The Princeton community must abandon the insidious idea that suicides are inevitable. These deaths are preventable, and the University leadership has a duty to act. This is not just an aspiration, but an achievable goal. By adopting an informed strategy, Princeton will be a model of a safer, more supportive academic community. We can and should demand this from our University.

Eleanor Clemans-Cope (she/her) is a sophomore from Rockville, Md. intending to study economics. She spends her time making music with Princeton University Orchestra and the Triangle Club and good trouble with Sunrise Princeton.

Robert Mohan ’26 Kok Wei Pua ’25 My Ky Tran ’26

project managers Jason Ding ’25 Kaustuv Mukherjee ’26

Vishva Ilavelan ’27 Austin Li ’26 Allen Liu

’26

Princeton should lengthen the semester to reduce burnout

Julianna Lee Staff Columnist

The fast pace of campus life is nothing new to Princetonians. Even as a junior, I can attest that my first week of classes was spent scrambling to sort my schedule out. During my second week, I spent hours at my eating club engaged in Bicker discussions that lasted well into the early morning. While my third week should have ideally been spent recharging, I was completely occupied with catching up on work and other commitments. Then, boom: before I had even realized it, a quarter of the semester had already passed. To help relieve the burden of this packed semester, Princeton should lengthen its academic calendar by two weeks to match those at peer institutions.

Princeton’s semesters are notoriously short. Princeton will begin its 2024–2025 academic year on Sept. 2, 2024, and the last official day of classes is on Dec. 5, 2024. The following two weeks are then devoted to Reading Period and final exams. The spring semester begins on Jan. 27, 2025 and ends on Apr. 26, 2025.

Conversely, Yale’s fall semester will begin on Aug. 28, and their fall term classes will end on Dec. 6, making their semester almost a week longer than Princeton’s. Likewise, their spring semester is two weeks longer, beginning on Jan. 13 and ending on Apr. 25. Similarly, at the University of Pennsylvania, the fall semester will begin on Aug. 27, and their reading period will not begin until Dec. 10. Their spring semester will begin on Jan. 15 and end on Apr. 30. Yale and Penn aren’t outliers; the average U.S. semester is

Letter

15–17 weeks long, significantly longer than Princeton’s 12 weeks plus exam period.

The consequences of these shorter semesters are clear — after four years of Princeton, burnout is not uncommon. I remember a friend telling me last year as he was graduating, “I feel bad for you guys. I’m on my way out of Egypt, and you’re here for two more years.” He added, “This life is unsustainable. We can only do this for four years, and not more.”

But how is it possible to only do this for four years? If learning, pursuing our interests, and spending time with friends are inherently fulfilling endeavors, we should be able to continue forever. The mere fact that many of my senior friends are eager to graduate, and that many others have chosen to take time off their sophomore and junior years, are testaments to burnout from Princeton’s unrealistic standards.

The experience of needing to balance many commitments is not unique to Princeton – many other institutions maintain high standards of rigor. Princeton students, however, are under an additional layer of stress because of the rushed semester. Many students often feel as if they have no time to rest and are constantly rushing towards the next break. Maintaining one’s relationships and one’s well-being while taking advantage of opportunities at Princeton should not feel like a chore.

By starting semesters earlier (the last few weeks of August in the fall and the middle of January in the spring) Princeton can take steps towards reducing burnout. Student academic performance may im-

prove with a lengthened semester. Research has shown that spacing out study sessions over a longer period of time benefits long term memory. A process known as “forgetting and retrieval” illustrates that people tend to forget what they learned the first time around, and it is the reinforcement at a later point that jogs the memory. As almost any Princetonian can attest, cramming before an exam does not facilitate retention. Yet, Princeton’s twelve week semesters can often feel like one big intensive cramming session. Just as it is a good practice to space out study sessions, it may also be a smart decision to extend

the semesters, with shorter breaks in between the fall and the spring. Shorter semesters may permit longer breaks, but many students often take this time to work. By shortening winter break by two weeks, Princeton can encourage students to actually rest rather than feeling pressured to fill those weeks with more things to do. Having done a virtual Princeternship the winter of my freshman year, I would rather have spent that time recuperating than taking on more work. Many of my fellow Princeterns have expressed the same feelings. Princeton, and most other universities, have a long summer break precisely

for this purpose, to allow students to pursue internships, jobs, and travel. Students need winter break as a time of rest. It doesn’t make sense for the semester to be so intensive, especially when there is a clear solution to lighten the intensity: extending the semester. Princeton should opt for a fourteen week semester like most other universities to alleviate student burnout. Slow and steady is better than all or nothing.

Julianna Lee is a junior from Demarest, NJ, majoring in Politics. Julianna is a big fan of road trips and has been to 43 states.

to the Editor: Mpala Research Centre is committed to inclusive, strategic vision for the future

The following is a letter to the editor and reflects the author’s views alone.

The Daily Princetonian’s Nov. 27 article “At Princeton’s Mpala Research Center, researchers grapple with a colonial legacy” adds to ongoing conversations about the past and the future of the Mpala Research Centre. As members of Mpala’s

board, we would like to add to these conversations from our perspective.

One cannot deny the impact of colonialism on Mpala and on every other institution in Kenya. We acknowledge this painful history and we seek to create a more inclusive and sustainable future. There is important work currently underway to position Mpala as a catalyst for high-impact research on the most relevant environmental, sustainability, and human development issues of our time.

As the article states, Mpala is a

Kenyan-American partnership. In addition to Princeton University, the founding member institutions are the Kenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, and the Smithsonian Institution. Recently, the Wildlife Research Training Institute of Kenya joined as a fifth partner. Day-to-day management and operations of the Centre are led by Kenyan staff on-site. In 2023, Princeton was one of 65 institutions active at Mpala — 25 of these were African institutions.

Mpala is finalizing its inaugural strategic plan, which lays out a vision that will significantly change the organization’s structure, operations, facilities, and culture. The plan is anchored by three goals that are vital to fostering further improvement and change: purpose, people, and place.

To advance inquiry into some of society’s most important questions, Mpala will continue to enable and disseminate research with realworld relevance and will do so with a greater emphasis on locally relevant research. The Centre will increase engagement with policymakers and will continue to expand its research beyond the natural sciences to include social sciences, engineering, and the humanities.

Further, to assemble one of the world’s most diverse and inclusive

research communities, Mpala will continue increasing the involvement of Kenyan and African scholars, at all career stages, to participate in research and teaching at the Centre.

Lastly, to ensure that Mpala’s resources are stewarded in perpetuity for the people of Kenya and the world, the Centre will pursue new opportunities for financial, operational, and environmental sustainability.

Many of the initiatives outlined in the strategic plan are already underway, including an allocation from Princeton to construct 112 units of new staff housing and a solar field to generate clean energy. These initiatives are a precursor to Mpala’s first campus master plan, which will include infrastructure investments in laboratories, classrooms, information technology, roads, and dams. A number of these improvements are in progress.

Mpala is deeply committed to diversifying the population of researchers based at the Centre and will provide additional resources to support this goal. In addition to existing financial aid and subsidies for students and scholars from East Africa, last year Mpala raised graduate fellowship funds to fully support two Kenyan master’s degree students. This winter, we raised funds

to support an additional two students. While this is a modest start, we plan to raise a multi-million dollar endowment to support Kenyan and African students and scholars to undertake research at Mpala.

Mpala is also in the midst of expanding its professional staff. In the last two years, Mpala has increased staff capacity through several new roles including a chief research officer, chief financial officer, infrastructure manager, and community outreach officer. Dr. Winnie Kiiru, a widely admired wildlife biologist and advocate for people-centered conservation, became Mpala’s fourth executive director in February 2023.

Our strategic planning process has made it clear that there are incredible opportunities ahead for the students, researchers, scholars, and staff affiliated with Mpala. We look forward to collaborating with our community in Kenya, the United States, and across the world to continue to move forward together in the years and decades to come.

