retaliation from the University, citing violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination and the Genetic Information Non discrimination Act.
onds.“ И я тебя .”
The news came just a day ahead of most students’ return to cam pus. In the week prior to official move-in, around 20 percent of Yeh and NCW students were living in temporary housing.
By Brenden Garza Staff News Writer
date of Sept. Hotchkiss3. also clarified that first-years were now allowed to move in Sept. 3 — but could not gain access to their assignments until 9:30 p.m., “to support their attendance at Orientation events throughout the day.”
In early September 2021, the University denied her request. On or about Sept. 10, 2021, McKinley filed a discrimina
considered too young to play. So, like the spoiled brat I was, I bawled in the waiting room until they let me sit next to my sister on the bench. In light of my jealous des peration, Anna invited me to clap along to a few basic rhythms. Giving in to my snotty pleas, she took me on as a student.
By Ellen Li | Contributing Prospect Writer
Former employee files lawsuit against U., alleges religious discrimination in COVID-19 policy exemptions
Largest incoming class in University history welcomed in Opening Exercises, Pre-Rade
of Opening Exercises and the feel ings of renewal and promise that accompany them,” he added. “Our gradual recovery from the long pandemic has heightened that sense of Eisgruberjoy.” also remarked on particular lessons that the pan demic has taught him, stating that “our extended experience with social distancing and re moteness has highlighted the value of presence and place in our lives.”“Iwant to urge you to be fully present in this special and mar velous place,” he said.
Opening Exercises mark the beginning of the academic year with an address from University President Christopher L. Eisgru ber ’83, the presentation of several undergraduate awards, and spiri tual remarks from a host of differ entEisgrubertraditions.began his address by citing the historical importance that Opening Exercises has played in welcoming new students, and the opportunity the event pro vides to “reflect on the larger pur poses that should guide our com munity as we begin another year.”
See PRE-RADE page 5
Friday September 9, 2022 vol. CXLVI no. 15 www. dailyprincetonian .com{ } Twitter: @princetonian Facebook: The Daily Princetonian YouTube: The Daily Princetonian Instagram: @dailyprincetonian WeekThis Campuson ARTS | Princeton Triangle Club Frosh Week Show Friday, Sept. 9, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., McCarter Theatre. In an annual tradition, the Princeton Triangle Club will perform their Frosh Week Show, titled “2SIXY & I Know It” at McCarter Theatre. The Office of the President is hosting a portrait unveiling for alum Bill Bradley ’65, former U.S. Senator and Basketball Hall of Fame honoree. Women’s Rugby vs. Army — Saturday, Sept. 10, 1 p.m., Sherrerd Field.SPORTS | In their home opener and Alumni Appreciation game, women’s rugby is set to play Army. ON CAMPUS | Bill Bradley ’65 Portrait Unveiling — Friday, Sept. 9, 4:30 p.m., Dodds Atrium, Robertson Hall Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998
See LIGHT page 12 The PROSPECT
Hope Perry is the Head Podcast Editor at the ‘Prince’ who has covered USG, US politics, and student activ ism. She can be reached at hperry@ princeton.edu or on Twitter @hopem perry.
Brenden Garza is a staff reporter for the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at bg8077@princeton.edu or on Insta gram @brenden.garza
versity Chapel after Opening Ex ercises and then through FitzRan dolph Gate during their Pre-Rade.
By Sandeep Mangat associate News Editor
U. AFFAIRS
McKinley claims in the suit that she complained to supervi sors and spoke with her employ er about the discrimination and harassment she faced, and that the University had “actual or constructive knowledge” of the ongoing discriminatory behav ior and harassment. McKinley claims that the University failed to take “prompt and appropriate remedial action” to prevent or ensure that further discrimi nation and harassment did not takeMcKinleyplace. is seeking restitu tion for “mental anguish and economic damages,” as well as to “compensate Plaintiff for harm to her professional and personal reputation and loss of career fulfillment.”
“Lazy, lazy girl,” An na’s voice still echoes in my mind. “So talented, so
All students in Yeh, NCW allowed to move into dorms on schedule after construction uncertainty
Opening Exercises for the Class of 2026 were held in front of Nas sau Hall, rather than in the Uni versity’s Chapel, the event’s site sinceFirst-years1929. paraded through the iconic gate on their way to the seats arranged in front of Nassau Hall in a change to the traditional timeline. In previous years, the class has walked out of the Uni
The largest first-year class in Princeton’s history marched through FitzRandolph Gate in the Pre-Rade on Sunday, Sept. 4, marking the beginning of their four years at the University.
Aslazy.”I got busier at school, I got even lazier. I disappointed Anna ev ery dreaded Monday. My
U. AFFAIRS
I was no prodigy. My beginner’s enthusiasm was not paired with the discipline necessary for regular practice. And be sides, when asked to play in front of anyone be sides Anna or my family, my body would vibrate head to toe with poorly suppressed terror.
“Я люблю тебя .” I love you.The
His appeal for students to ac tively immerse themselves in
tion complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the University. On Sept. 16, McKin ley was terminated by the Uni versity.Inresponse to inquiries from the ‘Prince’ regarding the lawsuit, University Spokesper son Ayana Okoya said that the Princeton “handled this former employee’s accommodation re quest fairly” and “in accordance with the applicable laws and in ternalMcKinleypolicies.”has filed her suit with Vlasac & Shmaruk, LLC, which did not respond to mul tiple requests for comment on her“Webehalf.feel our client has a strong case as she was granted religious exemption to the vac cine policy, but denied accom modation for others,” McKin ley’s attorney David Cassidy said in an interview with The Princ eton Patch. “The University is taking a restrictive view with theCassidypolicy.” also said in the in terview with the Patch that the University did not take into account the fact that McKin ley worked from home for 18 months.According to the suit, McKin ley believes she faced religious discrimination and unlawful
ELLEN LI / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN STAFF
In an email to The Daily Princetonian, Deputy University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss announced that beginning Sept. 3 “at 8 a.m. all sophomores, ju niors, and seniors with [New Col lege West] NCW/Yeh assignments can move into their academic year rooms.”Previous communications from the University stated that it was possible that more than 25 percent of NCW and Yeh students would have had temporary hous ing assignments, primarily in the former First College buildings, if construction remained incom plete after the scheduled move-in
By Hope Perry Staff News Writer
The University “intend[s] to defend the litigation vigorously and expect to vindicate our ac tions in court,” Okoya told the ‘Prince.’
STUDENT LIFE
“I’ve always enjoyed the energy
A former University budget analyst, Kate McKinley, filed a lawsuit against Princeton on the grounds of religious dis crimination on Aug. 16. In the suit, McKinley alleges that Uni versity officials harassed and fired her due to her faith-based objections to the University’s COVID-19McKinleypolicies.first joined the University in May 2017. The University informed employ ees in June 2021 that COVID-19 vaccination would be required for continued employment. A month later, McKinley sought and was granted a religious ac commodation to the policy, ac cording to a brief she filed with the United States District Court for New McKinleyJersey. then requested additional accommodations to University policy in August 2021, in the hopes of exemptions from mask-wearing, contact tracing, and saliva collection and testing. The University, at the time, required asymptom atic testing by all employees re gardless of vaccination status.
‘Not like light from dead stars’: Russian, piano, & life leading up to brain surgery reply pops onto my screen within sec And I you. I have never been com fortable with the word love. My family never made the casual habit of it, never used it to punc tuate a phone call, but in Russian, I have acquired a clumsy assertiveness, a bold naivete only per missible for foreign lan guage beginners. I’m a babbling child again, learning a new emotive world through trial and error.I’ve been practicing with my old piano teach er, Anna, with whom I recently got back in touch.Mygrandparents enjoy reminding me of the day Anna and I met — my 8-year-old sister had just begun piano lessons, but I, at 4 years old, was
In a similar vein, Konstantin Howard ’24 messaged the ‘Prince’ that he “was already living in a post-COVID Princeton without testing and masking” since he had tested positive in the Spring 2022 semester, “like much of the student body.” This past spring, students who tested positive were removed from the mandatory testing proto col for the following 90 days.
Students are “no longer required to submit asymptomatic test sam ples” for COVID-19, according to a memo from University administra tors. The memo, which was sent out to the entire student body on July 28, also states that booster vaccines will no longer be required, mark ing a shift from previous policies.
The memo cited in the email said that “the University continues to monitor the campus” and that they have “adjusted COVID-19 policies to decrease the number of manda tory mitigation measures.”
share a similar updated COVID-19 policy.Cornell announced on July 27 that it does not require the CO VID-19 booster and said it “will dis continue its supplemental PCR (na sal/saliva) testing sites on Aug. 31.” Cornell noted that “antigen tests will continue to be available to all students, faculty and staff who may wish to test following travel, attendance at large gatherings, ill ness or potential exposure.”
“Thisfall.isjust the nail in the coffin of Princeton not caring about its disabled students,” she said.
“As usual, the administration is lagging behind both the student body and the country as a whole in arriving at this policy just now,” Howard said. “In any case, I’m just excited to get back to campus for my junior fall.”
Since the initial COVID-19 wave in the U.S. more than two years ago, the University has implemented and repeatedly revised several poli cies and measures in an attempt “to support a healthy campus,” the memo said. This latest shift rolls back major components of the pub lic health infrastructure the Uni versity has deployed throughout the pandemic, in line with the turn to “individual responsibility” on COVID-19 that administrators had signaled during the spring term.
ON CAMPUS
“There will be some circum stances where it is best that the COVID positive person change lo cation,” or it is possible that their roommate may be asked to move sleeping spaces if they test nega tive.Students will also be expected to “take personal responsibility” when it comes to contact tracing, Okoya added.
Addressing students who are at higher risk of contracting serious illness due to COVID-19, Marks said they should “follow their health care provider’s advice on boosters and additional doses,” wear face coverings when in the presence of others, and “avoid as much as pos sible crowded areas or spaces with high numbers of unmasked indi viduals.”Masks will no longer be required in any space on campus, but in structors “may continue to re quire masks” in teaching spaces. The memo also asks the campus community “to be considerate and respond to the requests of individ uals who prefer mask-wearing, in cluding those who may be at higher risk.”Inregards to isolation, Univer sity spokesperson Ayana Okoya said that the University is working towards a model “where the major ity of COVID-positive students will isolate in place,” she wrote in an email to The Daily Princetonian.
“At the end of the day, nothing’s stopping people from making the right choice for themselves, so hopefully people do!” he wrote.
