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Thursday september 26, 2013 vol. cxxxvii no. 75

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U N I V E R S I T Y A F FA I R S

Report finds weapons not a U. investment

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In Opinion

By Anna Mazarakis

Susannah Sharpless discusses the point of unpaid internships, and Bennett McIntosh contemplates the true meaning of service at Princeton. PAGE 6

staff writer

In Street Street gives you a guided tour through Princeton’s coolest dorms, defends Frist mailbox locks and writes up some surprising headlines. S1

Today on Campus 6:30 p.m.: Maria Ressa ’86 speaks about her latest book ‘From Bin Laden to Facebook.’

Oakes lounge, Whig Hall.

The Archives

Sept. 26, 1983 Police tell eating clubs to quiet music and issue summons to the Ivy Club president.

On the Blog Intersections reviews the best and worst of the Emmy’s red carpet.

KASSANDRA LEIVA :: SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Theatre Intime’s fall play, ‘Fuddy Meers,’ will have its first show tonight at 8 p.m.

U N I V E R S I T Y A FA I R S

ACADEMICS

Search underway to replace outgoing dean

SPIDER to launch in Antarctica

By Jean-Carlos Arenas staff writer

A search committee has been formed to find the replacement for Dean of the Graduate School William Russel, who announced on Sept. 11 that he would be retiring at the end of this academic year. The committee, whose members were appointed

by University President Christo-

pher Eisgruber ’83, is chaired by electrical engineering professor and Vice Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Claire Gmachl.

“A month into the search is when things will become much more substantial,” Gmachl said, noting that the search process has just begun. “At this point, [everything] we can do is plan meetings and listen to who peo-

The University was included on The Huffington Post’s list of The Colleges Most Obsessed with Squirrels.

The story features the infamous black squirrels that frequent the campus, recounting the campus myth that they were the result of a biology experiment at the University. According to the myth, the squirrels either escaped or were liberated by an animal rights group.

Alternatively, another legend suggests that a Princeton resident imported black and orange squirrels in honor of the University’s colors and that the weaker orange ones died out over time.

“Regardless of why they’re in Princeton, the community loves ’em,” the list states.

Other squirrel-obsessed schools include Harvard, Yale, Lehigh and Oberlin.

been suggesting candidates since the announcement of Russel’s retirement but that it was far too early to provide the names of potential candidates.

She explained that the position is open to candidates from all disciplines and that the new graduate school dean would be responsible for a variety of tasks.

See COMMITTEE page 2

Q&A: President and COO of BuzzFeed, Jon Steinberg ’99

By Monica Chon senior writer

Before speaking on campus Tuesday, BuzzFeed COO and president Jon Steinberg ’99 sat down with The Daily Princetonian to discuss his memories from Princeton, his position at the helm of one of the Internet’s most popular media companies and advice for current Princetonians.

No MacArthur fellows come from U. this year

Princeton makes list of squirrel-obsessed colleges

ple suggest.”

The search will ideally be completed in one semester, Gmachl said. “My goal is to wrap it up within the fall term to give the new person enough time to get started with the new students coming in next year, but we’ll take all the time it needs to find the right person,” she added.

Gmachl said that people have

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

News & Notes None of this year’s MacArthur fellows were affiliated with Princeton University.

The 24 scholars and artists receiving the fellowship were announced Tuesday by the MacArthur Foundation.

The so-called “genius grant” is given annually to between 20 and 40 U.S. citizens or residents who show exceptional promise in their creative work. Fellows, who are nominated anonymously, receive $625,000 over five years.

There were also no MacArthur fellows from the University in the 2012 grant year.

The University’s investments do not include any “direct” holdings in weapons manufacturing companies, according to a report released by the Resources Committee during the summer. This report is the result of an investigation in response to a petition by faculty members requesting that the University divest any holdings it may have in firearms.

The report was published on the Resources Committee’s website over the summer, without

public announcement.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, 113 members of the faculty signed a petition calling on the University to disown “current and future investment in companies involved in the manufacture and distribution of multiple, rapidfiring semi-automatic assault weapons and the bullets that equip them.” The petition was authored by professors Caryl Emerson, Marie-Helene Huet and Simon Morrison. In conjunction See PETITION page 2

The Daily Princetonian: When you wrote for the Opinion section of the ‘Prince,’ did you know that you would end up working at an online media company? How did your experience writing for the ‘Prince’ inform your career now?

SETH MERKIN MOROKOFF :: CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

BuzzFeed COO Steinberg ’99 spoke on media trends Tuesday night.

Jon Steinberg: I wish I understood more about the web — it was still relatively new then … I was there from 1996 to 1999, and I don’t think we even had the ‘Prince’ online then. There was a standalone publication that was called the Spigot, run by a few people.

It was starting it out a little bit, just trying to get distribution; we all had websites where we could post stuff.

But I don’t think I really understood how transformative the web could be to how people got news and information.

And I always loved writing.

I write a fair amount now, both internally and also from a blogging standpoint about our business; I write on LinkedIn a fair amount.

But you know I just always loved writing … My thesis is actually all about participation in a more civic society as a result of online engagement. I was very interested in the web, even then. I always loved computers; I always loved technology; I always loved the internet.

I don’t think I necessarily knew that I would go into media; I didn’t know that it would all intersect that way. But these were things that I was interested in even when I wrote my thesis. And my thesis was kind See MEDIA page 4

By Greta Shum staff writer

A team of University physicists and engineers met with collaborators in Palestine, Texas this summer to assemble and test a telescope complex, known as SPIDER, that when launched will help scientists understand the fundamental physics of a period during the early universe.