Aly Kassam-Remtulla and Kitili Mbathi write on behalf of the Mpala Research Centre Board of Trustees. Kassam-Remtulla is a Trustee and Chair of the Board. Mbathi is a Trustee and Chair of the Finance Committee of the Mpala Research Centre.

JULIAN GOTTFRIED / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Labyrinth Books, the University-affiliated bookstore on Nassau St.

Fayyad: “This is how much I care about independent thought... No Israel-Palestine for me.”

FAYYAD

Continued from page 1

classes specifically on Israel or Palestine at Princeton. Instead, he’s taught graduate courses on Afghanistan and the Arab Spring. His undergraduate class, SPI322: Public Policy Issues in Today’s Middle East, focuses on public policy, capacity building, and economic development issues in the Middle East, with some focus on Arab states.

“This is how much I care about independent thought,” Fayyad told the ‘Prince.’ “No Israel-Palestine for me.”

“He was very upfront about the fact that it was not a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on Palestinian affairs,” Jake Brzowsky ’21 said, who took Fayyad’s class in the spring of 2019. Brzowsky was Fayyad’s only undergraduate thesis advisee and served as student board president of the Center for Jewish Life during his time at Princeton.

“He was extremely accessible,” Brzowsky recalled. “He was always available to discuss whatever was on your mind or his mind or regardless of whether it was directly connected to the course content or the thesis topic.”

But for all his sincere focus on campus, Fayyad coming to Princeton was not originally in the cards. In 2017, he was tapped to serve as the United Nations special envoy to Libya. In an abrupt decision, Trump administration officials blocked the appointment — a move meant to bolster support with Israel.

Upon hearing this news, Kurtzer said, “It took about 15 seconds for me to pick up the phone and to call him and to ask whether or not he would want to come to Princeton, if the University was prepared to bring him on.”

Kurtzer had known Fayyad since 2002, when he was the United States ambassador to Israel and Fayyad was finance minister of the Palestinian Authority. The second intifada was near its peak, and the authority was strapped for cash due to the economic downturn and Israel’s withholding of tax revenues it normally collected for the Palestinian governing body.

Kurtzer recalled inviting Fayyad and a senior Israeli official over to his residence for lunch, a move that inaugurated “a couple months” of negotiations between the two sides. It was eventually agreed that the Palestinians would receive the tax revenue, but that an international auditor, paid for by the United States, would supervise its disbursement.

“It was so important that the agreement was based on trust,” Kurtzer said. “But when the two sides reached an agreement, they let [the U.S.] know that they no longer needed the international auditor because trust had been built up to a point where Israel was ready to start releasing the funds and was sure that Fayyad would disperse them properly.”

Fayyad’s voice on Palestine

has remained sought-after internationally, especially after Oct. 7. He has written in Foreign Affairs about “day after” political plans for peace in Gaza, appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show on the future of Palestinian leadership, and spoke on the Ezra Klein Show about his statebuilding agenda.

Fayyad’s writings “haven’t just been academic pieces,” Udi Ofer said, an Israeli-American professor in SPIA who occasionally chats with Fayyad over coffee (Fayyad usually orders a black Americano, according to Ofer). “They have framed the way the State Department is thinking about these issues, the way thinkers and other academics are thinking about these issues.”

In January, Fayyad was even floated by several news outlets, including the New York Times, as a potential replacement for Abbas. However, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that he had not been approached about a potential Palestinian leadership role. Fayyad also recently told the Middle East-focused news site AlMonitor that he is not involved in official “day after” discussions.

In the meantime, Fayyad has “thrown himself into Princeton life,” Kurtzer said. Fayyad lives in town and takes long walks around campus most mornings, “even if it’s sub-freezing,” he said.

In many ways, Fayyad seems truly compelled by Princeton and its student life — how they group together, how they learn, and what they talk about.

“I’m fascinated by how institutions function and how wedded to the status quo people become sometimes. That, in many ways, inhibits progress,” Fayyad said.

He generally observed that “students are happy here,” he said. “It was something that stands out. I haven’t changed my mind on it.”

“There’s something about the way the program is designed and the manner in which students are treated,” he added. “Students are made to feel the place is for them and about them.”

But Fayyad also expressed frustration with a perceived insularity among students centered around identity, especially in relation to controversial issues.

“People have a natural tendency to congregate around identity. There’s nothing wrong about that,” he said. “But if you do only that, that limits the scope for your intellectual, social, cultural development.”

“It could also sow the seeds of division, polarization,” Fayyad added, arguing that controversy sometimes develops from “people kind of taking positions that are more related to their identity than anything else.”

In order to foster discourse, Fayyad argued that University professors and administrators should maintain a fairly strict level of neutrality. He gave his own decision not to teach about Israel and Palestine as an example.

“I don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to teach my own experience,” Fayyad said. “Give the nature of leadership structures

to [students], they begin to see things a little bit the way I tell the story, and that’s not very healthy.”

In the same vein, Fayyad expressed concern about University administrators issuing statements on broad issues outside campus.

“Why should there be the expectation that the University president issue a statement on a world issue, a crisis?” he asked, adding, “When it’s not something you do for a living every day, you begin to wonder, why are we doing this?”

Among University administration, the most prominent voice on the conflict has been President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, who issued a short statement on Oct. 10, condemning Hamas’ attacks on Israel. In January, he addressed the conflict and its ramifications on campus in his State of the University letter, later drawing condemnation from some pro-Palestinian student activists for not commenting on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

At a recent meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Committee, Eisgruber said Oct. 7 was “of the special historical significance and cruelty and I think that that warranted a statement of a rare kind.”

Fayyad said instead that University officials should be making efforts to reach out and converse with students in smaller settings.

“I’m talking about having lunch,” he said. “It’s amazing how much you will discover you can accomplish if you do things this way, as opposed to directive this, directive that, directive the other thing.”

While he doesn’t teach classes directly focused on the conflict, Fayyad himself has been a frequent guest speaker at University events on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East over the years, including a panel with Kurtzer in the days after Oct. 7.

“That’s one way in which you can make students feel the place is about them,” Fayyad said about panels and speaker events.

Fayyad also stressed the importance of civil conversations.

“[There’s] nothing wrong with being passionate about things. For heaven’s sake, I am,” Fayyad said. “But there needs to be civility.”

And compared to many of its peer institutions, the broad sweep of Princeton’s discourse seems to have been far milder, especially in the first weeks after Oct. 7. During that period, which included fall break, conversation on campus largely focused on vigils and mourning the dead and displaced, including events hosted by the Center for Jewish Life (CJL), Princeton Chabad, the Alliance of Jewish Progressives (AJP), and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

“On the whole, if you ask me, most certainly by comparison to what I saw and read about happening elsewhere, this is as orderly as it could have been,” Fayyad said, referring to Princeton’s climate.

At other campuses, the political climate was far more contentious during that period. Columbia closed its campus to the public on Oct. 12 in response to competing pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protests. At Harvard, students who were allegedly affiliated with a controversial statement that called Israel “entirely responsible” for the violence had their names and faces displayed on a billboard truck that drove through campus; some later had social media profiles and hometown information published online.

Since then, Princeton has seen a number of protests in support of Palestine (typically greeted by smaller counter-protests in support of Israel), with the earliest drawing hundreds of attendees. As of late, protests have shrunk down to within a hundred. Princeton’s protests have largely gone on without major disruptions — unlike at Columbia University, for example, where students attending a pro-Palestine protest in January were allegedly sprayed with a hazardous chemical.

At the recent meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Committee, pro-Palestinian student organizers protested Eisgruber’s comments on a petition to divest the University’s endowment from certain companies as-

sociated with Israel. But they did so silently, holding up signs with a green thumbs up or red thumbs down in response to his answers to student questions.

In contrast, last weekend at Stanford, pro-Palestinian student protestors disrupted a Family Weekend welcome session, interrupting the president and provost with chants like “Palestinian blood is on your hands.” Elsewhere, students have staged hunger strikes and organized sitins to demand their institutions act in support of Palestine.

However, “orderly does not mean not passionate, does not mean not vibrant, does not mean being introverted. It means exactly the opposite, but done in an orderly way,” Fayyad noted.