The University encourages stu dents to look at the COVID-19 Re source Site “for more information about what to do if you test posi tive, about hosting visitors on cam pus, isolation, and more.” Students can also email covidconnector@ princeton.edu for more specific questions.
a Head News
Editor who has covered USG, Univer sity and COVID-related affairs. He can be reached at jas19@princeton.edu or on Twitter @andr3wsom.
page 2 Friday September 9, 2022The Daily Princetonian
According to a Q&A with Direc tor of Medical Services for Uni versity Health Services (UHS) Dr. Melissa Marks and Assistant Vice President of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) Robin Izzo, “no new information has arisen to lead the University to change its perspective on this public health mitigation,” since the decision to mandate the primary series of the COVID-19 vaccine, effective last fall.The University’s decision to re move the booster mandate is a re sult of “data suggest[ing] that the boosters do protect the individual, but do not significantly curb trans mission of the current prevalent COVID variants,” according to the email.Additionally, although “partici pating in the asymptomatic test ing program is no longer required,” the University asks students and employees to “voluntarily continue testing monthly to help the Univer sity monitor variants circulating on campus and community spread to inform our strategies.”
Some students expressed feeling confused and upset after the an nouncement. Julia Elman ’23 told The Daily Princetonian that she “never imagined” that administra tors would make testing optional in the
Madeleine LeBeau is a Staff Writer for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at mlebeau@princeton.edu, on Insta gram @madeleinelebeau, or on Twit terAndrew@MadeleineLeBeau.Somervilleis
But in the case of a suspected cluster of cases, Okoya said the health team would conduct contact tracing.OnJuly 25, three days prior to Princeton’s memo, Yale announced that it will continue requirements that all students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral/postgraduate train ees “be fully vaccinated, [and] to receive a booster when eligible.” Though varying on the booster requirement, Yale and Princeton
Jack Amen ’25 told the ‘Prince’ he could not understand why “the University would get rid of mea sures that are so easy to enact and enforce and cause so little disrup tion for the sake of ‘individual choice.’”But,despite being disappointed, he said he remains hopeful.
“There’s literally no reason to not [enforce] testing this semester,” El man added. “I have never felt more unsafe at this school.”
Other students said they felt re lief as a result of the announce ment, lauding what they see as a return to normal this fall.
Clarissa Allert ’25 said she is “glad that testing isn’t required this year because it will give a sense of nor malcy for the upcoming year.”
Asymptomatic testing optional, boosters not required: U. resumes ‘pre- COVID-19’ life
By Madeleine LeBeau & Andrew Somerville Staff News Writer and Head News Editor
The memo contained another policy change regarding visitors on campus, informing students that the University has “changed our Visitor Policy to eliminate the proof of attestation requirement for visitors to campus.” With this new policy, “visitors must either be fully vaccinated OR have recently testedBuildingnegative.”access policies have also been changed, allowing pub lic spaces like Frist Campus Center, Firestone Library, and the Univer sity Chapel to be open to the public without TigerCard access during certain hours, as they were prior to theNewpandemic.University employees will be given five “COVID-19 days” to use as self-isolation days if they test positive for COVID-19 or to care for a loved one who tested positive. Similarly, the campus isolation policy for students continues to follow “the CDC and NJ Department of Health isolation requirement[s],” the memo stated.
page 3Friday September 9, 2022 The Daily Princetonian
page 4 Friday September 9, 2022The Daily Princetonian
The University found alle gations of research miscon duct against Princeton Ger rymandering Project (PGP) Director and neuroscience professor Sam Wang to be “without merit,” a University spokesperson told The Daily Princetonian. The University has officially completed and closed all internal investiga tions regarding Wang, the spokesperson said.
“Following the procedures outlined in the Rules and Procedures of the Faculty of Princeton University, an ad hoc committee of the Uni versity’s Faculty carefully reviewed the allegations of research misconduct lodged against Dr. Wang, and found those allegations to be with out merit,” Hotchkiss wrote in an email to the ‘Prince’ in lateHotchkissAugust. said that the Dean of the Faculty had “ac cepted the committee’s find ings, and the matter is now considered closed.”
Lia Opperman is an Assis tant News Editor who often cov ers University affairs, student life, and local news. She can be reached at liaopperman@ princeton.edu, on Instagram @ liamariaaaa, or on Twitter @ oppermanlia.
The Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Award, given to the mem ber of this year’s senior class with the highest academic standing for all preceding college work at the University was given to Aleksa MilojevićFollowing’23. Opening Exercises, members of the Class of 2026 marched around Nassau Hall for the Pre-Rade, cheered on by family members, students in other class years, and alumni.
PRE-RADE
their communities formed the theme of his address. He present ed Jordan Salama ’19, author of this year’s Pre-read, as an example of someone who did this well.
The new dining points system is different from existing Paw Points, which any student can elect to add to their Ti gerCard regardless of meal plan type, though students will now be able to use Paw Points at participating in-town locations as well.
and others. The late meal program that allows students on meal plans to buy $8 worth of late lunch and dinner at Frist on weekdays remains unchanged.Pointsare automati cally loaded onto the TigerCards of students with the unlimited meal plan at the start of the semester, and students will be able to check their dining points bal ance through an online portal. All first-year and sophomore students are required to hold the un limited meal plan.
Annie Rupertus is a sophomore from Philadel phia and a News staff writ er who covers USG for the ‘Prince.’ She can be reached at arupertus@princeton. edu or @annierupertus on Instagram and Twitter.
Casey Beidel ’24 and Brendan Kehoe ’24 received the George B. Wood Legacy Sophomore Prize, and Beatrix Bondor ’23 and Lucy Sirrs ’23 shared the George B. Wood Legacy Junior Prize.
Elliot Lee ’26 said marching in the Pre-Rade felt “monumental.”
Legislative website.toNeuroscience501A:oneN.J.).N.J.),(D-N.J.),resentedmapN.J.).Rep.ofcumbentelectionmapclaimedpersonalulatingalleged“memberscourtThatgroups,ingPrincetonStatepartisanmissioncraticpassedTheCommission,Apportionmentrespectively.redistrictingmapthatwascreatedbyDemomembersoftheComandhadsomebisupport,butsomeRepublicanssuedtheGerrymanderProject,amongotherafteritspassage.suitwasdismissedinonFeb.3.AccordingtotheGlobe,of[Wang’s]staffthathewasmanipdatatomatchhisagenda.”TheGlobethattheDemocraticthatpassedhurtthere-prospectsofoneinandrepresentativeNewJersey’s7thdistrictTomMalinowski(D-Ontheotherhand,thehelpedthedistrictsrepbyReps.AndyKimJoshGottheimer(D-andMikieSherrill(D-Wangisscheduledtoteachcoursethisfall—NEUCellularandCircuits—accordingtheOfficeoftheRegistrar
“I think it was just a really good time for students to see each oth er, interact, and mingle,” Wijaya added.
Sandeep Mangat is an Associate News Editor who has reported on labor shortages on and off campus, Univer sity guidelines regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, international student life, and research led by Princeton faculty. He can be reached at smangat@princ eton.edu and on Twitter @s_smangat.
from page 1
University closes Sam Wang investigation, finds research misconduct allegations to be ‘without merit’
The Globe first reported the allegations against Wang on April 28. The Globe also claimed that Wang had a “possible Title IX violation” under investigation by the University, but in a state ment to the ‘Prince’ in May, University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss denied this claim. The research mis conduct and toxic workplace
Starting on Saturday, Sept. 3, the University is providing students on the unlimited meal plan with $150 worth of din ing points each semester for purchasing food and non-alcoholic beverages at various on- and offcampusAccordinglocations.toan email announcement from the Undergraduate Stu dent Government (USG) on Aug. 22, the program provides “an opportu nity for students to con nect with each other and the town of Princeton without having to wor ry about paying out of pocket.”USGCommunity Din ing Task Force Chair Ste phen Daniels ’24 told the ‘Prince’ he hopes this program will improve access to activities like bonding with friends over food and meeting professors for coffee, as “eating meals together is a huge part of building relationships at Princ eton.”Participating loca tions in town currently include Jammin’ Crêpes on Nassau Street, Proof Pizzeria, Small World Coffee on Witherspoon Street, Say Cheez Café, and The Bent Spoon, though the TigerCard website includes a note encouraging students to “stay tuned for more offcampus locations in the nearThefuture.”website also states that points will roll over from the fall semester into the spring, but un used points will expire at the end of the aca demic year. Sophomores will also have the option to put dining points to wards eating club dues in the spring.
By Annie Rupertus Staff News Writer
On campus, points will be applicable at most dining locations, including Frist Campus Center, Coffee Club, EQuad Cafe, the U-Store,
munity as a whole,” he added. Annabelle Edwards ’26 of New College West echoed that senti ment, telling the ‘Prince’ that the Pre-Rade was “a nice welcome to Princeton.”“Itwasreally helpful that every one was in their college T-shirts, that helped you identify people that you hadn’t seen before,” she said.Edwards added that as she was moving into NCW, she was struck by the fact that she was among the first cohort of people to live there. Jocelyne Wijaya ’26, another member of NCW, said that for this reason, marching in the Pre-Rade felt “honorable and very exciting.”
U. AFFAIRS
The program comes as a result of efforts by Uni versity Services and the USG Community Dining Task Force, which ran a trial run community dining program last year.
“[Salama] learns from his trav els because he engages energeti cally and imaginatively with the places that he visits. He is fully present to the people he meets and he lets them be fully present to him,” he Eisgrubersaid.urged students to not only build personal connections with each other and with profes sors during their time here, but also make time for quiet reflec tion.“Cross Lake Carnegie and walk along the Towpath by the canal,” he said. “Leave your phone be hind occasionally. Give yourself a chance to get lost in thought.”
KATHERINE DAILEY
USG
redeemablewithprovidesinitiativestudentsdiningpointsatNassauStreetrestaurants
Wang, who served as a crucial figure in New Jersey’s redistricting efforts, served as an advisor to John E. Wallace Jr. and Judge Philip Carchman, the chair of the Congressional Redistricting Commission and the nonpartisan 11th member of the
Honor Prize, presented to sopho more students who display “ex ceptional academic achievement in the work of their first year.”
“Any other investigations involving Dr. Wang have been completed and closed with no findings of policy vi olations,” Hotchkiss wrote.
Dean of the College Jill Dolan also presented several undergrad uateAryahonors.Maheshwari ’25 and Yuri Yu ’25 received the Freshman First
/ THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN First-year students in the Class of 2026 are welcomed at Opening Exercises outside of Nassau Hall.