Currently, most of SPIDER has been disassembled and is on its way by boat to Antarctica. When it arrives in late October, the team will reconstruct the instrument and launch it in late December, during the Austral summer. The device is the result of research that began in 2000 by Princeton, the University of Toronto and Caltech. It was built at NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

When the instrument is in the air, it points away from the sun, Jon Gudmundsson, a graduate student in the physics department who worked on SPIDER last summer, explained. The wind at the South Pole f lows in a “circumpolar” fashion, meaning that it will keep the balloon circling around the South Pole every 10 days.

While in the air, SPIDER will collect measurements of polarized light at particular frequencies generated by inf lation, a period when See SPIDER page 5

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

Q&A: New York Times Columnist Gail Collins

By Carla Javier senior writer

Gail Collins, a New York Times columnist and the first female editor of that paper’s editorial page, spoke on campus Tuesday about women’s rights from the 1960s to the present.

The Daily Princetonian: Let’s talk about journalism and newsrooms. What do you think of the current gender balance in today’s newsrooms?

Gail Collins: It depends a lot on where you are and what’s happening, but clearly that ceiling has been cracked. Now, Jill Abramson is our editor,

we’ve had a woman CEO at the Times, and I was editorial page editor before I went back to being a columnist. Women just do everything, as you can imagine. It’s been that way for quite some time. There was a day, a long time ago, I was on the bus for some presidential campaign — and that used to be the ultimate place where it was just these guys — and there was a guy behind me who was on the phone trying to get his kid back home to poop, and I thought, “Oh my God, it has all changed. The whole order is done.” The thing is now is that everything is so fast, and the world belongs to the people See COLUMNIST page 3

MERRILL FABRY :: PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

New York Times columnist Gail Collins spoke at the Wilson School on Tuesday about women’s rights.

The Daily Princetonian

page 2

Thursday september 26, 2013

Resources Committee rejects petition

CIVIL RIGHTS

PETITION Continued from page 1

.............

with the faculty petition, the Student Anti-Violence Effort issued a Student Statement of Support that garnered 351 signatures.

The Resources Committee’s report also questions whether the proposed divestment is the most effective way to achieve the goals stated in the petition. It encourages the petitioners to revise their request to focus on companies that market weapons, rather than manufacturers.

“I think the committee knew and understood where the faculty were coming from. We’ve got just very clear guidelines that we have to use,” Deborah Prentice, a psychology professor who is chair of the Resources Committee, said. “If you read the guidelines and you read what they were asking for, it was very hard to come up with a different response.”

The Resources Committee, a division of the Council of the Princeton University Community, is tasked with evaluating

issues of socially responsible investments in the University’s endowment portfolio. The endowment is managed by the Princeton University Investment Company.

While Prentince stated that there was clearly a core University value at stake in the issue, divestment was not a well-defined or practical enough action at this stage.

“The problem is, the actual manufacturer of the weapon isn’t the problem, it’s the use of the weapon, so divesting from the manufacturer of the weapon isn’t, in fact, a direct response,” Prentice said. “It didn’t meet the criterion that the action being requested was going to address.”

The Resources Committee’s guidelines state strictly that the purpose of divesting from a company should not be to make a political statement, which the petitioners said was a key goal.

Princeton University Investment Company President Andrew Golden declined to clarify what the report meant by “direct” holdings, citing PRINCO’s policy not to comment on specific holdings in the endowment. He not-

ed that the petition and report demonstrated that debates over social concerns related to the endowment were possible without discussing specific investments.

The report reads that the Resources Committee “learned from PRINCO that, at present, the University does not have any direct holdings in companies that manufacture weapons.” Golden, however, emphasized that PRINCO did not directly provide information to the Resources Committee, suggesting instead that the information may have come from the Board of Trustees or the University President, who are privy to otherwise confidential information regarding the University endowment.

Huet was not available to be interviewed, but noted that she was disappointed by the report.

Student leaders of Student Anti-Violence Effort were satisfied with the results of the report.

“We’re definitely really happy to hear that the University in fact does not invest in assault weapons manufacturers,” Molly FischFriedman ’16, SAVE co-head, said.

“That’s definitely something we were hoping for.”

New dean should be “approachable” COMMITTEE Continued from page 1

.............

HORIA RADOI :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 gave a lecture Wednesday titled ‘Civil Rights & the Supreme Court.’

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“The dean has to promote, design [and] put in place the very best graduate program that we can have at Princeton, and that includes curricula development and oversight,” Gmachl said. “[The position] also looks at student life; it looks at the diversity of the program, and it is also important that the graduate program meshes well with the overall mission, goal [and] activities of the University.”

According to Jamie Ferrare, managing principal of the higher education search committee consulting firm AGB Search, search committees

tend to look for people who are collaborative, inclusive, respectful and accepting of others’ ideas when seeking to fill higher education administrative positions.

“With that as kind of a general theme, I think you have to get specific,” he said of universities’ preferences for candidates.

“Some schools are looking for very specific skill sets based on the needs they might have, and so you have to really honor that.”

According to Graduate Student Government president Friederike Funk GS, Russel was very active in improving conditions for students of the Graduate School both in the academic and social spheres.

“I think he did an amazing

job. He was a very great dean of the Graduate School, and I hope that the person who will be the next dean will just continue his great work,” she said. “He was genuinely interested in graduate students and their concerns and really genuinely interested in our success as well.”