Of course, all this discourse isn’t just for the sake of discourse. “With this dialogue, I think you can really achieve enormous progress and cut the distance between you and the students,” Fayyad said.

The students — that was what Fayyad kept coming back to. Not himself, not administrators, not the wider conflict, but the students.

“He’s so humble,” Ofer said. He recalled hosting a documentary screening on campus about Fayyad’s work on Palestinian statehood as prime minister and inviting Fayyad to a question-and-answer session afterward. “[Fayyad] was like, ‘Sure, if you want to, but you know, why would people want to watch a documentary about me?’” Fayyad is not prime minister anymore. He’s on campus, and that’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Fewer speeches, more conversations. Fewer speeches, more conversations,” he repeated.

“How about that for a slogan?”

Miriam Waldvogel is an associate News editor for the ‘Prince.’

CALVIN GROVER / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Fayyad in his office.

‘We Can Fix Princeton’: Inside TIGER, the University’s new geoexchange facility

By Raphaela Gold Associate Features Editor

When I toured the West Energy Plant last year, Energy Plant Manager Ted Borer promised that he’d show me the new energy plant when it was complete. Borer stayed true to his word, and just over a year later, I found myself striding past Prospect St. and down Broadmead St. on a chilly February afternoon to see the building for the first time.

After greeting me at the door, which was surrounded by wood paneling and emblazoned with the name “T.I.G.E.R.” in bold white lettering, Borer and his colleague Saurabhi Mishra led me down a hallway to a bright conference room. Borer noted that this room was a space specifically meant for conversations like ours.

For the first time in history, Princeton is producing a portion of its energy more efficiently than before and sometimes without the combustion of natural gas. This feat is made possible with the help of pipes 70 stories deep, two thermal energy storage tanks that can hold around 4.5 Olympic-sized swim -

ming pools each, and TIGER, the affectionately dubbed and recently constructed Thermally Integrated Geo-Exchange Resource building.

“I can’t tell you how many times already people have come for talks and presentations,” he said.

According to Borer, some U.S. government agencies have already expressed interest in visiting the plant, and this past January, Princeton’s campus caught the attention of the New York Times.

Entering the building, we took our seats at either end of a long table as Borer allowed me to question him for over an hour about what had changed since our interview last year. As it turned out, there were many developments to catch up on.

Over the past year, the team has continued to install geo-exchange bores across campus, under East Garage, Hobson College, Meadows Softball Field, Poe Field, Roberts Stadium, and Whitman Lawn. The bores are about six inches in diameter and 850 feet deep.

“That’s equivalent to a 70 story building,” said Borer, comparing the length to 30 Rockefeller Center in New York. “It’s just a really deep hole.”

Each hole houses HDPE vertical piping which doubles back on itself at the bottom to create two parallel pipes. These act as the arteries of the geo-exchange circulatory system. So far, about 1000 bores have been installed. By 2033, Borer expects that they will total 2000.

Through these bores flows water which circulates through larger pipes in the TIGER facility. We would take a closer look at these pipes later in the tour, but first, Borer took me into the control room and introduced me to Dave Sousa, the plant operator.

Sousa was watching the temperature cursors on a screen to maintain the proper levels of cold and hot water. He explained the information he was seeing on the screen in real time. “He’s thinking about reliability … making sure students get what they need,” explained Borer.

The system operates as a thermal piggy bank. In the summer, the system draws heat from buildings into water, which is sent underground through piping to gradually warm subterranean rock. When the weather gets cold, the system pumps the heated water up through pipes to warm the buildings once more.

Although the system heats and cools the ground on an annual cycle, Princeton has a continuous need for both heating and cooling yearround, regardless of outside temperature. Even on the coldest day of February, the University extracts heat released from lasers, electron microscopes, CT scan machines, and computer facilities. Likewise, stored heat must be delivered for activities like handwashing, showering, and dishwashing despite the warmth of August weather.

In other words, plant operators like Sousa must balance satisfying the campus’ immediate needs and heating the daily thermal storage tank. Anything left over is stored in the seasonal system.

The control panel provides Sousa with the information on the automated process; though, he also occasionally needs to step in and change something.

After chatting with Sousa, we were finally ready to see the pipes in the equipment room. The conference room had been quiet, but as we neared the heart of the facility, the steady whirring of machinery crescendoed, and I noticed a faint rubbery scent. If I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed I was gazing upon an indoor waterpark full of twisting, vibrantly colored slides.

Borer explained the plant’s simple color coding system as I soaked it all in. The green pipes contain chilled water going out to campus and back. The blue pipes are going down to the geo-exchange field and back. Finally, the orange pipes carry hot water out to campus and back.

Each pipe is marked with a sticker bearing a “secret code,” with abbreviations and numbers that the plant staff can understand.

At one point, Borer asked me to feel the metal attached to a pipe. The pipe is insulated, but a bit of heat escapes. Because there is always some hot water going through

the system, it was warm to the touch — probably 105 or 110 degrees, Borer estimated.

Borer explained that the water going through the pipes also travels through daily thermal storage tanks, which are located outside, adjacent to TIGER. Each tank holds 2.2 million gallons of water. This water serves as energy storage media, meaning that the water is heated and cooled, but not gained or lost. “It’s a closed system. That is important,” Borer noted.

Borer pointed out an air-dirt separator pointing into a drain in the floor, which filters debris particles out of the water and pumps any solids through the drain out of the plant. It looked like a wide vacuum, but one which ejects particles outwards rather than sucking them in. If any of this equipment breaks or needs repair, the plant staff can open the glass walls, manufactured with built in fritting to protect against bird collisions, so that a new piece of equipment can easily be installed, while the old one is removed.

Borer noted that it was difficult to source many of these materials, as the geo-exchange technology is so new. The facilities team looked “all over the world and certainly all over the country for the right things and the right skill sets to install them. It’s not like [they] just went to Home Depot,” said Borer. Additionally, acquiring the materials was expensive. Though he couldn’t tell me exactly how much, Borer confirmed that the combined systems cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is as of now unclear how much of that will be incentivized by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The University is still working with outside counsel and tax advisors on what they can and can’t claim under the IRA. According to Borer, the cost could swing 30–40 percent based on the answers to those questions.

The geo-exchange installation continues despite these challenges, and, even after it is fully in use, the University will continue to maintain its cogeneration plant. The two plants will ultimately operate in tandem.

In the past, the cogeneration plant has played a crucial role during severe weather events, allowing the University to continue operating even when the regional power grid failed. “Because we had on-site cogeneration, we were able to be a place of refuge to the community,” Borer explained. He added that because of climate change, the University needs to be prepared for more storms in the future. This might involve buying generators that run on diesel, one of the most polluting forms of fuel. Therefore, though Borer knows that the University needs on-site, controllable power generation, he hopes to run it as infrequently as possible. “If I run the diesel generator or something like that 100 hours a year, it will save us money, and then I can have it during the next horrendous weather event,” he explained.

One significant difference be -

tween the cogeneration plant and TIGER is a shift in architectural ethos. While the cogeneration is housed in an unassuming “concrete block and metal siding,” the University wanted TIGER to stand out aesthetically to mark the importance of what it housed. Borer remembers working in a Philadelphia power plant that was built in the 1920s. He recalls soaring windows that let in the light, mahogany railings, and a restaurant up over the turbine hall floor where you could see power for a whole city being generated.

“It was exciting back then,” Borer explained. “So now we have this new and novel and exciting and dynamic thing, and we wanted people to look at it and say: look how impressive this thing is and to learn what best practices in energy look like.”

Although the system is still far from complete, many buildings are already running on the district hot water system, including New Col-

lege West, Yeh College, Bloomberg Hall in Butler, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Thomas Laboratory, Carl Icahn Laboratory, Jadwin Gym, and Caldwell House.  A part of Dillon Gym is also connected, and soon, the Art Museum will be as well.