“[The Pre-Rade] seems to be a part of a historical legacy, and I think that’s very significant,” he told The Daily Princetonian in an interview.“Ithink it definitely helped us feel more integrated into the com
page 5Friday September 9, 2022 The Daily Princetonian ACROSS 1 This past Tuesday, for short 5 Not above 7 Sheep-related 8 Like much cryptocurrency 9 “___ you!” DOWN1 Big curse 2 “The ___ Went Down to Georgia” 3 Really big football players, for short 4 Partner of rods, in the eye 5 Marries THE MINI CROSSWORD See page 8 for more MINI #1
“I am looking forward to devoting my full attention this fall to teaching and to my research in neuroscience and democracy,” Wang wrote in an email to the ‘Prince.’ He referred all further com ments to Hotchkiss.
Wang said he is ready to spend his time continuing his role as a professor and a researcher at the University.
In break from tradition, Opening Exercises held outside Nassau Hall
The allegations of research misconduct surrounded New Jersey’s redistricting ef forts earlier this year. PGP staffers had raised objec tions, alleging that a report Wang had written on New Jersey’s congressional redis tricting was biased and that he had an “agenda” of favor ing Democrats, according to reporting by the New Jersey Globe that cited unnamed staffers. In the Globe’s re porting, Wang was also ac cused of mistreating those who worked for him and en gaging in “retaliatory acts and job threats.”
Continued
“I am really excited about what this means for the student body and for the meaningful im pact that USG can contin ue to have on the student experience,” Daniels wrote. “This should be viewed as a start and not as an end for what we can do to facilitate com munity.”
By Michelle Liu Staff Constructor
USG
USG’s email announce ment noted that greater flexibility and more food options near the E-Quad were incorporated as a result of feedback from the pilot program.
By Lia Opperman Assistant News Editor
allegations resulted in a months-long internal inves tigation by the University.
page 6 Friday September 9, 2022The Daily Princetonian
By Candace Do and Angel Kuo Head Photo Editor and Associate Photo EditorA
Beyond Poe Field first look at Yeh College and New College West
page 7Friday September 9, 2022 The Daily Princetonian
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a cheerleader’s tool 44 Figures that some work on for summer 45 Result of a Breathalyzerfailedtest, for short 47 Curtain 48 Very, very long time 49 Nice, in Nogales 50 Texter’s disapproval 51 What’s left over after a show 53 “There’s 104 days of summer vacation and school comes along just to ___ it” (“Phineas and Ferb” theme lyric) 55 Dean Dolan dept. 56 Princeton dorm fig. 57 Spirit for many summer drinks ACROSS 1 100- or 200-meter 6 San Fran footballer 7 Traveled by car 8 Doesn’t look so good? 9 Yells DOWN 1 Forest Moon of ___, Ewok home planet 2 Current zodiac sign 3 ___ Gay (plane that dropped the atomic bomb) 4 Not even once 5 Chunk of hair ACROSS 1 It’s not a good look 6 Ancient Greek market 7 Wheel of Fortune host Pat 8 Really ham it up 9 -ish: Abbr. DOWN 1 Bag for a diamond 2 Best performance 3 Places for punching and kicking 5 Movie star Chris 6 Fall garden tool The Minis MINI #2 MINI #3 Summertime By Juliet Corless and Emily Wang Associate Puzzles Editor and Contributing Constructor
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page 8 Friday September 9, 2022The Daily Princetonian Scan to checkanswersyourandtrymoreofourpuzzlesonline!
ACROSS fruit necessities, for short this reason proj. Early graduationsummertradition Night Lights ___ pizza minigame)(Mario Like sunburned skin Gone for lunch: Abbr. What a professor may get at Wawa (according to the Triangle Club) They may be golden or double-stuffed Some cold brews Where to hike Macchu Picchu Summertime water sport First pope to be called “The Great” NASA, UN, or AARP, e.g. “Ba-di-bop-ba-do-bin-bop-in,”ordeerpoop Horse and buggy drivers Preceeder of up or cute Japanese currency Prospect, e.g., for short Craigslist ad opener: Abbr. Increasingly legal oil Measure of liquidity Broadway spectacles Summer destinationcruise Four-baggers: Abbr. Flatten one’s hand Customs abbr. Not one’s Full or new Snorkeling sight Good ‘Wheel of Fortune’ buy for “Panama Canal” Chanticleers sch. in Myrtle Beach “Wish you were ___” six-pack Summer internship?branding That’s gonna leave a mark section for the Frosh Survey and Senior Survey gotta get there!” in favor French vineyard It may pop on a plane Set of Gothic dorms on Princeton campus (with air conditioning) Ready to go Domineering Nemo’s shark friend in “Finding Nemo” Restless desires With (enthusiastically)___ Commonly Top secret agency in Ft. Meade Sing-song syllable Half
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From former Cambridge re search fellow Noah Carl: “peo ple who should know better have allowed once-great sci entific journals to become a platform for woke activism” and “[I] have covered Nature’s descent into woke activism … now seems that Science is go ing the same way.”
In it I wrote: “Today, stu dents are taught Darwin as the ‘father of evolutionary the ory,’ a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injuri ous and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience. Racists, sex ists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements ‘val idated’ by their presence in ‘Descent’ as support for erro neous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically … The scientific community can reject the legacy of bias and harm in the evolutionary sciences by recognizing, and acting on, the need for diverse voices and making inclusive practices central to evolution aryThisinquiry.”piece inspired a large outpouring of anger from the “anti-woke” crowd, including a cluster of senior biologists, and even produced calls for me to be fired from Princeton. Obviously, I wasn’t. But why does this Becausematter?science has a prob lem. Systemic gender inequi ties, sexism, racism, ableism, colonialist histories and their neocolonialist present exist in science.Numerous recent peerreviewed articles, essays and books demonstrate the truth of these realities (see here,
A ll shouldgrammingUniversityPrincetonprobeacces
The final example I offer is one of my own. On May 21, 2021, Science published an in vited editorial on “‘The De scent of Man,’ 150 years on.”
The trip to Senegal seemed like a perfect oppor tunity. It would be a chance to practice my French in an authentic Francophone en vironment, trace the his tory of the United States’ founding sin of slavery, and
lion. Perhaps the offices or ganizing the trip knew that Senegal’s Jewish commu nity ran thin and, accord ingly, took no measures to include Jewish students on the trip. But the fact that there isn’t a large Jewish presence in Senegal is all the more reason for the trip to accommodate Jewish stu dents.InDakar, Senegal’s capital and largest city, the Israeli Embassy has to provide Ko sher food. Even Chabad, a global organization known for creating a Jewish pres ence in places devoid of one, is absent in the country. Any observant Jewish stu dent on the trip would re quire Kosher food; in going to a country without many Kosher eateries, it would only make sense to have ap propriate arrangements for such a Furthermore,student. just be cause the trip is focused on the “vibrancy of Islam and Christianity in Senegal” does not mean that obser vant Jewish students would not be interested in such a trip. Many Jewish students want to learn about the other faiths and cultures derived from our common origin. A trip to Senegal where one can “witness the peaceful coexistence of Christians and Muslims in the land” seems valuable to practitioners of any reli
On Aug. 18, 2022, Science published an essay by an astrophysicist titled “How astrophysics helped me em brace my nonbinary gender identity—in all its complexi ty.” In it, the author concludes “Physics is always evolving, and gender is, too. When we understand that things are more complex than they ap pear, we learn. When scien tists embrace the complexity of the universe, our science can only improve.”
On Aug. 12, 2021, SciAm published an essay entitled “Modern Mathematics Con fronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” which contained this: “Racism, sexism and other forms of systematic oppres sion are not unique to math ematics, and they certainly are not new, yet many in the field still deny their existence … statistics on the mathemat ics profession are difficult to ignore.”OnFeb. 3, 2022 Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals wrote “Science needs affirma tive action” that started with: “As science struggles to cor rect systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, mak ing it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts— including among scientists.”
sible to students of differ ent faith backgrounds, but especially programming sponsored by the Office of Religious Life (ORL). Yet, the ORL-sponsored Senegal Pilgrimage over fall break is blatantly inaccessible to any observant Jew. The trip’s description might as well declare “Not for Jews.”
JON ORT / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Murray-Dodge Hall, which houses the Office of Religious Life.
These criticisms have spread from blogs to the edi torial pages of The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.
James Watson or E.O. Wilson, as people whose support for white supremacy should be given a pass because of their scientific achievements.”
Here are a few examples in SciAm and Science that have the “anti-woke” crowd foam ing at the mouth:
These are assertions made by the scholar we recognize as a genius and the originator of much in our understand ing of the processes of evolu tion, and if not countered and corrected, can be a gut punch to some readers, a signal that they do not belong, are not equal or valued. This can be true even if many readers (such as older white cis-male ones) don’t notice it.
Founded in 1845 and 1880 re spectively, SciAm is the oldest and top popular science mag azine and Science is the of ficial journal of the American Association for the Advance ment of Science. Not exactly radical lefty ‘zines. Yet both have been called out repeat edly as “too woke” and “antiscience.”Whatis driving this cluster of largely (but not exclusively) white, senior, and cis-gender scholars and pundits to com plain? What have the SciAm and Science editorial boards done that is so horrible? Sim ply put, they have recognized that times are changing and including previously exclud ed and marginalized voices, experiences, and perspectives in their pages is not only the right thing to do, but also the
Science scholars and jour nals must publicly and clearly repudiate racist and sexist as sertions, even those made by icons, and show how they are scientifically incorrect while pursuing constructive ways forward (see an example of this in the journal Nature Hu man Behaviour recently). This is not some radical “woke” non-scientific assertion, it is a valid, intellectually robust, and necessary one. The edi torial boards of SciAm, Sci
dents of all religions, fails to provide for the religious needs of Jewish students. This trip will continue in spite of its exclusionary nature toward Jewish stu dents, just as the Univer sity will continue to hold classes on the major Jew ish holidays of Rosh Hasha nah and Yom Kippur, and host opening exercises in a Christian chapel. I look forward to returning to an incredibly accepting and supportive community, but this community will exist in the CJL and Chabad, with few spaces in between.
Agustín Fuentes is a professor in the Department of Anthropol ogy at Princeton, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Ad vancement of Science. This is his inaugural column as a faculty columnist at the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at afuentes2@princ eton.edu.
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and many more).
necessary thing to do for a better and more vibrant sci ence of the 21st century.