The new dean should be approachable and interested in the personal experiences of the graduate students, Funk said.

She said she remembered times when Russel had held dinners with graduate students and met with the GSG to listen to graduate student concerns. She added that she hoped the new dean would do the same.

A job description for the position will be available in the near future, Gmachl said.

The Daily Princetonian

Thursday september 26, 2013

Collins discusses social media, women’s history COLUMNIST Continued from page 1

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who are digitally smart and are fast at whatever they do, and that’s too bad in a way. You’d like to think there would be more time for contemplation, but there’s not. It’s a Twitter universe, and that’s the way of the world.

DP: Jumping off of that point, especially with your column writing, how does social media affect how you and journalists can interact with people who respond to your pieces?

GC: I am sort of in the middle. I have to admit, I do not Twitter. I think the Times has an account for me so my column goes up every week, but that’s about it.

It seems like an invitation to a disaster, so I’ve not done it.

And I’m not technologically really smart at all about the other stuff. But when I started in the business, there wasn’t anything. When I was editorial page editor, that was sort of the time at the beginning of the millenium when everything happened, and the difference in the way we perceive the world between before and now is just extraordinary. I think we thought we were very responsive, but we had no idea how we were totally cocooned. Now, the second you do anything, there’s all this stuff going on all over the place. Everything you write is commented on, and you kind of have to not pay too much attention to it or else you could lose your mind completely. If you hadn’t come up outside of it, you couldn’t understand how totally different this universe is to the way journalism and media were even 10 to 15 years ago. The public is up on what we do, which is good, except it does reward speed over thinking fast. To some degree, it rewards opinion over seri-

page 3

FUDDY MEERS

ous reporting, which is really a problem. It doesn’t reward local stuff. There is no reward right now for people who cover local and state government. That is my absolute, number-one worry in the world. How are you to get a generation of leaders when, at the bottom part where everybody’s supposed to be working their way up, there is nobody watching you?

DP: You’ve spoken about the journey of American women from 1960 to the present. When did everything change?

GC: The amazing thing about it was if you look at 1960, the vision of the way women’s role in life should be was pretty much the same as it had been for several thousand years. Then, in a period of eight years, it all changed. It was so fast. If you look between 1964 and 1972, everything changed and flipped around in such a short period of time, which I think is the most amazing part of this story.

KASSANDRA LEIVA :: SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

‘You’d like to think there would be more time for contemplation, but there’s not. It’s a Twitter universe, and that’s the way of the world.’ gail collins

DP: If you had to say something to the college women of Princeton who will be leaving here and entering into the real

The cast of Theater Intime’s newest production, ‘Fuddy Meers,’ rehearses for opening night. The show will run Sept. 26-28 and Oct. 3-5.

world, what would you say?

GC: It’s interesting that when you look at it, it seems like the world was turning to create this platform for you guys to leap off of. It was totally unexpected, where men and women were leaping off together, which is the big change. It is the story of men as much as it is women. Often, when I do talks with a lot of young women, they express great concern about how they are going to manage a family with a great career, and, since the country has not yet attacked this issue, [the answer] is find yourself a great partner who cares as much about your career as they do theirs. That’s the secret

to happiness and well-being.

Younger women have told me that they have partners or are dating people who are very enthusiastic about being the one to stay at home while the wife leaves to get a career, because actually the stay-at-home thing is kinda cool if you organize it the right way. You can stay at home, and write your novel, and hang out with your kids, and be a part of the community, and organize your day to some degree while your wife is running around like a wild woman pursuing her career. It’s a blessed couple in which anybody gets to do that, and I don’t know if it’s always more women than men that look longingly to that option.

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The Daily Princetonian

page 4

Thursday september 26, 2013

Steinberg believes BuzzFeed is “most modern of the news sources out there” MEDIA

in a lot of ways — one that I have been very lucky to be part of.

Continued from page 1

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of not relevant for a lot of years, and it started to get relevant again.

DP: At what point in your career did you want to go into a field that was specifically BuzzFeed-related?

JS: When I met Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, and I heard about his vision for what he wanted to build.

And he was just coming off the Huffington Post success.

He had such a unique set of skills in terms of building a big media property, and he had such a vision for the way that Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and all these other networks would allow people to share and spread content. That, coupled with the fact that we really had a shared vision of how to develop a business around it. I joined when we were 15 people and had six million monthly visitors to the site, and today we have over 300 employees, we just moved into a new office, we have 50 million YouTube views a month on our videos. That, and the site has 85 million monthly visitors. It’s just been a miraculous journey

DP: In your view, where do you place BuzzFeed on the spectrum of Facebook, Twitter, Huffington Post, Reddit, Tumblr — sites like those?

JS: I think we are the leading social news and entertainment company. I think we’re a media, politics, business, entertainment and technology source that really understands “the social,” the way the content gets spread, and I think we write for a much younger audience. 60 percent of our audience, of our readers, are 18-34. That’s much younger than most newspapers. So I think we’re the most modern of the news sources out there. What’s interesting is that, for people brought up on the web, all this stuff is culture and entertainment.

DP: BuzzFeed is often known for the more entertaining, cultural articles, lists and media. Then there is another side of BuzzFeed that has the more political, news-based reporting — more journalistic, perhaps.

How is BuzzFeed managing

the two sides? How do you view these two aspects?