Though the first month’s report has not yet been published, Borer reported that the plant’s performance “looks amazing.” When Borer predicted what the plant’s coefficient of performance would be last year, he expected it would be around four. Right now, according to Borer, it’s measuring between 4.5–5.

“That means we’re delivering to this campus 4.5 times the energy we’re putting into the plant,” Borer explained. He expects the plant will do even better this summer, adding, “I cannot dream of seven, but it might be as high as six. Come back and ask me!”

Though Borer enjoys the aesthetic

of the plant and spending time in the new TIGER, his favorite part of his job is looking at spreadsheets.

“I’m such a nerd,” he joked, then explained “This is not theoretical, this is not a research project. We can do this on a community scale. We can do this for 15,000 people. What I want to do now is show that this is also financially attractive.” Borer’s spreadsheets help him work towards the goal.

Borer is intent on sharing this technology and its possibilities outside of Princeton. “We can fix Princeton,” he said. “But what I want to do, and what many of us want to do, is make a bigger impact.” He hopes that in the future, Princeton can help peer institutions learn how to “walk this path.”

As the tour came to a close, we took a moment to step back and look around the equipment room one last time. The machinery was still gently whirring, and a green light glowed at the top of a four-

light system, indicating that all was well, and the plant was safe.

When Borer reflects on the progress the team has made, he said that he feels very proud. He emphasized that the project was a team effort, involving hundreds of people, and to see it finally performing well is “super exciting.”

He added, “The bigger context is we’re trying to get Princeton to carbon neutrality, and we’re trying to get others to carbon neutrality. This is showing: ‘Yeah, you can do that.’”

Raphaela Gold is the associate Features editor and a head Archives editor.

RAPHAELA GOLD / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN The maze of pipes at the TIGER facility.

RAPHAELA GOLD / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN My first view of T.I.G.E.R. from the front.

RAPHAELA GOLD / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Energy Plant Manager Ted Borer explains the screens in the control room.

the PROSPECT. ARTS & CULTURE

‘Problemista’ USG Movies review: bizarre love story has a big heart

By Edward Rogers | Prospect Contributor

Feb. 22, 2024 marked the early screening of buzzworthy A24 film “Problemista” for students at the Garden Theatre. The film was shown as part of the USG Movies Committee’s ongoing advance screening series, which allows Princeton students to see up-andcoming indie films for free. The film opened to a packed house of students and the committee provided free popcorn and refreshments.

Director of the film Julio Torres also stars as the protagonist Alejandro, a twenty-something immigrant from El Salvador who struggles to achieve his dream as a creator of nonsensical toys, such as a slinky that doesn’t fall down the stairs when pushed. Continually rejected from jobs, he earns money through Craigslist in hopes that he’ll find a sponsor for his work visa.

Throughout his struggles, Alejandro encounters Elizabeth, played by Tilda Swinton, an eccentric middle-aged art curator who can’t afford to continue

paying the cryogenics company that is currently keeping her deceased husband frozen. Alejandro agrees to help Elizabeth honor her deceased husband if she sponsors his visa, and the two set off to organize an art exhibition of Alejandro’s eccentric egg paintings in New York City. The film’s plot and style are as wacky as you’d imagine. Julio Torres is wellknown for his surrealist humor that effectively combines fantasy and reality. We see this world through Alejandro’s unique vision as he uses imagery that encapsulates his vivid feelings and deep messages, such as a neverending maze of trap doors to describe the American immigration process. Torres also personifies the everyday objects that he encounters in his life. For instance, he frequently interacts with a human embodiment of Craigslist played by rising star Larry Owens. This combination of reality and fantasy, along with brilliant, idiosyncratic score, brings the classic story of immigration and the American Dream

into a new light.

That being said, the real glue of the film is the push-pull performances of Torres and Swinton as Alejendro and Elizabeth. Alejandro is quiet, pensive, and nervous but infinitely ambitious, while Elizabeth is brash, loud, and ready to pick a fight with whatever waiter or receptionist who crosses her the wrong way. The chemistry between such polarizing personalities works well, driving the film’s humor and, ultimately, the film’s heart. It is when these oddballs ultimately realize that they are not so different after all — both wholly misunderstood and pursuing a wild dream — that the film’s message about perseverance and individuality is achieved. The result makes for an odd and unique platonic love story.

However, Torres and Swinton do not always do their characters justice with their performances. There are painful setbacks among Alejandro’s journey to success that beg for honest, unrestrained emotion, but Torres seems

to resist these needed temptations in favor of a more reserved sadness.

On the opposite end, Swinton sometimes over-acts as Elizabeth, turning her character from a misunderstood human into a fire-breathing dragon instead (sometimes literally). These misguided creative choices limit the film’s emotional potential and make the film’s ending seem not entirely deserved.

In the end, though, “Problemista” shines as a unique take on the immigrant experience that makes for a powerful but flawed statement about the need for sticking to your true self even when the world may not understand. The film is sure to make a splash in theaters during its wide release this Friday, March 1, just as A24’s BestPicture-winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” did when it premiered in 2022.

Edward Rogers is a contributor for The Prospect from Durham, North Carolina.

‘Right person, wrong time’ exemplified in a film: Past Lives

I’ve always wondered, is it a blessing or a curse to experience first love, only to be ripped apart by circumstance? This question has inspired the plots of many films before, still, “Past Lives” could not have provided a better, fresher depiction of this heart-breaking question.

At the mention of “Past Lives” showing at the Princeton Garden Theater, my friends gushed raving reviews and flashed me judgmental stares when I revealed that I had never seen this 2023 Oscar-nominated film. I went to the theater with high hopes.

Even so, the film surpassed my expectations. This indie film released in January 2023 initially appears to portray the classic trope where childhood sweethearts reconnect and find love in adulthood, but it subverts that trope with sobering realism.

Na Young and Hae Sung are inseparable as they grow up together in Korea, but once Na Young emigrates to the United States, they lose contact with one other. Years later, Na Young has become “Nora Moon” and lives in New York City as an aspiring playwright, while Hae Sung remains in Seoul as a student. The two reconnect online and the rekindling of emotion is immediate — palpable even through a screen. A one-time catch up video call soon turns into lengthy daily conversations and a rekindled, unofficial relationship, until Nora calls things off. The two cannot visit each other and should fully focus on their respective lives, she reasons.

Twelve years later, Nora is married, but she and Hae Sung reconnect again when he visits New York City. During this visit, their feelings resurface, but they also recognize the impossibility of being together, at least in this lifetime. Maybe in a past life, or an afterlife, they can realize the full potential of this ill-timed love.

It strikes me as extremely refreshing that barely any physical touch or dramatic emotions are involved to progress the story; instead, the film is upheld by palpable tension, charged glances, and clever cinematography.

The incorporation of dry humor also juxtaposes the painful situations of the movie.

When Nora explains to her husband that her childhood sweetheart is visiting New York City, he nods in painful acceptance and falls silent for a few beats. He then deadpans: “If this was a story someone was telling, I’d be the evil white American husband keeping you two apart.” This was met by a large round of laughter from the audience. The movie’s display of self-awareness broke the fourth wall between the movie and viewer.

I especially like that the movie knows it leans closely into a romantic trope, owning it while providing its own spin.

Visually, in every scene a gentle blanket of minimalism is draped beautifully as the film relies on deft cinematography to tell the story. One of the most memorable shots captures Nora’s last day in Korea before she emigrates. When her and Hae Sung split to leave, the camera captures their backsides as they walk in the same direction but on diverging paths. Nora walks upward on a staircase, while Hae Sung walks forward on flat ground. It is incredibly straightforward, but symbolic of the different paths their lives are taking and the widening gap that separates them. The minimalism works in favor of the simple storyline.

The film also does a beautiful job of exploring the moral grayness of the characters. Nora may have married Arthur for the main intention of obtaining a green card in the United States. Hae Sung, while aware that Nora is married, flies to New York City to see her. Interestingly, it is Nora’s husband who suffers the brunt of the situation, even though he has done absolutely nothing to

deserve disloyalty. He is very devoted to Nora, even learning Korean and immersing himself in the culture to better understand her identity. He is uneasy upon Hae Sung’s arrival, but keeps his grace and does not hold Nora back from reconnecting with her childhood friend. Everybody suffers in the story; the only villain might be fate.