As for me, this is the start of my third year on campus, so I’m still learning the ropes and realities of this institu tion. I’m extremely hopeful and inspired by what I see in the increasing diversity (of all sorts) in the student body and the energy and potential it’s unleashing. While the faculty has a long path to diversifica tion and inclusion ahead, I’m not daunted and deeply ap preciate the quality and tenor of ongoing discussions and actions on campus. I look for ward to more listening, think ing, discussing, and acting on these topics in the pages of The Daily Princetonian and in the life of Princeton Univer sity and hope you do, too.
From University of Chicago biology professor Emeritus Jerry Coyne: “Scientific Amer ican is changing from a pop ular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science mag azine” and “it is not science: it’s politics and sociology with a Leftist bent.”
Agustín Fuentes Faculty Columnist
What the ‘anti-woke’ crowd gets wrong about the calls for diversity in science
gion, including to those of Judaism.Itcould be that offices like the ORL and ODI feel no need to include Jewish stu dents under the assumption that the Center for Jewish Life (CJL) and Chabad meet all of our needs. They may be surprised to learn that Jews, especially those at a secular liberal arts school like Princeton, can also be interested in non-Jewish re ligious and interfaith op portunities. Our interests are just as diverse as those of students of any other cul tural backgrounds, though it becomes difficult to pur sue these interests when the University outside of the CJL does not accommodate our needs. Even the ORL, which is supposedly meant to serve as a haven for stu
Theodore Gross is a junior from Monroe, Conn. concen trating in politics. He can be reached at twgross@princ eton.edu.
These journals are opening their pages to serious discus sion of issues of discrimina tion and bias in science not necessarily faced by most se nior cis-male white scholars — which is a critical compo nent of change.
On May 24, 2022, SciAm published an opinion piece entitled, “Science Must Not Be Used to Foster White Su premacy” that noted “scien tists need to take an active role in fighting both violence and white supremacy … sci entists have too often default ed to defending their peers or intellectual forebears, like
ence, and many other science journals, recognize this real ity and are doing something about it.
ecently a select group of scien tists, scholars, and pundits have de nounced key science journals, specifically Scientific Ameri can (SciAm) and Science, as going “woke” and joining the “social justice” bandwagon.
This issue is so pressing to the practice of science that the National Academies of Sci ences, Engineering and Medi cine is currently conducting a consensus study on the topic. Many science departments and programs, and many prominent scientists, have played (and still play) roles in maintaining structures of systemic bias and the harms they produce. The point of my editorial (and why Science ran it) was that systems of rac ism and sexism are powerful, capable of blinding even bril liant scientific minds, such as Darwin’s.Wedo (and should) teach Darwin as a brilliant scien tist, which he was. But when reading “Descent of Man,” students who are not white and don’t identify as male en counter assertions about their lower value as humans, their cognitive deficiencies, and their being “less than.”
We Princetonians consti tute the heart of one of the most heralded and prominent centers of knowledge creation on the planet. Princeton is an epicenter of scientific excel lence and influential in shap ing how science (writ large) is practiced, perceived and deployed globally. Are we leaning into the necessities of the 21st century with con viction and action? Or are we sidelined by attention to the “anti-woke” hysteria and hesi tant to plunge ahead? I hope all Princetonians are driven to ask and carefully consider these questions and what to do about the answers to them.
R
This Office of Religious Life program is failing to include Jewish students
Theodore Gross Guest Contributor
I matriculated at Princ eton in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, so I have not had many opportunities to travel abroad during my time here. “Take advantage of traveling on Princeton’s dime” was a piece of advice that I heard often, but such opportunities have been hard to come by as a low-in come student who has only left the country once when driving across the border to Canada. Princeton was sup posed to offer a world of op portunities to travel, and so far, my experience has been sorely disappointing.
hopefully meet some cool people along the way. My excitement quickly dissi pated when I followed the link to the ORL website and saw that the trip would leave on a Friday afternoon and conflict with the start of the Jewish Sabbath later that evening. I was disap pointed, but not necessar ily surprised: since enter ing Princeton, numerous events and trips have been barred to me and my Jewish peers due to conflicts with Shabbat. The trip would similarly coincide with the final days of the Jewish har vest festival of Sukkot, dur ing which work and travel is also populationthanexistent,communityAndmeantconsideringcificthe(ODI),ficeednot.”strictlyantional:theirstrictionsstatementhonestmayWhileforbidden.thecoordinatorshavesimplymadeanoversight,theirondietaryreforthetripmakesmistakesseeminten“Vegetarianandvegfoodwillbeplentiful,KosherfoodwillForatripjointlyhostbytheORLandtheOfofDiversity&Inclusionitseemsasthoughcoordinatorshadspegroupsinmindwhenwhatdiversityandwhomtoinclude.Jewswereleftout.InSenegal,theJewishisclosetonon-makingupless0.01percentoftheofover17mil
page 9 www. dailyprincetonian .com }{ Friday September 9, 2022 Opinion
Mike Kentz Guest Contributor
page 10 www. dailyprincetonian .com }{ Friday September 9, 2022
John Rogers ’80, captain of the 1979–80 Princeton basketball team (and coincidentally also Obama’s cam paign finance chairman in Illinois), relayed a similar sentiment from his experiences. He said that Carril “could tell each player what they were think ing when they did what they did … that’s hard to do. That’s hard just to re member where everyone was, let alone remember what they were thinking, and get into their head and visualize what they visualized, and then help shape that vision so they don’t make the same mistake again.”
secondsCarril’sleft.effects were felt much fur ther than just the result of the games he coached, or the famous upsets he nearly pulled off, or the one famous 1996 upset he did pull off. He was not just an old guy from a little underdog school who finally got the big win. He was clearly much more than that.
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As another example, a year after Carril’s retirement in 1996, newly-ap pointed head coach Bill Carmody was in the process of leading his Princeton team to a 27–2 overall record when they matched up against Niagara Univer sity in the finals of the ECAC Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden in New York. At one point in the game, the Purple Eagles switched to a tri angle-and-two defense, a rare defense few practice to beat. During a timeout, several of the Tiger players asked Car mody how they should counter the defense. Carmody responded, “You are smart guys. You figure it out.” Not only did the Tigers go on to win the game 61–52, but they scored every single bas ket off of an assist, 21 in all. After the game, Niagara coach Jack Armstrong commented, amazed, “To score every basket off [of] a pass is picturesque.”
Pete Carril’s passing led me to dust off my senior thesis
The passing of Pete Car ril, former head coach of the Princeton University men’s basketball team, has sent shockwaves through the bas ketball world, inside and outside of Princeton.Hisfabled Princeton offense, ruf fled appearance, good nature, and leg endary teaching skills left an impact on all those who knew him, along with those who Fourteendidn’t.years ago, as a senior at Georgetown University, I sat in a li brary, trying to come up with an idea for an all-important senior thesis proj ect for my American Studies degree.
toppled heavy-favorite Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential prima ry, and the buzz of his campaign was gaining momentum in Washington, D.C. as the election drew nearer.
The core of Carril’s management philosophy was trust. On Feb. 25, 1975, the Princeton Tigers played a highly ranked University of Virginia team in Charlottesville, Va. At the time, all of Carril’s assistant coaches were out re cruiting, and Carril was the only coach present. With Princeton clinging to a 35–29 lead with 15:00 remaining in the second half, Carril was ejected from the game for arguing a call. Coach Car ril then put the team into the hands of substitute Peter Molloy ’76, and the Tigers would go on to win the game 55–50. The game propelled the Tigers into the National Invitational Tour nament, which they would eventually win. Carril called the Virginia game the “highlight” of his career.
As Rogers told me in 2008, “He taught you so well… made you un derstand so well, that [I] can play with guys who played in 1972 to guys who played in 2002 [from Princeton] and we all see the same things… His legacy still lives, it’s been passed on from gen eration to generation.”
As a coach, Carril focused heavily on individual players. Sean Gregory ’98, the sharp-shooting wing of the 27–2 1998 team and a role player on the ’96 team, relayed a story featured in my thesis to illustrate the point. He laughed as he remembered Coach Carril relentlessly drilling Mitch Hen derson ’98, the team’s star point guard, now Head Coach, in weak-hand pass ing drills that might not even be seen at a youth basketball camp, much less the practice session of a Division I pro gram.“Itwould be very simple,” he said. “Mitch and a teammate in the oppo site corner. [Carril would say] ‘Mitch, 30 times, throw that pass to the cor ner with your left hand.’ Nobody ever practices that! Nobody ever practic es weak hand passing like that. But it was something very specific. And they would practice that very specific move, which isn’t complicated, but takes practice. It’s hard but if you prac tice it enough it works.”
I saw all of these things in the Obama campaign. Carril’s empathy and focus on each individual player were mirrored in the Obama cam paign’s individual voter outreach and micro-targeting — trying to reach people where they were. Obama’s ap peal, in the words of campaign man ager David Plouffe, was based on the trust of the voters, who thought he told it straight. And it’s hard to re
member, but at the outset, Obama’s campaign was the longest of long shots — a Cinderella story. There were even some common characters: along with John Rogers, Michelle Obama ’85’s brother Craig Robinson ’83 played un derTheCarril.Obama campaign is long be hind us, and so is my thesis. I had forgotten about my senior thesis un til I read the news of Carril’s death. The project was important to me: it filled a void after I was cut from the Hoya program a month after coming up with the idea. I was never coached by Carril, or Thompson, but in some ways, by the end of it, it felt like I had been. Either way, the descriptions of Coach from his former players had led me to believe he would have liked to read my paper. Even if only to have a good laugh and give me some pointers.
To understand the connection, you have to understand how Carril worked.
In my spare time, I was studying the Princeton offense and playing basketball every day as I prepared to try out for the Georgetown University basketball team, one that was then coached by the Carril-trained John Thompson III ’88, only a year removed from a Final Four run, and the only team in the fabled NCAA Big East Con ference to run the Princeton offense.
THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN ARCHIVES Pete Carril
I decided to write my thesis on the parallels between Carril’s Princeton of fense and the most exciting campaign of the day: Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Less than six months earlier, Obama had
What I realized was that while many respect the Princeton offense as a way of playing basketball, it has much deeper resonance: its tenets of a focus on individuals, empathy, and trust are the bases of all good or ganizations. And most importantly, the romanticism of Carril’s Princeton fighting a David vs. Goliath battle in the 1996 NCAA Tournament holds an inspiration for modern social move ments and campaigns.
One also shouldn’t minimize the inspirational value of Carril’s signa ture upset — the 43–41 toppling of blue-blood heavyweight UC Los An geles in the first round of the 1996 NCAA tournament, punctuated by, what else, a backdoor layup with 3.9
Mike Kentz is a journalist, high school teacher, and coach based in Savannah, Ga.