JS: I mean, that’s always [the case] in media, right? NBC has lots of sitcoms … and it has the nightly news. So every media property has a mix of entertainment and hard news. We just have a type of entertaining content that’s more relevant to the culture of the times …

There always needs to be a dispersion of content all across the spectrum of entertainment and hard news.

We’re no different than NBC or ABC or CBS in that regard — just that everything we do is much younger.

DP: So as BuzzFeed continues to grow, what part of BuzzFeed are you looking to expand? Is it the journalistic side?

JS: Yeah. We just opened our U.K. bureau. We’ve got five or six people there.

We do six million visitors a month. Australia, we just announced. We have a whole foreign and world affairs section now, so we will continue to get more global.

Video has been a huge area of investment for us as well.

We have a big facility in L.A. with about 40 employees; a large percentage of it is

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focused on video content.

So we’re building a media company and all the things that go with doing that — including global, world affairs coverage. We’re profitable now, so that gives us the ability to finance our own growth. So we’re really just following in the footsteps of great media companies like Hearst or Conde Nast — just updated 100 percent digital.

DP: Going back to Princeton, in one of your opinion columns for the ‘Prince,‘ you wrote, “Our focus should be less on doing well and more on doing good,” in reference to the time students spend at Princeton. Looking back, do you have specific recommendations, now, for a Princeton student?

JS: I think it is really important to spend your time on what you’re passionate about and what you want to do. I know that sounds cliche and that’s the advice that everyone gives when they come back to campus … I just don’t find that most advice people give young people to be that useful. Stuff about managing people, and operating a company, and how to scale, and how to deal with tough choices — that’s stuff that I think I have direct experience that I can speak about in a very tactical manner.

But I think people need to give less advice, to be honest with you. Most of the advice I was given about doing this company was wrong, or the opposite of what I should have been doing. So I kind of had to figure that out on my own. But in terms of how to treat people, how to work with people — that was stuff that was helpful for me to hear about.

I try to figure out ways to give advice. When you look at all the people who have made dramatic changes in things, they all tend to be very young people. I’m increasingly of this opinion that people who do the most innovative stuff in business or social programs or things like that are going to have a life cycle of professional athletes. Your 20s and 30s are when you do what you’re going to do, and then you’re kind of out of the game, I feel, by the time you hit your 40s and certainly by the time you hit your 50s.

So I think it’s a very limited amount of time that you have to make an impact and do what you want to do … Everything is more competitive, everything is faster, and when you get out of Princeton, you’ve got 20 short years to make your mark — especially if you’re going to be in technology, media or entertainment.

DP: To the Princetonians that will be going into the digital media or technology world, do you have any more advice you want to share regarding this specific area?

JS: I think that studying history is really important.

If you read the history of newspapers and you read the history of cable networks, there’s a lot of mistakes to be avoided by studying history. So that’s particularly important to me. That, and also trusting my own instincts and trusting my own study of things as opposed to listening. I mean, if I had listened to what everybody told me while we were getting going with BuzzFeed, we would have been running banner ads. Jonah and I just didn’t want to do that.

We thought that there was a much better form of advertising to do, something that would work much better.

We hadn’t worked in the industry before, and we hadn’t sold banners before, so we weren’t stuck with that legacy conception. So I think it’s really important we leave legacy notions behind and we can come up with things that strike you as logical from your own perspective — no matter how naive that perspective may be. Because I think naivete can be really valuable when combined with hard work and logic.

DP: On Sunday, our new President [Christopher] Eisgruber had his presidential installation ceremony, and he echoed what former President [Shirley] Tilghman championed, which was the value of a liberal arts education. What are your views on the value of a liberal arts education in our world today?

JS: I’m not totally sold on the value of a college education in general, to be honest with you. I loved my time at Princeton. I learned an exceptional amount there, but

I think if you’re going to get a college education, it has to be something you really want to do and that you’re excited about. Doing it because it’s something that everybody does is the wrong impulse, and I think there are lots of choices available to people — ranging from volunteering time, or getting an internship and doing something along those lines, or self-study, or online education. I just think the world is wide open with choices right now, and given the cost of a college education, given that most people don’t graduate college with applicable skills to any job, [a college education] has to be something that on its own merits, a person wants to do. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t get college degrees. I’m saying that people should get a college degree because they want to study at college — not because it is a guarantee of anything. Because a college degree is no longer a guarantee of anything.

DP: So in our society today, some of the more visible entrepreneurs are those who have not received a college diploma, and some even encourage dropping out of college. Where do you stand on that?

JS: I think that two generations ago, if you went to a school like Princeton, you were guaranteed of an amazing job when you got out. That was just the way the world worked. I think I was one of the last generations where it really made a huge difference. When people apply to come work at BuzzFeed right now, I don’t really care where they went to college. It doesn’t really indicate anything to me. I care about what are their passions, what have they done, what have they written, what have they created? Just having gone to a great school doesn’t come with any directly applicable skills. So when you’re at Princeton for four years, you are going to derive pleasure and benefit from learning, but you’ve got to do something else. You’ve got to tie in some other way to position yourself to do what you want to do when you get out of there. Just going to classes and getting good grades is not enough.

The Daily Princetonian

Thursday september 26, 2013

page 5

ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLUB

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HORIA RADOI :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Howard Marks, entrepreneur responsible for franchises such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero, gave a lecture on investing to young entrepreneurs.

Gambrel: no way to fix SPIDER once it is in the air SPIDER

Continued from page 1

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the universe expanded rapidly for a very short period of time. SPIDER measures the energy of gravitational waves that existed in the early universe by looking at polarized light that has been traveling since that time.