With its signature touch of realism, the film masterfully explores complex themes including the dynamics of interracial relationships, immigration, and most of all, the infinite “what-if’s” of love. As someone who is used to being fed the idealistic, cliché epilogues of rom-com novels, I was not prepared for the jarring realism that leaves the audience craving more at the end. Once the credits started rolling, I remember thinking, “There must be more!”

I find it difficult to pinpoint any flaws in this film, besides the fact that I was de-

manding for it to be longer. Frankly, I left the theater feeling the most unfulfilled that I had ever felt after a movie, but also realized that was the point — that was the beauty of the film.

Above all, “Past Lives” is a melancholy story exploring the tragic and wonderful pain of love that cannot be. It provoked an incredible amount of introspection about my own life, and touches on the concept of multiple pathways of lives, which seems to be trending more in movies in recent years. Fans of “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” and “The Notebook” are sure to be intrigued by this film.

Shannon Ma is a staff writer for The Prospect. She is in the Class of 2027 and comes from Saratoga, California. She can be reached at sm2818@ princeton.edu.

By Shannon Ma | Staff Prospect Writer

The Prospect 11 Weekly Event Roundup

By Christopher Nunez, Staff Prospect Writer

“i-heresy,” a new dance work

1

“Heartbreakers,” a new dance performance

SYMPOH Urban Arts Crew

Feb. 29 to March 1 at 8 p.m., March 2 at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Frist Theatre

Breakdancing group SYMPOH Urban Arts Crew puts on their newest dance performance of the year, “Heartbreakers.” Earlier in the school year, SYMPOH hosted the highly popular “Dance Your Style” competition, and they’ve come back with “Heartbreakers” as their first solo show of the school year. Join the group for a night of thrills, love, heartbreak, and outstanding dancing. Tickets can be purchased through University Ticketing. Tickets are available for free to University students through Passport to the Arts.

5

“Pipeline”

Dominique Morriseau

2

3

4

March 1 at 8 p.m. and March 2 and 3 at 2 p.m.

Hamilton Murray Theater, Theatre Intime

Directed by Alex Conboy ’25, this performance follows a public school teacher, Nya, as she and her son navigate the racial prejudice within the American educational system. Tickets can be purchased through University Ticketing with free tickets available for University students through Passport for the Arts.

8

Storm Stokes ’24

Feb. 29 to March 2 at 8:30 p.m.

Hearst Dance Theater, Lewis Arts complex

From the mind of Storm Stokes ’24 comes a dance performance that explores the liberation of the “Black spirit” from the “oppressive constrictions of colonial religious traditions.” The performance is connected to Stokes’ scholarly research and educational pursuits in the Department of African American Studies. This performance is free and open to the public. Advance tickets must be acquired through University Ticketing.

Princeton University Orchestra

March 1 and March 2 at 7:30 p.m.

Richardson Auditorium

Princeton University Orchestra delivers their spring Concerto Concert. Concertgoers can expect a con- temporary exploration of ancient Mandingo strings. The concert will also feature Ralph Vaughan Williams Concerto for Bass Tuba, the first tuba concerto ever written. Additionally, PUO’s many talented musicians will also be playing concertos by Robert Schumann and Peter I. Tchaikovsky. Tickets can be purchased through University Ticketing. Through Passport to the Arts, tickets are available for free to University students.

“The Woolgatherer”

William Mastrosimone

March 1 at 7:30 p.m., March 2 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and March 3 at 3 p.m.

Donald G. Drapkin Studio, Lewis Arts complex

This play explores the complex dynamics of love and the hardships that arise from relationships. The performance highlights Sarah Duntley ’24 and Jay White ’24. Sydney Hwang ’24 and Joe McLean ’27 will perform on Saturday’s midday show. This performance is free and open to the public. Advance tickets must be acquired through University Ticketing.

6

“All-Nighter”

Thomas Hughes

March 1 at 11 p.m.

Frist Theatre

Thomas Hughes ’24 presents Season 12, Episode 3 of late-night show “AllNighter.” The show will feature Mia González, Tiger Tea Room and Frist barista, and performances from Koda Gursoy ’26 and Disiac Dance Company. Tickets are available for free through University Ticketing.

“Traces”: Collaborative Exhibition

Erin Macanze ’24, Kirsten Pardo ’24, and Julia Stahlman ’24

Feb. 26 to March 8 from 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Hurley Gallery, Lewis Arts complex

Princeton seniors Erin Macanze, Kirsten Pardo, and Julia Stahlman present “Traces.” This collection of works is defined by identity, place, and human connection to the world and nature itself. This exhibition is free and open to the public. No advance tickets are required.

Film Screening: “Galoot” with Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

March 4 at 4:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

Arthur Lewis Auditorium, Robertson Hall

Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies and University of London’s Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim present the film “Galoot”: an exploration of humanity’s continuous grapples with the political spheres of the world; specifically, Israel and Palestine. This screening is free and open to the public.

7

2024 VIS Book & Poster Show

Feb. 27 to March 8 from 9 a.m.–6 p.m.

Hagan Gallery, 185 Nassau St. Junior and senior students in the Program in Visual Arts present design work and book il- lustrations. This showing is free and open to the public. No advance tickets are required.

Film Screening:

“The Rapture” (2023) with Director Iris Kaltenbäck

March 2 at 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.

Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

Director Iris Kaltenbäck joins the University community for dis- cussion of their French film, “The Rapture.” This film follows a mid- wife in distress who simultaneously deals with multiple pressures in her life. This screening is free and open to the public. Registration is required through the Lewis Center for the Arts website.

Gauss Seminars in Criticism: Denise Ferreira da Silva (Lecture)

March 6 at 5 p.m.–7 p.m.

Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

Princeton’s Humanities Council presents the latest Spring 2024 Gauss Seminar in Criticism with New York University Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva. This lecture is deemed “Annotations on Black Art: On Authority at the Threshold of Representation.”

www.

WOMEN’S HOCKEY

Women’s hockey roars past Dartmouth in playoff opener

By Max Hines Staff Sports Writer

In the first year of the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Hockey Playoffs’ new format, No. 13 Princeton (14–10–6 overall, 6–10–6 ECAC) defeated the Dartmouth Big Green (6–21–3, 3–16–3) in the first round.

Straight from the opening puck drop, the Tigers controlled the action. Attacking mostly from the left and center, Princeton piled on over ten shots in the first ten minutes. Sophomore forward Issy Wunder had four of her own, but Dartmouth goalie Hann Humphreys initially stood strong.

Just under nine minutes into the period, senior defender Stefanie Wallace fed a pass to Wunder, who ripped a shot towards Humphreys. While Humphreys made the save, the puck ricocheted right in front of the net, where star senior forward Sarah Fillier swooped in to score and make it a 1–0 game for the Tigers.

Just two minutes later, Wunder fed a pass to sophomore forward Emer-

son O’Leary, whose shot was saved by a swerving Humphreys. The Tigers continued to pressure 30 seconds later, when Wunder rifled off a shot of her own that was stopped by Humphreys.

With six minutes to go in the period, Dartmouth forward Cally Dixon committed a holding penalty, as she got tangled up with sophomore forward Sarah Paul in Princeton’s defensive zone. Paul, however, had the last word on the ensuing power play, as she received a pass from O’Leary on the left wing. With two Dartmouth defenders blocking their own netminder’s line of sight, Paul rifled a wrist shot into the right corner of the net.

With a 2–0 lead, the Tigers continued to press, but despite a 24-6 advantage in shots on goal, the lead remained at two heading into the intermission. Suffice to say, it was a dominant, electric period from the Tigers’ offense. After scoring eight goals last weekend as a team, senior forward Emma Kee spoke as to what inspired the strong play in the first.

“We focused on scoring goals in

smaller games a little bit [in practice] and I think that competitive edge brought it, we brought it,” Kee told The Daily Princetonian. “We played for each other today.”