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direct impact on queer and trans (QT) communities in our region and around the world, yet this virus is indis criminate. At present, in the United States, we are seeing higher rates of MPX exposure among cisgender gay, queer or bi men who have sex with men (MSM), trans women, and sex workers of all gen ders.For this reason, several stu dents have reached out to the Gender + Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) to express their concern about how the Uni versity community will re spond to the potential impact of MPX on our campus, and the ways that fear and misin formation can foster bias and discrimination. I shared your
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Though I could hardly speak a simple sen tence in Russian, and just barely managed not to mangle my first ever ‘privyet’ to a liv ing, breathing human being, I was incredibly
A few months later, I learned that I also have an arteriovenous malformation, a tangled mass of blood vessels in my brain that puts me at high risk of seizure and hemorrhage.
desk drawer is full of bronze medals and honorable mentions from local music compe titions. And besides, if I wasn’t good enough at piano to help me get into college, what was theOnepoint?Monday, during the beginning of high school, I told Anna I was quitting.
I told her that I’ve suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome for the past six years. It’s a neuro-inflammatory disease where symp toms can worsen dramatically with exertion. Last fall, I knew my body was failing to keep up with the demands of the in-person semes ter, but I was determined to finish. By late No vember, I was vomiting every other morning, delirious with pain for eight hours a day. By finals, I could no longer get out of bed. After a few days as a prisoner in my room, I called my family, begging them to take me home. I emailed my professors, asking whether they’d pass me with D’s if I handed in blank finals.
“But Ellen, Akhmatova is not the poet you need to read. Her life was a pure hell,” Anna told me. “Russian poets are heavy drinkers. They looking for a better life in a glass of vodka. You need to read some other poetry, bright and optimistic!”
But as my vocabulary grew, the world wid ened, and my bedroom seemed to shrink. Rus sian filled me with a longing for elsewhere. I resented my failing body that could hardly sit upright for an hour, let alone survive any where outside my family’s suburban home.
My verseslaborto
cleave the mass of time and will appearinbulkcoarseclear
The next time we met, she pulled out a worn volume of Bella Akhmadulina, and showed
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “After ten years.”
excited to have toddler-level conversations with a stranger across the world. Every new expression learned was a gift, no matter how banal. ‘Kruto,’ cool, ‘tak tak tak,’ well well well, ‘mozhet byt’,’ maybe.
A few days later, she sent me a link to “Rachmaninov Concerto 2,” played by Evgeny Kissin.“Itwill make you feel better,” Anna wrote. “Listen to music, it will bring you to fairytale world, wonderful adventure. You will be Ellen in Wonderland! (Alice)”
unable to move, speak, or think. These times — these lacunae, long passages blacked out of my stream of con sciousness as if my brain were half-bathed in ink — remind me of Ionesco’s play, “Le Roi se meurt” (Exit the King). The king gradu ally loses control over his kingdom, his sub jects, his limbs, and finally, he loses sight and speech. The queen cuts the invisible threads which tie him to the world. Curtain. For most of my waking hours, I think Ionesco would pronounce me dead.But if that is death, what is life? As the king says, “Il n’y a que la littérature.” There is nothing but literature.
page 12 Friday September 9, 2022The Daily Princetonian
My verses will reach over ranges of ages over the headsofpoets and governments.
After a few weeks of practice, I gathered my courage to text Anna in Russian.
“Is it weird that I think I have a crush on the Russian language? I swear it’s not sexual,” I texted my friend, who’s also a comparative literature major.
“Do you know this poem by Akhmatova?” I wrote, along with an English translation I found of “White Night” (1911). “Ya eto obozha yu!”“Your Russian is perfect,” she wrote back. “We can trade: You teach me English, I teach you Russian! Translation of White night is awful.”Ireplied with a misspelled ‘spasiba,’ and the next time I saw her, she asked me to read “White Night” aloud to her, though I recognized less than a quarter of the words and pronounced none of them correctly. She drilled me on it as if it were a piece, asking me to repeat line after line back to her, because she wanted me to “feel the music”: its steady rhythm and ABAB rhyme, neither of which the English translator chose to preserve.
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Watching lines abound fade to pine and sunset blurs, I am drunk on a voice that sounds like yours and know that all is lost, to live is to burn in hell. I would have crossed my heart on your return.
turns.Ach,
LIGHT Continued from page 1
After that day, our interactions were lim ited to clipped birthday wishes on Facebook. She must’ve been busy with other students, but it feels so odd now, or maybe even cruel, to think of how I visited her once a week for what had practically been my entire life, and then never saw her again.
After we reconnected, Anna offered me free piano lessons. She’d moved into a senior liv ing community and looked almost the same as I remembered, though her hair was maybe whiter.When I asked her how she’d been, her an swers were brief. She’s not so busy during summertime. She returned the question, and I said I was alright, just tired and happy to see her. I described a bit what my days were like, but she said nothing in response and invited me to the piano.
My verses will reach you but not like so –not like anofarrowcupid’s hunt not like a worn penny to a coin collector and not likefromlightdead stars.
She’d switched out the piano bench for a tall-backed chair with pillows. I warned her that it had been a long time since I played, but she wouldn’t have it. She put Medtner’s “Skazka Ptichek,” “A Bird’s Tale,” before me, and I sight read through, my fingers slow and halting over foreign chords. As the piece ended, silence flooded the space between us. I was certain she must’ve been looking for something less than rude to say. Then, I met her“I’meyes.so proud of you,” she said. “I’m proud of me, for teaching you something you remem bered.”Istarted learning Russian on a whim. My sister suggested I learn Turkish with her, as a way to structure my bedbound days, to exer cise my mind without exhausting it. But the Turkish course cost money, and I found Pro fessor Mark Pettus’ Russian lectures online forThefree.daily lessons brought order to my life, which had begun to resemble a heap of dead time. If I could do nothing else in a day, at least I had 30 minutes of grammar drills un der my belt.
the PROSPECT.
as aqueductswhich entered our days still builtby Roman slaves.
Maybe I find this persuasive only because my life is so materially null. My horizon is my bedpost. But could it be that literature is all there is — not just as in poems and novels, but as in expression by means of language? When I am not living in literature, I am living in the nothing that is the absence of signs, the almost-nothing of despair. Living as a specta tor of this shoddy art house film that may or may not be on pause, static hours gathering like dust on eyes pried open.
I haven’t locked the door, I haven’t lit the fires, you don’t know how worn I am, that even respite tires.
But after wishing her happy birthday this past May, I told her that I was on medical leave, and would be back home for a while.
When the fog clears, I am always starved for literature.So,you can imagine my terror, when they found the blot on my brain MRI, sitting in an area which, I learned from panicked Googling, was near my center of emotive language pro cessing.“Iwonder how many of my personality flaws I can blame on this thing,” I texted close friends. “Is this a valid excuse for being an angsty little bitch who writes shit poetry?”
“No yeah, I feel the same about Portuguese,” he replied. “But for me, it’s definitely sexual.”
ELLEN LI / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Mayakovsky’s poetry.
I wondered if there’d always been a language barrier between us, that I had overlooked in my impenetrably bashful youth.
I found another way to feel like a foreigner, to feel out of place as my body stayed obsti nately in place — trudging through Russian poetry, deciphered one word at a time. I will proudly declare myself a Mayakovsky fanatic, despite having read maybe five of his poems. His last poem, the unfinished epic “At the Top of My Voice” (1930), quite literally transports you across space and a century:
“Ellen, what’s wrong?” she wrote back. “Are you able to continue your college? I’m so sorry I haven’t seen you for such a long time.”
I thought of my near-daily unilateral mi graines. I thought of the time I woke scream ing at 4 a.m. with the worst headache of my life, half-numb, periodically unable to breathe, and Snapchatted all my contacts, “hear me out I think I’m having a stroke,” and “this is weird but you’re a great friend and I loveThatyou.”day, the ambulance declined to arrive, not believing someone could have a stroke at 21 years old. After a taxi ride to the hospital and a 10 hour wait, I was sent home with 500 milligrams of Tylenol and a negative preg nancy“OMG!”test.Anna texted me after I described my diagnosis. “Never thought something bad could happen to you.”
It’s true that, when I am able to listen, Rach maninov carries me far away. But what I don’t tell her is that I am often too nauseous for sound, that even the stubborn thrum of my heart is sour in my throat as I lay in the dark,
“Do you understand?” she asked. “Maybe you can translate it when you get home.”
I did translate it, intending the translation as a kind of gift for her, an assurance that I did understand, that I could feel Akhmato va’s tired heartbeat, bitter longing, and sharp
But could it be that literature is all there is — not just as in poems and novels, but as in expression by means of language?
I surprised myself with my consistency. Having completed half a semester’s worth of lectures in a month, I even decided to find a tutor online, Sergey, a language-learning en thusiast from Kazakhstan.
And this step is longer than life
Gabriel Robare is a senior writer for the Pros pect and the head Puzzles editor. He can be found doing chores on Wednesdays and can be found on other days on Twitter @GabrielRo bare, or by email at grobare@princeton.edu.
As I head for the city that doesn’t exist Who will answer me about my fate
She cast her arms wide and faded beyond reach as all sound was swallowed into the needle-scarred ring.
“Did I tell you I play guitar?” he asked, in English. “Have I played for you? This song is famous, maybe you will know.”
Ellen Li is a member of the Class of 2023 from Millburn, N.J. majoring in Comparative Literature. She can be reached at ellenli@princeton.edu. Li is a former Features editor for the ‘Prince.’
Night and silence for a century Rain, or maybe snow, falls It’s all the same, warmed by endless hope I see in the distance a city that doesn’t exist Where wanderers find shelter easily Where surely they remember and wait Day after day, I lose or confuse my path
There’s something calming, too, about stopping your week in its tracks, and tak ing a day for rest and restoration. I do all my chores on Wednesdays: do my laundry in the empty laundry room, yes, and clean my room, shave, file my nails, organize the file folders on my computer, water my plants, and attend to any other tasks that evade me. It’s a day to care for my space and
“Do you have ‘mi graines’?”“Yes,but, blood on brain? I need — how to say ‘radiation,’ ‘sur gery’? In two weeks.”
Next, I look up the song “Gorod Kotorogo Nyet” (The City That Doesn’t Exist) by Igor Ko rnelyuk, which sounds nothing like Sergey’s hesitant acoustic performance over shaky in ternet. It’s a pop power-ballad, with a full orchestra, wailing electric guitar, and sincer ity so raw it reminds me of ’90s Celine Dion, steeping me in nostalgia for the decade prior to my birth, the time Nabokov would call my “prenatal abyss,” the “twin” of the abyss I’m heading for. A world which, without me, is full of color, and almost the same.