After 20 days of being 120,000 feet in the air, with 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere below it, SPIDER will have collected all the data it needs. It will then descend by parachute, Gudmundsson said.

Once SPIDER has crashed to the ice, several scientists and riggers will f ly to the site of the crash and recover the hard drive and as much

equipment as possible.

This mission is dangerous in Antarctica, Gudmundsson explained, because the frigid temperatures limit the amount of time the recovery team’s plane can operate outside. Consequently, some materials may be left behind and picked up at a later time.

But in the Texas heat, the team spent months this summer troubleshooting errors within and between the subsystems of SPIDER in order to prepare the device for launch. The scientists encountered new problems in every subsystem, and more remain to be fixed before the device is officially launched, according to Anne Gambrel, a third-year physics graduate student, who has been

working on the project with Gudmundsson.

“The main thing we did was essentially crisis management,” Gambrel said. She noted that in Antarctica, the trick will be to know when to stop testing and when to decide to launch.

Once SPIDER is in the air, there will be no way to fix anything that goes wrong, she explained. Balloonborne experiments have historically been prone to failure. While the team has used past disasters to ensure success, both Gudmundsson and Gambrel said jokingly that there’s no way to know what could go wrong.

Both Gudmundsson and Gambrel said that what they are looking forward to most is the moment of the launch.

“I don’t know what that feeling is going to be,” Gudmundsson, who has been working on the project for five years, said. “But when that thing goes in the air …

It’s going to be great.”

Gambrel said she was enthusiastic about the prospect of the launch and will be working on a successor to the SPIDER device, known as SPIDER II. “It’s going to be so cool,” she said of the launch.

CORRECTION The Sept. 25 graphic “Annual Giving since 1990” contained incorrect units. Annual Giving levels should be measured in millions of U.S. dollars. The ‘Prince’ regrets the error.

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Susannah Sharpless columnist

Finding meaning in vocation

D

uring my internship program this summer, my fellow interns and I gathered in The Huffington Post offices, talking to former Princeton Dean of Religious Life (and current HuffPo Religion editor) Paul Raushenbush. He had answered all of our questions about the religious angle of HuffPo, the spiritual climate of New York City, and the challenges of working with religion in a country that calls itself secular. We had run out of things to share. There was a small pause, and then Raushenbush said to us, “Talk to me about what this summer has taught you about vocation.”

We were silent. I personally hadn’t thought about vocation in so many words all summer. I had, though, raged against internships. Something in this rage was intimately connected with my desire to do something that felt “right,” like a vocation should, and internships just felt “wrong.” The idea of spending the summer doing work that’s by definition awful and then using that experience as motivation for ascending the corporate ladder was infuriating to me. It seemed — and still does — a backward system: Companies literally exploit their interns and then these interns come back for more. I have no idea why I’m supposed to want this white-collar type of success when the ways of getting there seem immoral and dishonest and downright unpleasant.

Beyond my personal distaste for internships, it’s not like Princeton’s emphasis on them is that beneficial. When I have an unpaid internship, I’m not actually doing anything for my future. According to a 2012 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, if I get a paid internship (which is highly unlikely for someone who wants to be a writer), I have a 60 percent chance of being hired.

If I have an unpaid internship, I have a 37 percent chance. If I have no internship at all, though, I still have a 36 percent chance of getting hired by the same company.

This is because — as the study explains — companies don’t want to hire unpaid interns because they’ll only have “clerical” experience. So the work a company asks you to do in your internship — menial, boring tasks you have to do because everybody else is a paid professional and their work has value — is therefore irrelevant. Honestly, it makes sense: If a company decides my labor is not worth paying for the first time around, they’re not going to pay me for it in the future.

Maybe this is because, however, the kinds of internships I am pushed toward are not the “right” kinds of internships for me. This summer, I took an internship that was out of the way of what I (and my parents) thought I “should” be doing, and I absolutely loved it. I was a part of a new program from the Office of Religious Life and the Pace Center called the Interfaith Summer Internship Program, and I had been placed with a volunteer-run bookshop in Washington Heights. My co-workers were other volunteers who actually treated me like an equal. I had a f lexible, open schedule, and I had an independent project that occupied most of my time and, above all, I — like everyone else — was happy to be there, committed to the cause.

But Princeton was funding my summer.

The real volunteers were not so lucky: This was an after-work volunteer commitment for most of them, and they needed other ways to pay the bills. They were all freethinking, artistically minded people; they challenged conventional ideas of success, disagreed with many a bureaucratic, capitalist notion and — somehow — were self-sufficient. And that is not something Princeton shows me enough. Princeton applauds hard work and ambition, the successful ascension of the corporate ladder, the high-f lying political career. No one ever, really, asks me to think about what Paul did when he asked about vocation: Will I be able to spend my life doing something that makes me happy? Do I even know what that is?

I didn’t answer him, but the people I met this summer could have. They had all kinds of careers; they were writers and teachers, freelance artists and tutors, editors and welders. Some of them were only employed sporadically, and some still lived at home.

But that didn’t matter to them or define them: What mattered was their art. That was their real job, an option that I hadn’t even realized I had before this summer.

By prioritizing their craft, they somehow had figured out a way to make a living and a home in one of the most expensive and exciting cities in the world, to be engaged in their community and to seem pretty darn happy about it — and that is success enough for me.

Susannah Sharpless is a religion major from Indianapolis, Ind. She can be reached at ssharple@princeton.edu.