While junior goalie Jen Olnowich had far from her busiest period, she stepped up when necessary. Early in the second period, a Dartmouth 2-on1 turned into a shot from the closerange defender Caroline Appleyard, but Olnowich was right there to make the save. Later, Dartmouth forward Tiffany Hill threatened Olnowich on a breakaway with three minutes left, but no damage was done as Hill missed wide.

Olnowich and first-year Uma Corniea have both shined for the Tigers in net this year, and head coach Cara Morey talked about the difficulty of choosing who starts each game.

“We’re looking at matchups,” Morey said. “Jen did well against Dartmouth last time; sometimes goalies match up against teams.”

Five minutes into the second, Dartmouth was beginning to clear the puck from their defensive zone when Fillier raced in to steal the puck. Left

LACROSSE

all alone, the left-winger roped a shot from the right side just past Humphreys’s shoulder, making an incredibly difficult goal look elementary. The Tigers now had a commanding 3-0 lead but were hungry for more.

A few minutes later, the Tigers were in the dwindling seconds of a penalty kill as first-year defender Gabby Kim received the puck in the Tigers’ defensive zone. Kim passed to senior forward Emma Kee, who raced down the ice on a breakaway. Kee scorched a wrist shot past Humphreys, bringing the bench roaring onto its feet as the senior scored her second goal of the season in her final game at Baker Rink. While the goal technically wasn’t short-handed, it came right after the Dartmouth power play ended, and the penalty-kill unit was still on the ice.

“She’s our penalty killer, and she wants a shorty [short-handed goal], and she talks about it all the time,” Morey said to the ‘Prince.’ “In practice, sometimes I accidentally blow it dead because I’m watching the power play, and she’s taking off on a breakaway, and then she’s really mad at me … so when she had [the chance], I was like please do it, please do it, please do it. I might’ve jumped higher than anyone when [she] put that in.”

Kee confirmed Morey’s words, saying that “I always say every week, it’s my dream to score on the PK [penalty kill].”

A couple minutes later, Dartmouth forward Hamilton Doster received a pass from teammates Appleyard and defender Anne Averill and fired the puck past Olnowich. While the shot went to an official review, it was confirmed as a goal, and Dartmouth cut the lead to 4-1.

However, any thought of a comeback soon became a moot point.

As the minutes ticked away in the second, and then the third period, Princeton kept piling on shots, and Dartmouth had very few of their own. Both goalies held strong, but despite the lopsided margin, Fillier was look-

ing for a hat trick in her last game at Baker.

With just under three minutes to go in the game, Fillier saw her chance, taking the puck behind the Tigers’ goal and racing down the ice all by herself. With one woman to beat, she deked the sole defender remaining and fired a wrist shot past Humphreys for the goal and was promptly mobbed by her teammates in a gleeful celebration.

Fillier’s impact as a leader cannot be understated on this team — she is at or near the top in just about every Princeton hockey record.

“She was a program changer for us; she was probably the biggest recruit in the world at the time,” Morey said. “Picking Princeton was a huge statement because we weren’t a program that was currently in the top ten, and she elevated us.”

The final seconds mercifully ticked by, and the Tigers won their last home game of the season 5-1. Now, Princeton advances to the quarterfinals of the ECAC playoffs, where they will play defensive juggernaut No. 3 Clarkson University (29–3–2, 18–3–1) in a best-of-three series. The Tigers have lost to the Golden Knights twice this year, both by 1-0 margins.

Morey hinted at a long film study session for her and her assistants in preparation for the Clarkson series, aiming to “figure out where we’re strong, play to our strengths, and then figure out any adjustments we need to make in order to win, how we’re going to put pucks in the net against this stifling defense of Clarkson.”

Kee concluded with a more simple directive for herself and the rest of the team.

“Just continue our hunger; we’re ready to go. We don’t want our season to be done.”

Max Hines is a staff Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’

No. 11 men’s lacrosse loses first game of season against No. 4 Maryland

By Evelyn Walsh Senior Sports Writer

Despite the strong effort from No. 11 Princeton men’s lacrosse (2–1 overall, 0–0 Ivy League) this Saturday, they were unable to take down the notorious lacrosse powerhouse, the No. 4 Maryland Terrapins (4–0, 0–0 Big 10). The Tigers fell in College Park, 13–7.

The Tigers’ biggest struggle during the game was ball control. The Terps were able to quickly set the tone for the game, pushing plays up the field and putting pressure on the Tiger defense. Maryland sent three goals to the back of the net within the first eight minutes of the game, leaping out to a quick 3–0 lead.

After finally settling into the game, the Tigers began clawing their way back. The defense did not allow any more action from the Terps in the quarter, shutting them out for the last five and a half minutes. The

backfield was led by senior goalie Michael Gianforcaro, who had a careerhigh 20 saves against the Terps. The Tigers were beaten 33–17 for shots on goal, putting Gianforcaro and the defense in a very tough position.

Last season, the Tigers saw Maryland at home for their third game. And similar to Saturday’s game, Maryland was able to take down the Tigers 11–5, having more offensive opportunities and shots on goal last year.

What the Tigers did not have last season, however, was first-year attacker Nate Kabiri. Kabiri was the first to put the Tigers on the board in College Park, scoring the first Princeton goal with two minutes left in the first quarter.

Kabiri’s first-quarter goal was the first of four for the first-year, making him the only first-year in Princeton history to score three or more goals in their first three career games. Kabiri currently leads the team with

ten goals so far this season. But Maryland did not have much trouble extending their lead going into the second quarter. The pattern of Maryland’s quick three goals to Princeton’s one repeated itself, within the first three minutes. Once again, Kabiri was there to answer, as he added a tally for the Tigers, driving through the Terps defense after an assist from senior midfielder Tommy Barnds. Maryland, controlling the ball for the majority of playing time and winning 21 of the 24 face-offs, capitalized on two more chances that extended their lead through the second quarter. With less than a second left in the half, junior midfielder Sean Cameron received the ball all alone on the left wing and sent an impressive bullet through the Maryland defense, making the score 8–3 at the half.

Princeton was chasing for the rest of the game but came out aggressive-

ly to try and close the sizable Maryland lead. Junior attacker Coulter Mackesy scored the first goal of the third quarter, just two minutes in.

Princeton began to gain momentum when the Tigers’ defense began to play more aggressively, attempting to contain the Terps and causing turnovers. Eventually, Maryland found a way through and nailed another in, but two minutes later Princeton responded.

The Tigers capitalized on their only extra man playing time from a penalty, and junior attacker Braedon Saris sent one in for the Tigers, closing the gap to four goals. But with only five seconds left in the quarter, Maryland converted once again to make the score 10–5 going into the last quarter.

Kabiri came back strong once again for the Tigers in the final quarter, scoring his third goal of the game only four minutes into the quarter. Both teams were putting as much

pressure as they could on their opponent, with Princeton trying to catch up and Maryland holding the lead. The Terps answered Kabiri and with nine minutes left were able to sneak one in for their 11th goal.

Kabiri and another first-year Colin Burns, Princeton’s second-leading scorer, both had goals that were disallowed for crease violations. However, the Tigers did not let up and Kabiri found another opportunity when sophomore attacker Chad Palumbo assisted him for the last Princeton goal of the game. The Terps closed out the game with two more, ending the game with a final score of 13–7.

The Tigers now look toward a road trip south to face off against No. 15 ranked University of North Carolina (2–1 overall, 0–0 ACC) on Friday, March 1 and No. 2 Duke (4–0, 0–0) on Saturday, March 2.

Walsh is a senior Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’

Evelyn

MEN’S

PHOTO COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM/PRINCETONWHOCKEY.

The team and fans celebrating senior Emma Kee’s goal.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

Women’s basketball snaps 15-game winning streak with loss at Columbia

By Yousif Mohamed Senior Sports Writer

MANHATTAN, New York — Under the roar of a sold-out Levien Gymnasium, No. 25 Princeton women’s basketball (20–4 overall, 10–1 Ivy League) fell to the Columbia Lions (19–5, 10–1) 67–65, snapping the Tigers’ 15-game winning streak that dates back to a 79–70 victory against Quinnipiac University on Dec. 6.

