Commencement June 6, 2017

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Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998

Tuesday June 6, 2017 vol. cxli no. 64

{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } BEYOND THE BUBBLE

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

Q&A: George Whitesides ’96, CEO of space exploration firm Virgin Galactic By Abhiram Karuppur associate news editor

George Whitesides ‘96 is the CEO of Virgin Galactic, which is developing commercial spacecraft aimed at providing the public with flights into suborbital space, starting as early as 2018. Whitesides sat down with the ‘Prince’ to talk about his Princeton experience, his foray into the aerospace industry, and the ramifications of spaceflight on our daily lives. The Daily Princetonian: Could you talk about your Princeton experience, and how you got involved with the space exploration field? George Whitesides: I’m from the Boston area, my dad is a Harvard professor. I loved the community feel at Princeton, I loved that people would smile at each other. So I came to Princeton and actually thought I was going to be an engineer, but ended up in Woody Woo taking some engineering classes, including a terrific course by Jerry Gray, who taught a course called MAE 399 [Faster & Higher: The Romance and Reality of Space Flight], which was a really creative course. It allowed you to sort of think through a space project from all aspects, not just the technical, but also business, and regulatory and everything, and I loved that integrative approach and, by the way, I think it’s awesome that the new Dean of Engineering is speaking about that integrative learning approach. I got a Fulbright Scholarship when I graduated, and I went to Tunisia, and I had a lot of time to think about what

I wanted to do in the future. The headline was, there were sort of a few different areas that were going to be big in terms of the future: one was neuroscience, another was space. I decided my true passion was space, so I came back and I started working in space areas, space businesses, space policy. I started a few things, I started a business that did zero gravity flights for people, and ran a space policy organization called the International Space Society. Then, I went to NASA, where I was chief of staff. I had bought a couple of tickets to Virgin Galactic, and they recruited me to be their CEO, and I’ve been there for about seven years now. DP: As a Woody Woo major in a science-dominated industry, do you have a unique perspective when dealing with the company operations or identifying new projects? GW: I like to think that I have enough of a technical background that I can reasonably be technically literate. As a manager, I mostly deal with people. One of the things I do is that I’m on the MAE Advisory Board at Princeton … and the same thing at Caltech. The thing that I tell folks is that you can be the most brilliant person, but unless you can help make a team work, you won’t be as effective as you can be. I think that the top educational institutions can do more to train future leaders by working in teams, because that’s what you do in the real world. In general, you don’t work alone, it’s very rare to be alone working on something. I think that in many aspects of

the educational system where you do work alone, you don’t really mimic real life. So, I deal with people, and Woody Woo was pretty good at that because it has the policy seminar … where you work together on teams. It’s not perfect, but I think that kind of thing is a really helpful background. DP: In April 2017, Virgin Galactic had a successful test of SpaceShipTwo, the spacecraft that will eventually take people into space. Could you describe how SpaceShipTwo is different from the conventional spacecraft people are used to seeing, and why it’s significant? GW: At a top level, I think space is going to be really important to the future of humanity, for a lot of different reasons. Understanding our climate, communications, navigation, transportation, exploration, all of these things are the best parts and really important parts of the human experience. Space plays an important role in all of them. What’s the problem? One of the problems is access in space, it’s still a very expensive and challenging endeavor. That is starting to change, which is really exciting, and why is it starting to change? I would say that there are two different reasons. One is that there’s been an influx of private capital, primarily from visionary investors like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos ’86 and Elon [Musk], new sources of capital organized in private corporations. Also, the concept of reusability is really starting to take See WHITESIDES page 2

COURTESY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT :: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Judge Clifton was, in part, responsible for an appeals court decision that upheld the earlier ruling staying the immigration ban.

Q&A: Trump E.O. Judge Richard Clifton ’72 By Abhiram Karuppur associate news editor

Richard Clifton ‘72 is a Senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he has served since 2002. In February 2017, he was one of three judges on the Ninth Circuit that heard and ultimately resolved the case dealing with Executive Order 13769, the first iteration of the Trump Administration’s immigration executive order. He talked to the ‘Prince’ about his Princeton experience, his long career in law in Hawaii, and his analysis of the immigration executive order case. The Daily Princetonian: Why did you decide to apply to

Princeton, and how was your Princeton experience? Richard Clifton: I went to a high school that regularly sent graduates to Princeton, so I learned about it from people in the class two years older than me. This was New Trier High School in the suburbs of Chicago, and I knew a couple people pretty well, let’s be blunt, a couple guys really well. I was a member of the last all-male entering class, so it was only guys then. I knew a couple guys two years ahead of me in high school…and they were all enthusiastic and encouraged me See CLIFTON page 4