Opinion

Thursday september 26, 2013

page 6

{ www.dailyprincetonian.com }

Princeton means washing dishes Bennett McIntosh

senior columnist

T

his month, while every-

one was returning to the quintessentially Princeton setting of ivy-covered castles (or, in the case of Wilson, ivy-covered bomb shelters), I was also returning, along with a number of others, to a setting that holds little in common with everything ivy: the Wilcox/Wu dish room.

Three-and-a-half hours a night, two nights a week, I join my fellow student workers in a deceptively simple task — cleaning the dishes that hundreds of our classmates have used, so that they can be returned to the servery to be used by hundreds more. It’s a dirty, often monotonous job, though lightened by the attitudes of colleagues who can find humor in a mutilated fork or the surprising ricochets of a poorly thrown plate. More important for Princeton students, it’s a fourhour break from the pressures of the academic world. But I derive the most joy from the work itself.

I can lose myself in it, caring for nothing but defending the dish room against the endless line of dirty dishes coming down the conveyor, or, more meaningfully, against our perennial foe, gastroenteritis.

And here we reach the heart of my job satisfaction: Dishwashing

is only truly meaningful when I put it in the context of the dining hall outside the dish room. Each night, several hundred of my classmates can enjoy a meal. The meal means food that nourishes their brains for classes and their bodies for athletic feats; it means company that sharpens their minds, morals and wit; it means time off from schoolwork (albeit shorter than my four-hour paid study break); it means eating as part of an undergraduate community 5,113 times larger than each individual student.

And I, in my own small way, help provide that.

This is not capital ‘S’ service. It’s not what we mean by “Princeton in the nation’s service.” It’s what economists mean when they say “the service sector.” This is not the ideal of service; it’s the gritty reality. This is the world of P-O’d customers, of pranked McDonald’s drive-through workers, of hardworking men and women who come home every night smelling like French-fry grease or beer or artificial butter-flavored popcorn tasteenhancement product. It is also the world of ever-smiling baristas, of the Dairy Queen worker who confronts the customer who swiped a $20 bill from a blind man, then slipped the blind man $20 out-of-pocket, of the kind, old groundskeeper adored by every child at my elementary school.

Such mundane service, without expectation of recognition, is often the kind that is most meaningful, to both server and recipient.

And it is this kind of service that is not discussed or honored at

vol. cxxxvii

Princeton. This is not serving in an exotic location through Community Action, Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders — it’s picking up thousands of beer cans along Elm Street after the P-rade has turned it into a sticky river of Bud, Miller and Heineken. I did just that during Reunions this year, after having gone through the P-rade twice while the same alumni whose detritus I would bag mere minutes later cheered me and my plaid band uniform forward. I felt connected to other Princetonians during the procession, but it was only afterward, as a cog in the machinery that keeps Reunions running sustainably and practically, that I felt myself a part of Princeton.

Previously, I had only been celebrating with the community — now I was acting as its agent.

Ambitious world-shakers and nation-builders that we are, we will without a doubt have much opportunity for significant work “in the nation’s service and the service of all nations” both now and after graduation. But during our four years here, we would do well to pay as much mind to serving our fellow Princetonians here and now. Mundane though they may be, tutoring, clerical work, Reunions tasks and yes, washing dishes, connect us to Princeton and to each other. It makes this place something more than a site for the exchange of money for skills and for knowledge — it makes Princeton a community.

Bennett McIntosh is a sophomore from Littleton, Colo. He can be reached at bam2@princeton.edu.

Luc Cohen ’14

editor-in-chief

Grace Riccardi ’14

business manager

BOARD OF TRUSTEES president Richard W. Thaler, Jr. ’73 vice presidents John G. Horan ’74 Thomas E. Weber ’89 secretary Zachary A. Goldfarb ’05 treasurer Michael E. Seger ’71 Craig Bloom ’88 Gregory L. Diskant ’70 Richard P. Dzina, Jr. ’85 William R. Elfers ’71 John G. Horan ’74 Kathleen Kiely ’77 Rick Klein ’98 James T. MacGregor ’66 Betsy J. Minkin ’77 Jerry Raymond ’73 Carol Rigolot h ’51 h ’70 Annalyn Swan ’73 Douglas Widmann ’90

137TH BUSINESS BOARD business manager Grace Riccardi ’14 director of national advertising Nick Hu ’15 director of campus/local adversting Harold Li ’15 director of web advertising Matteo Kruijssen ’16

Freud is too good to date anyone who will date him

director of recruitment advertising Zoe Zhang ’16 director of operations Elliot Pearl-Sacks ’15 comptroller Kevin Tang ’16

warren katz ’14

..................................................

NIGHT STAFF 9.25.13 news Night Chief: Monica Chon ’15 Anna Mazarakis ’16 copy Jean-Carlos Arenas ’16 Caroline Congdon ’17 Elizabeth Dolan ’16 Chamsi Hssaine ’16 Joyce Lee ’17 Alex Schindele-Murayama ’16 Emily Shuldiner ’16 Sunny Zhang ’16 design Debbie Yun ’16 Shirley Zhu ’16 Christina Funk ’15

Religion isn’t stupid David Hammer

guest contributor

W

e do not pretend to understand the occult forces that drive student group advertisement. Lately, however, things have taken a turn for the Cartesian.

First was club swimming’s endearing “I swim, therefore IM” leaf let.

Next was a provocative poster from the Princeton University Society of Humanists (PUSH): “I think, therefore I am Atheist.”