I was but a wee lad of eighteen when I first saw this video, titled “Weekend Wednes day,” by CGP Grey, the enigmatic and won derful educational YouTuber. I watched the video — heard the gospel — and, reader, the Kool-Aid was sweet. I was hooked.
By Gabriel Robare | Senior Prospect Writer
classes on Saturdays — though I’d take them if they did — but it’s my primary homework day.
Here’s how it works, as Grey describes it. The five-day work week is a disaster. It’s way too long. You’re so tired by the end that Friday is useless. The weekend doesn’t work either. The week is so long that Saturday is a day of recovery from the week, and Sun day is the only day of real freedom.
Although I had been more determined to practice than ever before in my life, the Czerny was not going well. With fortissimo chords over allegro runs, four bars of that étude tired me out more than three run-throughs of a Bach Bourrée. Though I knew Anna wouldn’t want me to strain myself, I was determined to give her full-bodied translations of these pieces that contained lifetimes of emotion.
The solution: make Wednesday a week end day, and Saturday a work day. Then the week becomes two short weeks: Monday, Tuesday, weekend Wednesday; Thursday, Friday, Saturday, weekend Sunday. You’re never more than two days from the week end. There’s also the advantage of the offcycle: you can do typical weekend tasks (chores, errands, excursions) while every one else is at work.
On my next visit, I handed her my poetry translations. She looked up at me in confu sion.“You want me to find originals for you?”
I caught a few words. Rain, snow, life. My brain was frazzled by the unfamiliar gram mar of the title and refrain — city, of which there is none? — so I gave up on understand ing, letting the minor chords wash over me. I applauded and thanked him as earnestly as I could manage without bursting into tears. He seemed embarrassed. We practiced the dative case.“Okay Ellen, I have to go, I have another lesson. I had ten today,” he said, as the end of the hour approached. “I hope you will be okay. ‘Nye perezhivay,’ I think you will be okay. In America, the doctors are so good.”
Let it stay unknown
myself, a Princetonwaystation.requires you to pour so much of yourself into your work — often liter ally: you mortgage yourself to the school’s grueling academic and social calendars. Wednesday, then, is for retreating to the homestead and likewise retreating to my self. I’m focusing this semester on defend ing my free time and defending my person al goals. That’s as important — maybe more important — than everything that happens on the other days of the week.
It’s not that I truly expect to die or have a stroke soon, though there is a small chance that I could. I just can’t shake the acute aware ness of the fact that this consciousness will one day fracture. Perhaps suddenly, or per haps after a long, laborious decline. I used to want to be a journalist or go to graduate school, but these aspirations now feel flimsy andEvenunreal.ifIknew I had little time left, I don’t think I’d live much differently than I do now. I’d still have to rest a lot and wait out painful hours in bed. I’d play the electric keyboard by my bedside, running through Bach on end less repeat, neglecting to practice at a lower tempo. I’d still be reading a shameful volume of “Yuri!!! On Ice” fanfiction, making my way through 20-plus adaptations of “The Twelve Chairs” with Zoom watch-party buddies, working occasionally as an overpaid tutor in math and English. I’d probably be drilling Russian verb conjugations when my mind is too dead for anything else. And for what?
Many of my classmates, upon hearing of my scheduling connivances, reject them out of hand because of their cherished offday on Friday. This is reasonable — riotous Thursday nights on the Street often require a day of recovery. Also, a three day week end solves a few of the problems indicated above. But deft craftspeople of ReCal will find that it is altogether possible to find four-class schedules void of Wednesday and Friday classes.
sick.”“Oh no, you have COVID?”“No,sick in brain. I, tired, head hurts.”
“Oh, what happened?”
“You see, music takes away all worries,” Anna said, after describing the girl in the poem’s fantasy — deceptively frail, but beau tiful and wise. “Music will take away all your worries.”Iwasat a loss for words. I felt tremors ris ing in my chest, a feeling warmer than my usual anxiety in her presence. All this time, had she been trying to say something to me through her choice of music, like she did with her choice of poetry? A decade’s worth of rep ertoire. For so long, I saw these as tedious as signments, emblems of my insufficiency as a “lazy, lazy girl.” I was ashamed that I never felt the poetry in music as I now felt the music in poetry. That I had always read the staves like a machine. That I internalized Anna’s scolding more deeply than I did the many times she told me that she loved me like a granddaugh ter, that I was so talented and beautiful and all she wanted was for me to be strong and happy.
Maybe beyond the barricade of wasted years I’ll find the city that doesn’t exist There, a hearth burns for me
“Okay,” she said, setting the page down on a pile of sheet music. “How’s your Czerny?”
“Hi, Sergey, how are you?”
The song ends. I play it again.
Now, I realize that through learning Rus sian, I have been rehearsing my reincarna tion, learning the world, building a self, from scratch. I am seizing back an illusion of con trol for all the times my illness has splintered my ability to read and speak, for those deaths I have lived, and re-emerged from no longer fluent in any language.
As furious as she seemed while correcting my phrasing of Granados’s “Spanish Dance: Andaluza” — why are you slowing down, do you see a ritardando? — she swore she wasn’t upset with me, only worried that I’d somehow turned a passionate love song into a “funeral march.”Itstruck me how poorly I must have under stood her, as we conversed for years primar ily through piano, a language I never put my heart into learning. I wanted, so badly, to make it up to her.
One night, a week before my operation, I am alone in bed. I have smuggled a pack of room temperature Heineken from the basement, because I’m a fucking adult. I ignore doctors’ warnings about drug-alcohol interactions, and Anna, who urges me not to take after drunk Russian poets.
How did she, her frame paltry and face a Polish white, unravel my woes and claim them as her own?
But I was so tired.
What a fate was ours, how fortunate this hour with only the spinning record between us!
“No, no, these are the ones we read before.”
For the poetry I’ll never get to read. For the cities, like St. Petersburg and Almaty, that exist for me only in dreams. For the friends I promise, dishonestly, to see again soon. The gift of other people’s literature and time, that I might choose to call love. The love I hurl back through faulty translation.
First emerged a hiss, thin as a garter snake from its stone lair, but strokes of Chopin soon gathered in the air and swept, steep, steeper, and pledged: a reckoning, and so dispersed these rings like ripples in water.
Why you shouldn’t take classes on Wednesdays
For the last three semesters I have taken no classes on Wednesdays. I can tell you — Weekend Wednesday works. And it’s a delight.OnWednesdays, I do my laundry — and the laundry room is empty. Last year I lived in a large suite, and I cleaned the room on Wednesdays while my suitemates were in class. In the evening, I’d finish some home work that had slipped through the cracks, and I’m ready and raring to go back to class Thursday and Friday.
Like a monument to forgotten truths I’ve made it to the last step
“Um, good and bad.”
He told me to wait a minute as he got out his guitar, apologizing in advance; it had been a while since he played. After a few strums, he seemed to notice that the guitar was a little out of tune. But he played on, singing “Gorod Kotorogo Nyet.”
***
page 13Friday September 9, 2022 The Daily Princetonian
Normal two-day weekends for me often come off as half-work and half-play, which certainly makes one a dull boy. You feel like you ought to be finishing your homework, but you ought to be relaxing too. But Week end Wednesday makes Saturday a work day — and if you work fully on Saturday, you can relax fully on Sunday (outside of the myriad of meetings for this newspaper that occur every Sunday).
“I saw my piano teacher, I love her. But I’m
I’ve made it to the last step
“I’ll“tumor.”prayfor you. You know, I believe God hears my prayers,” he said, and after a few moments of silence, asked, “Will I see you again?”Idid see him again, one more time.
A few Google-trans lations later, he got the picture, and taught me the words for “stroke” and
I blast Rach 2 on YouTube. I read the top comments. They’re about dying.
For a quiet stroll down this ancient road. For every step, including the last, longer than life.
Reader, lend me your ears. Don’t take Wednesday classes. Make your schedules accordingly for next semester — or better yet, rework your schedule during the adddrop period. Make a quiet place for yourself in the middle of the week. Respect your time, and enjoy that empty laundry room. I’ll see you on Thursday.
JOSÉ PABLO FERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
“Hi Ellen, everything’s good here. Really hot though. How are you?”
Saturday becomes a workday under the Weekend Wednesday protocol and that works great, too. Princeton doesn’t offer
And as thin as a test tube of water light blue there stood a mazurka girl shaking her head.
He reminded me to cancel future lessons and we exchanged smiling goodbyes.
And this step is longer than life
me “Chopin Mazurka” (1958).
This system does constrain which class es I will take: Monday–Wednesday lecture classes and Wednesday afternoon seminars are off-limits. But there are so many great classes offered every semester that this is never a serious problem. If anything it’s a helpful filter: there are always dozens of classes I want to take. Removing one day of the week helps me choose four or five.
Hear me out: you shouldn’t take classes on Wednesdays.
Jerry Price, the senior com munications advisor and his torian for Princeton University Athletics, shared a 1950 article discussing a game between Princeton and Lafayette that saw Pete Carril’s name printed in The Daily Princetonian for the very first time:
Bold. Unapologeti cally real, sometimes, so much so that the lines between tough love and counterpro ductive chastisement became blurred. The New York Times recently published a piece highlighting some facets of Carril’s philosophy that were harder to fall in love with.
“I remember in my senior year of high school, Coach was driving me to the Princeton train station. He just kept reit erating — ‘You’ve got to work hard. It’s going to be really tough for you. You’re going to have to put on a lot of weight, and you’re going to have to lift a lot of weights. You’re not the best passer we’ve seen. Work on your long range shooting.
“We all have this special bond, and I think it’s because we all persevered through some really tough moments,” Rogers explained. “All of us who played for him, we feel like we’re part of some special club.”“When he was coaching in the NBA, he happened to be in Atlanta at the time of the Final Four,” Rogers continued. “A bunch of the Princeton guys also hang out and go to the Fi nal Four games together. All of a sudden, we’re all in the same city again. There’s about 12 of us that ended up in his room. We’re sitting on the floor,
VIA PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY.
OBITUARY
Pete Carril (left) speaks with Chris Doyal ‘96 during the 1996 NCAA tournament win against UCLA .
When asked about legend ary men’s basketball coach Pete Carril, longtime Princ eton athletic director Gary Walters ’67 points to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to illustrate his grief.
About a decade after Petrie played for the Tigers came a new wave of Princeton basket ball, led by power players such as John Rogers ’80 and Craig Robinson ’83. By now, the fa mous Princeton Offense had developed into a well-oiled machine.“When he coached us in 1967, there was no Princeton Offense,” Petrie explained. “That was something that he developed over time.”