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

Q&A: Judge Andrew Napolitano ‘72 associate news editor

Judge Andrew Napolitano ‘72 is a national syndicated columnist and a senior judicial analyst at Fox News, providing legal commentary, where he has been for 20 years. He sat down with the ‘Prince’ to discuss his time at Princeton, and the rise of “fake news” and his own experience dealing with the issue. The Daily Princetonian: Why did you apply to Princeton, and how would you describe your Princeton experience? Andrew Napolitano: Well, I received a full scholarship to Princeton, which enabled me to attend. I come from a bluecollar family, and in the firstgeneration in my family to attend any university, much less Princeton. So, it was a great gift for which I continue to be grateful. I majored in history, if you look at the records of The Daily Princetonian from that era, 1968-1972, you’ll see that I was incredibly active in campus politics. There were not very many conservative political activists on campus in that Vietnam era, pre-Watergate era. But, I was among them. It was a fabulous experience that I look back on with quite fondness. There were a lot of ideological and intellectual clashes in the classroom as well as the undergraduate assembly and elsewhere. But, I

In Opinion

would retain it tomorrow and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

DP: Could you talk a little more about your major, and how you decided to study it? AN: Well, I probably decided before I got there, but I majored in history, in my case it was mainly American history. But, at the time, the history department wouldn’t let you major in just the history of one country or one region. So, I also studied European history and Roman history with a notorious professor by the name of Frank Bourne, who was immensely popular with students, and he taught courses in Roman history and Roman law, and a lot of the students going to law school took his course. I also took a course by the late, great Walter Murphy called Constitutional Interpretation, a class first crafted by Woodrow Wilson when he was a professor at Princeton. A course which then, nearly everybody who was planning to go to law school took. I assume it’s the same today, it’s taught by Robbie George today. DP: How did you wind up serving on the New Jersey Superior Court? What kind of cases did you here? AN: In Jersey, judges are appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate for seven years, and when recon-

Senior Columnist Ryan Dukeman reflects on his time at Princeton, and Columnist Ryan Chavez explains why a Mexican-themed party is problematic. PAGE 8

firmed, then you have it for life. So I was appointed by a fellow Princetonian, Tom Kean [‘57], for whom I had worked as a very young lawyer in his first election campaign, which was the subject of a recount, and he won it by 1,700 votes out of 2.5 to 3 million cast. Governor Kean was very generous to me, and was looking for someone who was young, had an Ivy League education, and who wanted to make the judiciary a career, and I seemed to fit his mold. The New Jersey Superior Court has jurisdiction over everything in the state, state and federal matters, and hears everything from jaywalking to murder, from divorces to complex commercial disputes, and everything in between. I probably have sentenced about 1,000 people, presided over more than 150 jury trials, and handled thousands of motions, applications, nonjury procedures of every stripe and variety that you can imagine. I was given my lifetime tenure position when Governor Christine Todd Whitman reappointed me to the bench. I obviously didn’t serve the full term, since I left ostensibly to go back into private practice, but television beckoned, literally a couple of weeks after I left when the O.J. Simpson trial came along, and CNBC, for which I worked before Fox, engaged me to be one of their legal experts in the O.J. case.

DP: Is there a reason you decided to leave the judiciary?

AN: You know I publicly stated my reason about a 100 times, and it sounds a little crass but it’s true: I was tired of being poor. My work on the judiciary had evolved into a lot of teaching. I was teaching full-time at Seton Hall Law School, and I was lecturing all over the country, where we’re not allowed to be compensated for it. It was an era where young lawyers were making a lot more than judges were in their first year of practice right after law school. I suppose if I had been among the elder judges, rather than among the younger, who had already accumulated a nest egg, I might have looked at it differently. But at the time Tom Kean appointed me, I was the youngest in the state, I’m still the youngest to have achieved, or it’s not an achievement since it’s biological, still the youngest to have received a lifetime position. But the prohibition on lifetime incomes and the low judicial salary drew me back into private practice, in my own case, not imagining that television would come along. DP: How does your prior service as a judge affect the way you approach and analyze the news? Does it give you a different perspective?

AN: It does, it does. You know, I have been teaching for many years the Constitution at Delaware Law School and Seton Hall Law School, and now at Brooklyn Law School. So I tend to look at what the government does through the focus of a person who has studied the Constitution, and also through the focus of a judge, thinking what I would do if I were there. I try to take the side of the Constitution, rather than the side of one of the litigants in the case, probably because of my years as a judge. At Fox, for example, I serve a couple of roles, one is to explain the law and the Constitution, and in my case as well Economics 101. So, those not educated in the law, in the Constitution, or in Economics 101 can understand it. Because of my fairly well-defined ideological views as the house libertarian here, I’m also called upon to express my small government view of these issues. It’s just the way my work here has evolved. I’ve written nine books on the Constitution, and they’re titled “It’s Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong,” “Nation of Sheep,” you know they’re all written from the small-government, Jeffersonian, Madisonian, since we’re talking about Princeton, view of the Constitution, as opposed to the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson view of the Constitution. See NAPOLITANO page 2

Today on Campus 10:30 a.m.: Commencement for the graduating senior Class of 2017 will begin, ending at 12:30 p.m.

WEATHER

By Abhiram Karuppur

HIGH

60˚

LOW

50˚

Cloudy with showers. chance of rain:80 percent


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