As members of Princeton’s interfaith group, the Religious Life Council, we understand how challenging it is to capture our peers’ attention and to recruit new members. (Believe us, interfaith has never had the panache of, say, club swimming.) A worthy cause is all too easily lost in the fray, and so we sympathize with the need for posters that appeal to our classmates’ wit or to their burning passion for early modern philosophy.

Regardless, words have weight, and we think PUSH’s words in particular are unfair both to our religious peers and to the banner of humanism. We assume PUSH doesn’t quite mean them — that

they’re just being glib and that we’re just being grumpy. But that said, “I think, therefore I am Atheist” ref lects a widespread attitude that merits attention.

There are, of course, important criticisms of religion and of religious institutions, which should be discussed vigorously.

A religious community, like any community, has the potential to advocate unref lective dogma, objectionable moral doctrines, superstition and belief in empirical falsehoods. These features should bother the religious and the non-religious alike. But another criticism of religion — manifest in these posters — is gaining purchase among some otherwise thoughtful people. It is, unfortunately, quickly becoming a default criticism: that religious people are unthinking and disengaged, that religion is essentially “stupid.”

We think this argument is unsound. When we say someone is religious, we have not in that very breath said they are softminded. Many people of faith — including many people on this campus — are well aware of the intellectual arguments for and against religion. They struggle with them, and in turn, determine

for themselves where they think the balance lies. We would do well to dispense with the simplistic idea that religion is always and everywhere an intellectual “crutch,” but we can only do this through sustained engagement with real, religious people.

The alternative is to freeze constructive conversation before it begins in earnest. But that is a disaster. Religion, we think, is too important to ignore, whatever your beliefs. Religion can be profound and beautiful and morally edifying. Religious people can be thoughtful and interesting and worth engaging. We should examine religion together and ensure that our most cherished views — whatever they may be — are not dictated by prejudice or fear.

We hope you go to PUSH’s meetings. We hope you ask your friends to bring you to their religious services and that you try to unearth what religion means to them. We hope you attend a Shabbat dinner. We hope you check out Diwali at the Chapel, a celebration of the Hindu festival of lights. We hope you ask questions that matter and seek out a diversity of possible answers. We hope you think and, therefore, decide for

yourself.

David Hammer is a philosophy major from Darien, Conn. He can be reached at dhammer@princeton.edu.

Endorsed by every member of the Religious Life Council (rlc.princeton.edu): Allegra Wiprud ’14, Hindu Arjun Dhillon ’15, Sikh Ari Satok ’14, Jewish Arielle Davidoff ’14, Jewish Asmod Karki ’16, Non-religious Bina Peltz ’15, Jewish David Hammer ’14, Atheist Emma Synder ’15, Episcopalian Farah Amjad ’16, Muslim Henrique de Freitas ’15, Buddhist Jihad al-Jabban ’14, Muslim Kate Wadman ’16, LDS (Mormon) Kristin Wilson ’14 Kujegi Camara ’15, Muslim Lauren Hoffman ’15, Jewish Mallory Banks ’16, Southern Baptist Christian Naomi Lee ’15, Buddhist Paarth Shah ’16, Jain Rebecca Dresner ’14, Jewish Safeeyah Quereshi ’16, Muslim Sam Watters ’15, Seeker Sarah Qari ’16, Muslim Vanessa Mosoti ’15 Victoria Chung ’14, Seventh-Day Adventist Christian Wardah Bari ’16, Muslim

The Daily Princetonian

Thursday september 26, 2013

page 7

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CONOR DUBE :: FILE PHOTO

The football team was 0-3 in games that were decided by a field goal or less last year, something they hope to change this season.

Defense will need to improve upon play in lategame situations in order to have future success FOOTBALL Continued from page 8

.............

lems in the second half.

“We’ll have to watch the film to see exactly what happened.”

In all four of these games, the defense was unable to get a stop in the end of the fourth quarter, either allowing a game-winning score or making it so that the offense didn’t have one last shot to tie or win the game. This has primarily been due to a

“We’ll have to look at it on film to see if our energy was the same.”

Bob Surace ’90 head coach

pass defense that has been unable to stop the opposing offense in late-game situations where the other team is focusing primarily on passing the ball in an (ultimately successful) attempt to regain the lead.

What will have to happen for this issue to be resolved is working on discipline.

This type of issue tends to occur because defenses tend to be more tired later in the game, making them more susceptible to blowing an assignment. This is even more of an issue if the opposing offense is behind and playing in hurry-up mode.

It should be noted that the Tigers did show the ability to perform in close lategame situations at times last year. The come-frombehind win against Harvard is proof of this. While the offense played arguably its

“There are positives you can take against a team like Lehigh, but the bottom line is we had a chance to make a statement and we didn’t.” bob surace ’90 head coach best quarter of the season, the defense also was huge, as it consistently stopped Harvard and gave the offense more shots to make the comeback possible. That is how the defense will have to play late in games in order

to win close games in the future.

“We’ll have to look at it on film to see if our energy was the same,” Surace said of the defense. “My initial impression was that no, it isn’t, so we’ll see if we have to rotate more guys or what that is.

They were on the field a lot.”

While the Tigers do not like seeing these problems return from last year, they can still be fixed. The coaches will have to instill more discipline or try a rotation as Surace suggested.