Gregory shared one of his most memorable Carril stories with the ‘Prince’: having his entire game critiqued before even making it to college.
‘He’s like the Oracle in The Matrix’
Carril graduated from La fayette in 1952. After briefly serving in the U.S. Army, he received a master’s degree in educational administration from Lehigh University. But it didn’t take long for Carril to find his way back onto the hardwood.In1954, his coaching ca reer began through humble
– Walt Whitman
page 14Friday September 9, 2022 Sports www. dailyprincetonian .com{ }
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher ...
“I played for him for three years, but I spent a lifetime with him,” Petrie said. “I was a gym rat, so I spent summers with him working on my game. We stayed in touch after I graduated and had some suc cess in the pros. We spent an other almost 15 years together after he retired from Prince ton, working in the NBA.”
One of the most notable re cipients of Carril’s trademark candor is Robinson, who is the fourth leading scorer in Princeton basketball history. Standing at a towering 6’6”, he dominated for the Tigers in the 1980s. He shared his story of receiving Ivy League Player of the Year honors two years in a row under Coach Carril with the“My‘Prince’:junior year, I was the leading scorer on the team, and was voted Player of the Year in the Ivy League,” Rob inson recalled. “Afterwards, Carril said to me in front of the entire team, ‘I don’t know how you ended up winning that award, because I didn’t vote for you. I don’t think you’re the best player in the league. You can’t do this, you can’t do that…’ He went on a litany of things that I couldn’t do — why he was surprised that I got Ivy League Player of the Year, and why I didn’t de serve“Heit.”said, ‘If you want to be good, you have to do all of
John Rogers shared similar experiences trying to play up to Carril’s high standards:
“To have this genius telling you things about your weak nesses, things you need to work on, things you need to get better at, things that you never get better at no matter how hard you try,” Rogers told the ‘Prince.’ “That’s the first time anyone ever told me, ‘Johnny, you’re legally blind, and I can’t teach you to see.’ But he was right.”
‘All of us knew he was a genius.’ Remembering Pete Carril.
“Little Pete Carril, former All-Stater from Pennsylvania, and Captain George Davidson were the only Leopards who were able to score against the tight Tiger defense consistent ly,” the article read.
Sean Gregory ’98 further il lustrated Carril’s quirks in a recent retrospective piece for Time Magazine that covered his own experiences playing under the coach. Gregory re called his straightforward ad vice for putting on mass dur ing the recruiting process.
beginnings. He took the posi tion of junior varsity coach at Easton High School, where he was mistaken for the school janitor on his first day. In 1958, he moved onto coaching var sity at Reading Senior High School.Thelack of glitz and glam or never phased Carril. In a 2007 article published on the Princeton Athletics website by Price, Carril reflected fondly on his early coaching experi ences.“Iconsider my time as a high school teacher and coach very valuable,” he said. “That’s where I first learned to teach things from a very basic per spective.”In1966, Carril took his first coaching gig at the collegiate level with Lehigh University. The following year, he opened the chapter to one of the great est coaching stints in college basketball history when he took the head coaching posi tion at Princeton University.
In 1994, Petrie was hired by the Sacramento Kings as president of basketball opera tions. Just two years later, Car ril joined the organization.
Work on your dribbling.’”
LAWRENCE FRENCH
During his 29 years with the Tigers, Carril led the Princeton men’s basketball team to over 500 wins. In addition to his cumulative .663 winning per centage — the highest in Ivy League history — he led the Tigers to 13 conference cham pionships and 11 NCAA tour nament berths, as well as the National Invitation Tourna ment title in 1975.
“Practices, before the NCAA imposed limits, typically went for four grueling hours. Carril frowned upon stretch ing, grudgingly allowed wa ter breaks and was even more parsimonious with compli ments, afraid that his players would become complacent,” the Times wrote.
His core offensive philoso phies are still embraced by a number of teams at all levels to this day, including the Uni versity of Richmond at the NCAA Division I level and the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers in the early Carril’s2010s.story started on July 10, 1930 in a single-parent home in Bethlehem, Penn. His father raised Pete on his own while working as a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel. Pete said that his father never missed a day of work in his 40 years employed.Thatcommitment to hard work was seemingly ingrained in the Carril genes, evident in Pete’s love for and dedication to basketball. Carril began his playing career in his home town of Bethlehem for Liberty High School. He found early success, earning all-state hon ors for Pennsylvania before committing to continuing playing at Lafayette College.
“I am the teacher of athletes, He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own, proves the width of my own;
“That was pretty unique… To call up the head basketball coach at Princeton and have the head of a tavern answer the phone. To have to ask, ‘Is
Rogers was the captain of the 1979–80 co-champion Princeton Tigers. Before ar riving on campus for the first time, however, he still remem bers one of his first encoun ters with “WhenCarril.Iwas arranging my visit to go visit Princeton, they had me call Coach Carril at Andy’s Tavern,” Rogers said.
My words itch at your ears till you understand them.”
Playing for Carril required immense mental toughness and resilience. While reac tions from his players differed based on underlying personal ities, the pressures he imposed often strengthened the team mates’ relationships.
Coach Carril there?’ That was Coach. That was the norm.”
By Matt Drapkin Assistant Sports Editor
Carril, the former Princ eton’s men’s basketball head coach who is known as one of the most influential minds in basketball history, died on Aug. 15 at age 92. After coach ing at Princeton from 1967 to 1996, he joined the NBA’s Sac ramento Kings as the assis tant coach for 13 years. Carril’s “Princeton Offense” revolu tionized the game, putting an emphasis on ball movement, backdoor cuts, and reliable outside shooting.
There have since been over 2,400 editions of The Daily Princetonian that have men tioned Pete Carril. That was the last one to mistakenly ad dress him as “Little Pete.”
“He was about 5’6”, but he was really a larger than life fig ure,” Price told the ‘Prince.’
“Yo, Sean, here’s what you need to do to get bigger: drink a six-pack of beer and eat a ham sandwich, before bed, ev ery night. Got that kid?”
“All of us knew he was a ge nius. So, when he was telling you the truth, it wasn’t just a coach. It was a genius telling you the truth. You just knew that this genius and this fu ture Hall of Famer was tell ing you things that were ac curate,” he said.
“He’s like the Oracle in The Matrix,” Robinson said. “He’ll tell you exactly what you need to Candid.hear.”
“For those of us that played for Coach Carril, I hope that we expanded the breadth and width of his own, while at the very same time being remind ed that his words continue to itch at our ears,” Walters told The Daily Princetonian.
these other things.’ The next year, I went back and I worked on my game. I averaged fewer points, but did more of the other things. I won Ivy League Player of the Year again,” Rob inson said. “For the first time, I thought he was satisfied with something I did. But, he wait ed until I was a senior on my way out to let me know that.”
“He was a cigar smoking, beer and pizza loving, barrel chested force of nature,” Geof frey Petrie ’70 told the ‘Prince.’ Petrie, one of the earlier players in Carril’s college coaching career at Princeton, spent all three years of his var sity basketball career under Carril before being drafted eighth overall to the Portland Trailblazers in the 1970 NBA Draft.“Ihad a fair amount of natu ral ability, but he’s the guy that really molded it into what it needed to be in order to be a pro player,” Petrie said of Car ril. “I wanted to play in the NBA, and he was able to set my sails in the right direction.”
The sheer number of people Pete Carril impacted is incal culable. While his teaching primarily was done on the court, it seems the lessons passed down directly trans
For Coach, every day in prac tice, every game,” he said, “it was a reflection of who you were, what your character was, how competitive you were, how willing you were to sacri fice, how committed you were to getting the most out of your ability.”Inteaching the X’s and O’s, the defensive schemas, and the principles of a free-flowing motion offense, Carril knew exactly what he was doing.
“I learned sort of how to play basketball cerebrally, as well as the philosophy of play
“We have a conference room here named after Coach Car ril. It’s to remind everyone that works here that you think about your teammates first.”
“He ended up with a great love affair with a lot of his explayers,” Petrie told the ‘Prince.’ “He certainly wasn’t politically correct by today’s standards, but he was very honest, very direct, and just believed in hard work and commitment. It wasn’t for everybody, but for a lot of them, it gave them life lessons that carried over into the rest of their life.”
And, when the job was fin ished? A little bit of fun, as well. In 1975, after a 55–50 victo ry against Virginia — a game that saw Coach Carril ejected in the second half — he let his team go crazy in the hotel fol lowing the big win.
All of the commotion got the attention of one annoyed guest. When the woman con fronted the rowdy group of col lege kids, the man in charge stepped forward, donning a T-shirt and black boxers. Ac cording to Sports Illustrated, the woman snapped, “May I ask what you’re doing?”
Carril’s final victory as an NCAA head coach would come seven years later. In 1996, Princ eton defeated UCLA in the first round of the NCAA tourna ment in what is today known as one of the greatest upsets of allESPNtime.included the 43–41 vic tory in their list of the greatest upsets in March Madness his tory, writing, “You know why the backdoor [cut] was invent ed? So 13 seeds could sneak by the defending champs in the firstAtround.”thetime of his retire ment, which came after a sec ond-round loss after the win over UCLA, Carril was the only active NCAA Division I head coach to reach 500 victories without the opportunity to offer scholarships to his play ers. “Without the ability to re cruit,” Petrie reflected, “he was such a creative mind, figuring out how to compete with a dif ferent type of player.”
Petrie said that playing for Coach Carril was not a gift which could immediately be appreciated.“Youdidn’t know it at the time, but you realize it later.
At times, Carril’s willing ness to bluntly speak his mind may have been difficult to en dorse from the receiving end. Throughout his career, how ever, he would earn national attention for what his gritty style produced on the court. His popularity rose on a mon umental scale as his Princeton teams consistently performed at a high level during March Madness.In1989, one of the biggest games of Carril’s career took place in the first round of the NCAA tournament. His Ti gers matched up against the star-studded lineup of the Georgetown Bulldogs, featur ing future NBA Hall of Famers Alonzo Mourning at 6’10” and Dikembe Mutombo at 7’2”.
“Coach’s legacy will always live on,” Gary Walters said. “At the end of the day, a coach’s teaching is his immortality. The whole concept of passing it on — it’s what he did, and it’s what those players who played for him will continue to do.”
“Coach’s fingerprints are all over the modern game,” Hen derson continued. “He was a visionary. Sometimes it’s hard to separate my own thinking from what Coach saw.”