Columbia entered the matchup on a quest to avenge their 80–65 loss to Princeton in Jadwin Gymnasium on Jan. 20 and to knock the Tigers off of their undefeated post at the top of the Ivy League.

Despite the high stakes of the matchup, Princeton went into the game just like any other.

“We’re the top two teams in the league, but if you treat it differently, I don’t think that’s respecting the other teams in our league,” head coach Carla Berube told The Daily Princetonian. “We tend to keep it the same … if you go outside of the preparation, I think you could get a little tight.”

Points from senior guard and captain Kaitlyn Chen started things off for Princeton, who sank two jumpers of her own to cut the Tigers’ deficit to two at 6–4 with 6:37 left in the first.

Following a Lions layup, first-year guard Skye Belker added a jumper with 5:31 remaining to make it 8–6 in Columbia’s favor.

MEN’S TENNIS

Chen dished out eight assists and recorded a double-digit scoring performance, albeit on 25 percent shooting. Belker posted a career-high 21 points vs. Columbia on Jan. 20, but was held to six points on three-for-six shooting from the field on Saturday.

“I thought we did a great job contesting Kaitlyn Chen’s shots and making everything else difficult,” Columbia head coach Megan Griffith said. “[We kept] Skye Belker in check this game, which we did not in the first game.”

“We wanted to make their bigs a little bit more of the stars … it is no secret that double zero [senior forward Ellie Mitchell] and twenty-five [senior forward Chet Nweke] are two of the best rebounders in the country,” Griffith said. “When they miss shots, they’re gonna get rebounds. We just have to make sure they don’t hurt us [in] the ways that we know they can.” Indeed, the duo combined for 26 points.

“They’ve been playing together for years now,” Berube said when asked about their chemistry. “They’re a little bit undersized, but they certainly have a lot of heart.”

The Tigers looked fluid coming out of the first and began to chip away at the Lions’ lead. First-year guard Ashley Chea stepped back 19 seconds into the second quarter to bring the Tigers within four at 19–15. Chea struck again just over two minutes later, drilling a

long-range three-pointer to tie it at 22 with 7:20 remaining in the quarter.

Later, sophomore guard Madison St. Rose drove inside for a layup to make it 26–24 and give Princeton their first lead of the game with 5:07 left in the second. A little over three minutes later St. Rose turned around to put the Tigers up 30–26, but this ended up being the largest lead that they would hold for the rest of the game.

Both teams continued to trade blows, but the Lions guard trifecta of Kitty Henderson, Cecelia Collins, and Abbey Hsu caught fire in the third quarter. To open the period, Collins found Henderson on a cut inside to give Columbia the lead, 31–30, with 9:23 remaining in the third. On the next Columbia possession, Hsu delivered a masterful bounce pass to Collins in the corner who buried a threepointer to finish the possession.

“All season long that’s been our biggest goal — to come out in the second half with the first punch,” noted Hsu. “That was a huge momentum swing for us in the game.”

Soon after, Hsu surpassed 2,000 career points on a contested threepointer with 6:28 left in the quarter. With the basket, Hsu became the fourth player in Ivy League history to achieve the milestone — the first since Harvard’s Hana Peljto in 2004.

“My teammates and coaching staff are making sure I do recognize [my achievement], but also making sure I

stay hungry,” Hsu said. “The journey is not over, so I want to enjoy every single day and then look back on everything we accomplished.”

Hsu’s basket was just the beginning of a 13–5 Lions run that culminated in a 47–39 Columbia advantage with 2:41 left in the third quarter. With 47 seconds left in the period, she was fouled on a three-pointer and converted all three shots from the charity stripe to put the Lions in front by 10. Chen narrowed the gap to eight with two free throws of her own with 28 seconds remaining, ending the third at a tally of 53–45.

The Tigers made a display of their resiliency on Saturday, continuing to keep the score tight for the entirety of the game.

“You gotta just stay the course,” explained Berube. “It’s a 40-minute game, sometimes longer … I was proud of my team for [staying the course] and making some big plays.”

Both defenses stepped up in the fourth quarter, which had nine scoreless possessions. With two minutes left, the Tigers were able to force Columbia into a 10-second violation, which allowed them to call a timeout.

The entire crowd rose to their feet, and a chorus of boos filled the arena as the referee gave Chen the ball to inbound. She soon found Mitchell underneath the hoop to make it a onepossession game at 66–63 with 1:46 remaining.

A Columbia shot clock violation with 1:13 left in the game gave the Tigers a chance to tie it up. St. Rose missed the three-pointer, but Nweke was able to scoop up the rebound and score to make it 66–65 with 52.8 seconds on the clock.

On the other end, Nweke fouled Fliss Henderson, who went to the line to shoot two with 25.3 seconds left. Henderson sank the first shot to make it 67–65, but the second shot rattled out. The Tigers called a timeout to talk over their final play to win the game.

Following a 21-second play, Chen released a final fade-away jumper that almost sent the game into overtime, but Chen was unable to come away with the basket. The game clock ran out, and the Tigers were defeated in New York for the first time since 2008, 67–65.

“Every game is a learning experience,” said Berube. “You have to keep building and climbing and hoping to play your best basketball.”

The Tigers will look to retake their unattested place at the top of the Ivy League in their return to Jadwin against Harvard (15–9, 8–3) on Friday and Dartmouth (7–16, 1–10) on Saturday.

Yousif Mohamed is a senior Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’

Princeton men’s tennis sweep weekend at ECAC Indoor Championships

By Josefina Gurevich Staff Sports Writer

On Sunday afternoon, Princeton men’s tennis (8–4 overall) were crowned victors at the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Indoor Championships after a weekend of undefeated play. They started their triumphant run off strong with a 5–0 win over the Brown Bears (3–10), followed by a solid 4–3 victory over the Yale Bulldogs (6–3).

The Princeton squad started their weekend with a controlling win over the Brown Bears on Friday afternoon. Sophomore team members Sebastian Sec and Ellis Short clutched the doubles point to start off play. The singles result proved to be disastrous for the Bears as the Tigers emerged undefeated with straight-set wins from first-years Paul Inchauspe, Fnu Nidunjianzan, and Landon Ardila. With this victory, Princeton advanced to the ECAC semifinals.

Reflecting on first-year performance, men’s tennis volunteer assistant coach Jason Kros shared to The Daily Princetonian “having a young team is always a fun experiment, and seeing where we are has been really cool.” He continued “we’ve seen what our sophomores and juniors have experienced the last couple of years, and seen where they’ve built off. Now, they get to use that experience and show it to our freshmen.”

On Saturday, the Tigers reproduced a win at the Hamlin and Hecht Tennis Centers in Philadel-

phia, Pennsylvania, against the Yale Bulldogs. The Bulldogs proved to be resilient opponents, opening the match by clinching a doubles point over Princeton. Sophomore duo Sec and Short once again proved to be a successful pairing as they won their match 7–5, despite the Tigers losing the point overall.

For singles games, the match-ups positioned the Tigers and Bulldogs head-to-head, and the Tigers ‘pingponged’ their way to the finals. Firstyear Aleksandar Mitric established the advantage with a solid (6–3, 6–2) win. Yale followed up with a swift win of their own at the third-singles spot (6–4, 6–2). Princeton answered with a comeback win from Short (3–6, 6–2, 6–2). This Tiger triumph was mirrored by a Bulldog clutch at the fourth spot (1–6, 6–4, 6–4). Princeton gathered the force to close it out with consecutive wins from top-spot first-years, Inchauspe (5–7, 6–3, 6–3) and Nidunjianzan (6–4, 4–6, 7–5).