However, there are definitely also positives to take

away from the game. The defense seemed to do a good job rushing the passer, although it was not able to

“We showed a lot of heart in that [final] drive.” bob surace ’90 head coach take advantage as Mountain Hawk quarterback Brandon

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Bialkowski was effective at quickly finding an open man in these situations. In addition, the offense had a great showing, as it consistently was able to move the ball downfield, even if it didn’t always result in points. The offense also showed resilience, as it managed to score a touchdown on the very next drive after Lehigh had completed its comeback to take its first one-point lead.

“I thought that was a really good drive, and we showed a lot of heart in that drive,” Surace said. “There are positives you can take against a team like Lehigh, but the bottom line is we had to take a chance to make a statement and we didn’t.”

Sports

Thursday september 26, 2013

page 8

{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } WOMEN’S SOCCER

A N A LY S I S

Tigers prepare to start Close games a recent Ivy League play after problem for Princeton strong start to season

By Damir Golac

associate sports editor

By Anna Mazarakis staff writer

After defeating Fordham 3-1 on Tuesday, the women’s soccer team is ready to begin its Ivy League season this weekend. The Tigers (41-2) are undefeated at home so far this season and aim to keep that streak alive as they host Yale on Saturday.

This year’s 4-1-2 mark is the best start the Tigers have seen since they started the season 5-1-1 in 2008. They started the week with a 1-1 tie against William & Mary on Sunday, with junior defender Gabrielle Ragazzo’s game-tying goal coming in the 81st minute to preserve their undefeated streak at home. The Tigers have not lost an overtime game since 2011 against Seton Hall.

“I think even though we tied, we played a really good game,” Ragazzo said. “We put two halves of good soc-

cer together, and I think that was key for us going into Ivy’s especially. I think [the Fordham] game is just one more final chance to play together. Anytime we’re playing together, it’s good for us, and hopefully we’ll have a good game; that would be encouraging.”

Freshman forward Tyler Lussi had her first two-goal game in the win over Fordham (2-5-2), while senior midfielder Erika Hoglund added the third goal. Lussi leads Princeton with six of the team’s 11 goals this season, and junior midfielder/ forward Lauren Lazo has been the second-biggest contributor with three goals. Ragazzo and Hoglund are the only other Tigers to find the back of the net this season.

The Tigers will need this offensive productivity as they have lost their last four home matchups

against the Bulldogs (4-3) and all except for one of the Bulldogs’ games — an 8-0 beating at the hands of Georgetown — have been decided by two goals or fewer. Oddly enough, the visiting team has won in each of the teams’ last six meetings.

Lussi, the top scorer in the Ivy League, will go head-tohead with Bulldog forward Melissa Gavin, whose five goals are good for secondmost in the league. Freshman Geneva Decker is second on the Bulldogs with three goals this season.

Yale comes off of consecutive one-goal losses, most recently a 1-0 loss to Fairfield in which a goal in the final seconds of the first half doomed the Bulldogs despite a second half in which they outshot their opponent 8-5.

The Tigers will face the Bulldogs Saturday at 4 p.m. in Roberts Stadium.

Despite an impressive performance by the football team on Saturday, particularly in the first half, the Tigers left their first game disappointed, blowing a 19-point lead to end up losing by only one. The loss highlights a problem that plagued the Tigers all of last season and one that they will need to correct if they hope to challenge for the Ivy League title. That problem is the Tigers’ inability to win close games.

Though last season was probably the best in recent memory, the Tigers lost all three games that were decided by a field goal or less.

This included the first two games of the season — a 17-14 loss to the same Lehigh team and a 21-20 loss to Georgetown, whom the Tigers play this weekend. The third close loss was a more crucial one, coming against Cornell as the Big Red gave the Tigers their first Ivy loss of the season, 37-35.

Their loss against Lehigh last year is the least like the rest of the bunch. In that game, the Tigers were on their way to being blown out, down 17-0 at the half, and did not get on the board until the start of the fourth quarter. Good defense and another touchdown allowed the Tigers to get within three points, but the Tigers were unable to get a first down when they had a chance to tie the game with over three minutes to go.

The Georgetown loss was more frustrating, as the Tigers were leading until the Hoyas made a field goal with under a minute to play. Additionally, the Tigers were 0-3 in field goal attempts, with two of the misses being attempts of over 40 yards.

The biggest problem in that game, however, was that the Tigers converted on only one of their seven third downs in the second half.

Unlike the first two, the loss at Cornell was a shootout. They lost on a last-minute field goal, but in this game, the Tigers did their

job on the offensive end, putting up one of their highest point totals of the season, but the defense did not do as well, allowing the Big Red to move the chains on nine of its 15 third downs.

Finally, this year’s season-opening loss against the Mountain Hawks had many similarities to last year’s close losses. For one, the Tigers did not convert either of their two field goal attempts, with both being blocked. Additionally, the Tiger defense, despite playing well early, was not able to stop Lehigh on either of its last two drives.

“We’re going to look at that on film. I gotta see what the issue was,” head coach Bob Surace ’90 said of the blocked kicks. “The kicks were low, and that has not been ever an issue for [sophomore kicker] Nolan [Biek].”

“It was a couple busts in coverage — some guys just not being in the exact spot where they need to be,” senior safety Phillip Bhaya said of the defense’s probSee FOOTBALL page 7

A Tale of Two Halves 27 56

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0

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PRINCETON POINTS FIRST DOWNS

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HELEN YAO :: DESIGN EDITOR

The football team performed very differently in the first and second halves of Saturday’s football game, allowing their early 19-point lead to be overcome by the Mountain Hawks in their one-point loss. This graphic looks at some of the different areas in which the football team had notable changes between the two halves.

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