“Were it not for him, I prob ably would not have gone to Princeton,” Gary Walters told the ‘Prince.’ Walters’ lifelong journey with Carril began early, when he played under Coach at Reading High School.
You could see equality in the Princeton Offense, all five players sharing the ball to get the best shot for the team. You could see it in practice every day, him criticizing each play er’s weaknesses regardless of talent or accolades. And, you could see it in the way he was raised.“Ithink the way he grew up in Bethlehem with his father working in the steel mills, clearly had a profound impact on him as a person,” Rogers told the ‘Prince.’ “When you’re at Princeton, you know, you don’t have a lot of folks who have that kind of background.”
Carril was giving his players the tools they needed to live life the way it should be lived, by the ethics he valued most: teamwork, strong work ethic, and a never-ending commit ment to excellence.
COURTESY OF GOPRINCETONTIGERS.
These were two of his most clear-cut values: equality and grit. One of Carril’s favorite maxims was “you can’t sepa
Carril puffed a cloud of cigar smoke her way before answer ing plainly: “I’m wallowing in success.”“Heloved to dance, he loved music, he loved good food,” Petrie said. “He would go up to the piano bar at this one Italian restaurant and sing this Frank Sinatra song … He loved life. I will miss him terribly, but he was a lifetime gift to me and to so many that crossed his path.”
‘Coach’s fingerprints are all over the modern game’
For Carril, “different type of player” usually meant wealthy Princeton students, who he didn’t think were cut out for the hard work he demanded. The Coach once said, “Basket ball is a poor man’s game, and my guys have three cars in the garage.”“It’sno secret how acerbic Coach Carril could be when he was admonishing his players,” Robinson told the ‘Prince.’ “He felt like he had to toughen us up because we were Ivy League kids going up against some of the better teams in the coun try.”“It’s not every guy like that,” Price explained, “but he could take guys who came from more privileged backgrounds and show them it doesn’t mat ter where you come from. You have to work hard. You have to improve. You have to be a teammate and you have to do what’s best for the team. We’re all equal here.”
rate the player from the per son.” Looking back at the lega cy he left behind, the same can be said about the coach.
“When I spoke at the event, I said, ‘Coach, you are the best teacher that I ever had,’” Rog ers shared. “I’ll be watching the game now — NBA game, WNBA game, high school game, whatever — and watch ing on TV, I’ll see someone who’s running down the ball. I’ll see someone who throws a pass that’s off. I’ll see some one that didn’t cut back door when they’re overplayed. I can see it before it actually hap pens. I can almost feel it in my stomach.”“That’swhat a great teacher does. They teach you some thing that is so embedded in you, you know it for the rest of yourToday,life.”Rogers is the founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, the nation’s larg est minority-run mutual fund firm. He says that he’s instilled the values of teamwork and cooperation into the company culture because of the lessons he learned from Carril.
“These old players still wanted to be around, just tell ing stories. Just continuing to learn from Coach. I don’t think you see that with [Former Duke Head Coach] Coach K. or [Former Indiana Coach] Bobby Knight,” Rogers added.
of the tournament — not just the later Perhapsrounds.even more impor tant for schools like Princeton, the attention the showdown garnered proved that the un derdogs deserve a chance. At a time when discussions of removing automatic bids for smaller conferences (like the Ivy League) were gaining traction, Princeton’s impres sive performance squashed the chatter. Sports Illustrated dubbed the Princeton-George town matchup “The Game that Saved March Madness.”
ing against guys who are as good, if not better, than you are,” Robinson said. “That served me well when I got into coaching, because I was able to take some of those tenets that I learned from playing for Coach Carril into my own coaching toolbox.”
surrounding him in bed, all drinking beer together. We’re all telling stories, and Coach is like, ‘No, I never said that. I never did that.’”
Matt Drapkin is an Assis tant Editor for the ‘Prince’ sports section. He can be reached at mattdrapkin@princeton.edu or on Twitter at @mattdrapkin.
Carril Court in Jadwin Gymnasium was dedicated in the coach’s honor in 2009.
“He taught the game in such a way as to enable his players to understand that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”In2008, Rogers was awarded the Woodrow Wilson award for embodying the school’s fa mous motto, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.” The award was given in Jadwin Gym.
Carril’s clever preparation proved extremely effective. Al though in the end, the Tigers came up short 50–49, the un expectedly intense matchup sent shockwaves through the NCAA. The effects were twofold.First, the entertaining backand-forth between a No. 1 and No. 16 seed helped persuade CBS to sign a deal with the NCAA to televise every game
“He talked about his dad a lot,” added Price. “He talked a lot about growing up poor and the impact that that had on him. There’s no question that that drove him and fueled him.”In2009, Princeton named Carril Court in Jadwin Gym nasium in his honor. After retiring from his role as an as sistant with the Sacramento Kings in 2011, Carril could not scratch the itch that called him back to Jadwin Gym. “He came to practice for almost 10 years straight,” current Princeton men’s basketball Head Coach Mitch Henderson ’98 told the ‘Prince.’Injust the past few decades, so much about basketball has changed, with the transition towards positionless play, the movement outwards towards the three-point line, the need for all five players on the court to be able to pass, dribble, and shoot. Carril envisioned and implemented these principles long before they became the standard. With his typical stubbornness, Carril didn’t capitulate to the pull of the norm, but instead molded the norm into his own reality.
page 15Friday September 9, 2022 Sports www. dailyprincetonian .com{ }
‘A coach’s teaching is his im mortality’
Carril knew that the power ful post presence could pres ent matchup difficulties for his outsized Tigers offense; no Princeton player stood taller than 6’8”. To prepare accord ingly, in the practices leading up to the match, he gave his assistants broom sticks to hold up high for his smaller players to practice shooting over.
“When Barack Obama got elected president, we were the temporary transition head quarters for three days,” Rog ers continued. “For three days, President-elect Obama was in the Coach Carril room, calling world leaders and starting to form the government. It just shows you the impact that it’s had for us to build our firm around those values of think ing about your teammates first.”After playing for Princeton, Robinson went on to a lifelong pursuit of coaching basketball himself. He held positions at five different schools across a 26-year career before settling into his current role as Execu tive Director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. Robinson reflected on how Carril shaped his own perspective as a coach.
“Because we all were going through the same thing and practices were so tough, we all felt like if we could get through it — we had sort of been through this hazing period,” Robinson explained. “It made everybody who’s been through it even closer. Some of my best friendships are guys who I played with at Princeton.”
In 1997, Carril was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He is just one of two Princeton-affil iated figures to ever be induct ed. The other was former NBA player and New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley ’65.
lated to life altogether.
page 16Friday September 9, 2022 Sports www. dailyprincetonian .com{ }
MEN’S SOCCER
last time the teams met, Roberts scored the win ning goal — the first goal of his career.
“I think after talking quite a bit today and going over film yester day, the team’s biggest goal is to make sure we’re locked in from the first minute,” Had away said. “It shouldn’t take two goals for us to start playing; it should be from the first min ute, and that’s going to be our goal going into PennWhileState.”aloss in the home opener is disap pointing, the Tigers are ready to take on the sea son. For them, they’re
Men’s soccer falls 2–0 to Vermont in home opener
By Julia Nguyen Head Sports Editor
In the eleventh min ute, a corner kick for the Catamounts gave them a one-goal advantage. For the fans on the bleach ers, only a scramble of orange and green jer seys was visible before the scoreboard changed to 1–0. In the end, what was an attempt to clear the ball by a Princeton defender became a de flection off of another Tiger into the goal.
The most exciting minutes of the game be gan 15 minutes into the second half. Within the span of five minutes, the Tigers pounded the goal and pressured the defense. Sophomore forward Harry Rob erts led the team with four shots total, two of which were near-goals. In the 65th minute, a shot from Roberts al most halved the deficit. However, Silveira’s fin gertips found the ball and tipped it away from thePrincetongoal. will take on Penn State on the road on Friday, Sept. 9 for their next matchup. The
Julia Nguyen is a head editor for the Sports sec tion at the ‘Prince’ who usually covers the week end recaps. She can be reached at trucn@princ eton.edu or on Instagram at @jt.nguyen.
keeping their eyes on the prize: another Ivy title.“At the end of the day, our goal is to reach our max potential as a team,” Hadaway said. “Obviously this is a rough patch ... I think if we just keep our heads up, grind in and out of training, and hold each other accountable, we’ll be set for the season.”
The Tigers managed nine shots in the second half, while Vermont had eight all game.
The opening minutes of the game saw little action on both sides of the field. Neither the Tigers nor the Vermont Catamounts had found their rhythm just yet. But the slow pace didn’t last long.
score by Princeton proved to be unsuccess ful. The themontoffensetheCatamountshalftime.hadthetheclearedwereabletheondtowardstoes.Catamountstheirthetheandsaid.asfactithalf,changethingsmonttimeingoftoNateVermonthopingdefensepoundedfirstandYves—ingJoekickotherute,goal.ameanwhile,Catamounts,wereridinghighoffoftheirfirstInthe23rdminVermonttookancornerkick.ThefrommidfielderMorrisoncameflyoffthefarrightpostrighttomidfielderBorieforareboundsecondgoal.Fortheremaininghalf,theTigerstheVermontwithsixshots,toclosethegap.goalkeeperSilveiramanagedkeeptheTigersoffthescoreboard,leadtheteamsintohalf-witha2–0Veradvantage.“TherearealotofwewantedtoaboutthefirstbutIthinkwhatboilsdowntoisthethatwejustweren’ttunedin,”Hadaway“We’vegottolearnkeepitmoving.”Inthesecondhalf,TigersreturnedtofieldandsteppedupgametokeeptheontheirDespitenineshotsgoalinthesechalfalone,though,Tigerswerenottoscore.TheshotseithertoowideorbySilveiraandVermontdefense.Still,itwasclearthatPrincetonoffenseintensifiedafterWhilethetookhomewin,thePrincetonoutshotVer16–8bytheendofgame.
@TIGERMENSSOCCER/TWITTER
Despite high spirits for the home opener, Monday afternoon saw the 2021 Ivy League men’s soccer champions Princeton (0–1–1) fall 2–0 to Vermont (2–1–1) at Sherrerd Field.
“With the first goal, it was definitely one hard to watch over on film. It’s not one we like to think about but one we definitely one we learned from,” sophomore goalkeeper Khamari Hadaway told The Daily gameofofandofly,out,guysforcorner“[Vermont]Princetonian.swungaintothebox...safety,oneofourtriedtoclearitandunfortunateitbouncedoffoneourotherdefenderswentintothebackthenet—aflukeluck,butthat’sthesometimes.”Effortstoeventhe