Sunday play concluded the Tigers’ winning weekend. Princeton once again started off the day’s competition against the University of Pennsylvania Quakers, with a doubles point fumble. However, even with the upper-hand, the Quakers were completely swept off the court in the singles. First in singles, Inchauspe double-bageled his opponent by winning both sets, 6–0. Soon after, singles Nidunjianzan defeated another Quaker swiftly (6–2, 6–0). The remainder of the matches followed suit with the Tigers sweeping No. 3 and No. 4 singles as well, not drop-

ping a single singles set to claim the ECAC Championship title.

The coaches were impressed with the maturity and composure of the players throughout the weekend’s results. Kros reflected “we [saw] the freshmen build on their previous matches and the sophomores grow as well. It’s really fun for us coaches, because we can really see them growing as tennis players and people.”

With this result, the Tigers entered the ECAC Championship finals and sealed the deal with a final 4–1 triumph over the University of Pennsylvania Quakers (8–5). The Tigers now sit comfortably at the top of ECAC standings and with an overall season record of 8–4.

Next up, Princeton men’s tennis (31st ITA) will face off at the Blue Gray National Tennis Classic February 23–24th. The Tigers will be opening against Old Dominion University (47th ITA) (9–1 overall, 0–0 Sun Belt Conference) in Montgomery, Alabama and hoping for another notable win.

Josefina Gurevich is a Sports staff writer for the ‘Prince.’

MEN’S VOLLEYBALL

No. 14 men’s volleyball splits weekend versus Harvard

By Frances McKenzie Sports Contributor

The No. 14 Princeton men’s volleyball team (7–8 overall, 1–3 Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association) headed to Cambridge, Mass. this past weekend to take on the Harvard Crimson (6–5, 3–1). The two Ivy League teams each took a match, sending Princeton to 1–3 in the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (EIVA) conference.

Tigers begin weekend strong, sweeping the Crimson 3–0 Friday

On Friday night, set one showcased a back-and-forth struggle between the Crimson and the Tigers. Despite Princeton’s early 6–4 lead, Harvard leveled the score at 10–10 and began to edge ahead. Trailing 15–18, the Tigers seemed to find their footing. Harvard’s efforts sent junior libero Matt Suh to an impressive dig, setting up junior hitter Nyherowo Omene for a crucial kill. The Tigers cut the deficit, courtesy of powerful kills and an ace from none other than senior outside hitter Ben Harrington, who is ranked number one in the country for aces per set.

The set went down to the wire, as the teams traded points until the end of the set. Princeton closed out 29–27 with another kill from Harrington, who notched 9 kills in the set.

In the second set, Princeton continued their momentum from the get-go, opening with a strong ace delivered by junior setter Henry Wedbush.

Despite a push from Harvard to take a two point lead at 7–9, Princeton swiftly shut down any opposition, securing four consecutive points. Key contributions included a kill from Harrington and a solid block

YEARS

from first year middle blocker Tristan Whitfield, propelling the Tigers to an 11–9 lead. Harrington’s consistent aces and Whitfield’s determined efforts extended Princeton’s lead.

“I went into Friday a little bit nervous, it was one of my first starts of the year,” Whitfield told The Daily Princetonian post game. “Once I got into a flow I started playing better.”

In his first start of the year, Whitfield racked up five blocks on Friday alone and continued to showcase his aggressive gameplay throughout the weekend, ending the weekend with seven kills total.

The set concluded with a 25–16 victory for the Tigers, marked by impactful serves and kills from senior middle blocker Gavin Leising, Omene, and Harrington, and ending with a service error from Crimson outside hitter Owen Fanning.

Set three was another strong set from Princeton, with Whitfield and Wedbush making key contributions. Though Harvard briefly took the lead, opening it to 13–10, the Tigers fought back, securing a 25–23 victory to sweep the match.

Harvard returns the favor in Saturday match, defeating Princeton 3–1

On Saturday, the Crimson jumped out to a two-set lead and didn’t look back, downing the Tigers in four sets.

Though Princeton started the scoring in set one, Harvard took back an early 5–3 lead that they would maintain. After consistent runs for Harvard, dominance was established for the Crimson with a six-point advantage to make it 17–11.

Impressive efforts from Omene and sophomore pin hitter Owen Mellon, as well as a service error from Crimson outside hitter Logan Sheppard helped keep the Tigers alive.

A

By Chloe Lau Staff Archives Writer

Fifteen years ago, getting an A-plus at Princeton was so unheard of that you had to stay anonymous.

A 2009 Daily Princetonian article documented the rarity of an A-plus: In September 2000, the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing established a requirement for a written justification from faculty members when giving out A-pluses, which was the equivalent of a 4.0 numeric grade.

In the article, Senior Writer for the ‘Prince’ Paolo Esquivel explains that the logistical hassle and more demanding requirement for giving out A-pluses have caused the already limited quantity to further diminish.

Despite Princeton’s best efforts, Harvard closed out set one 25-17.

Spirits remained high for the Tigers into set two. Though Harvard took an early 7–3 lead, a quick 6–2 run for Princeton evened the score, with help from an ace from Omene.

Though Princeton held a lead throughout the middle of the set, Harvard slowly brought it back to 20–19, a result of Princeton service errors and powerful blocks from the Crimson. Harvard rode the momentum and took the set 25–23.

With the Crimson up two sets to none, Princeton had a promising start in set three, getting out to an aggressive 4–1 lead. Though Harvard was able to cut the deficit, the Tigers quickly

responded with assertive kills for Leising and an ace from Harrington, his first of the day. This momentum continued throughout the set and the Tigers closed out with a muchneeded 25–16 victory.

The fourth set was back-andforth down to the wire. Kills from the Crimson were counteracted by more impressive blocks from Whitfield and efforts from Leising. On a Crimson match point, a kill off a block from first year pin hitter Jameson Vaccaro kept the Tigers alive. Despite valiant efforts from Princeton, Harvard closed out the set with a close 26–24 victory.

“I think as a team, we were collectively a little less locked in than we normally are.” Whit-

field added. “Next time we have a situation like that we have to find a way to keep the same intensity from night one into night two.”

The Tigers will face George Mason (13–5, EIVA 5–7) this Friday in Dillon Gymnasium, where they have another chance to prove themselves in the conference.

“We go in with even more motivation,” Whitfield told the ‘Prince.’ “We want to go out and beat George Mason so we can prove that what happened Saturday was a fluke and we were not the team that we normally are.”

Frances McKenzie is a Sports contributor for the ‘Prince.’

“It’s not just a crush on a smart kid, you get an A-plus for blowing the top of my head off,” said Susan Wolfson, an English professor who said she had given out only four or five A-pluses in her 20-year career. Karen ’10 — whose name, along with the other students quoted in the article, was changed to protect her privacy — received an A-plus in her sociology class. She said that she believed the new policy allowed “room for interpretation,” and added that the course was “the easiest class” she’d taken. On the other hand, the straightforwardness of exams and problem sets for engineering classes allowed Adam ’10, another anonymous student, to get an A-plus. While the students agreed

that an A-plus was a meaningful indication of their hard work, there seemed to be a stigma against sharing this good news, described by one student as a “status symbol,” with others.

Princeton’s A-plus policy has continued to change over the years. In 2014, the Princeton faculty agreed to remove numerical targets for the undergraduate grading policy, replacing them with grading standards developed and articulated by each department.

Today, instructors are still required to justify each A-plus by a written statement on the Office of the Dean of the College (ODOC) A+/Failure Statement page. According to last year’s senior survey, engineers were more likely than their A.B. peers to have received a grade of an

A-plus at least once during their time at Princeton.

Despite past grade deflation, which is no longer an active policy, Princeton student GPAs have been steadily increasing across all departments and programs, from 3.28 in the 2009–2010 academic year to 3.56 in the 2022–2023 academic year.

Compared to other Ivies like Harvard and Yale, Princeton Apluses have been historically hard to achieve. As Wolfson noted in the article, “Grades are only one indication of [success], and not the only one.”

Chloe Lau is a staff Archive writer for the ‘Prince.’ She also is a staff Prospect and Features writer.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GO PRINCETON TIGERS. Men’s volleyball in pregame huddle last weekend.