Today's paper: Thursday, Dec. 12th.

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Thursday december 12, 2013 vol. cxxxvii no. 120

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In Opinion Benjamin Dinovelli defends Princeton’s tax exempt status, and Prianka Misra talks diversity on campus. PAGE 4

In Street Miranda Rehaut investigates the waitlist for a Chapel wedding, and Street gives advice on gift giving.

Today on Campus 9:30 a.m.: Mindfulness and Eating helps students develop healthy eating habits over the holiday season. McCosh G20.

The Archives

Dec. 12, 1974 Job classification data reveals that only two out of the 270 fulltime professors at the University are women.

On the Blog Our Best of 2013 lists, including the year’s top 13 songs and top twerk tracks.

MENINGITIS VaccineTracker

ACADEMICS

New class examines Islam in America By Elizabeth Paul staff writer

A new seminar course, AMS 339: Religion and Culture: Muslims in America, will be offered next semester and has already become overenrolled with interested students. It will provide for the first time an overview of the long history of Islam in the United States, dating back to the slave trade in the 17th century, in addition to discussing this history’s implications for American culture and policy. Aly Kassam-Remtulla, associate director for Academic Planning and Institutional Diversity and the course instructor, said he designed the course out of a desire to talk about a piece of American history that had not yet been addressed in Princeton’s course offerings while providing insight into the culture of people who identify as Muslims today. “My course offers one dimension of the present reality,” Kassam-Remtulla said. “It provides insight into the past reality that a lot of people are unaware of — the history of Muslims coming to this country as far back as the 17th century.” Kassam-Remtulla has been discussing his vision for this course with Muslim Life Coordinator and Chaplain Sohaib Sultan for about one year. Sultan emphasized that this course would allow students to understand the history of Islam in America and how it has contributed to the present political climate. “Ever since 9/11 … Islam and Muslims are constantly in the headline news,” Sultan said. He explained the importance for students to “get an understanding of the realities beyond the headline news.” See AMS page 5

CARLY JACKSON :: CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Students make snowglobes at a study break featuring PPE, POCO and other musical groups last Tuesday.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

Lewis ’55 known for assertive decision-making

4,361

By Paul Phillips staff writer

The number of people who have received the meningitis vaccine so far.

News & Notes UCSB demands access to meningitis vaccine

as the emergency meningitis vaccine campaign at the University enters its fourth day with 4,361 students and select community members vaccinated, the parents of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara want their children to receive the vaccine as well, NBC News reported. Four students at UCSB have fallen ill with meningitis caused by a bacterial strain slightly different from the one that has caused the Princeton outbreak. One student had to have both feet amputated because of complications from the disease, according to NBC News. Health officials at UCSB and the local public health departments have been flooded with calls and emails urging them to offer the vaccine at the Santa Barbara campus. Both outbreaks were caused by meningococcal bacteria type B, a group of bacteria for which there is no vaccine currently licensed in the United States. The University’s current vaccination campaign aims to vaccinate 6,000 students with Bexsero, a vaccine produced by Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis that has been licensed in the European Union, Australia and Canada. Upon consultation with the CDC, state and local health authorities, the University has imported 12,000 doses of the vaccine on an emergency basis for use only at Princeton.

HOLIDAY HAPPINESS

COURTESY OF MUDD MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY

Peter Lewis ’55 was a donor to the University and supporter of marijuana legalization.

Peter Lewis ’55, who, as the CEO of Progressive Insurance, was notable for being a champion of individuals taking charge of their own decisions, conveyed the same message as a young eating club officer at Princeton. As treasurer of the now defunct Dial Lodge Club, which occupied the building that now holds the Bendheim Center for Finance, Lewis once resolved a conflict by appealing the president to make a decision, rather than wait for an informal consensus to be reached. “We had a difficult problem with a lot of hemming and hawing where different solutions were proposed,” Richard May ’55, then-Dial Lodge president and a classmate of Lewis, said. “And he just said, ‘One person’s got to make the decision. You’re the President. You do it.’ ” After that statement, May explained, the meeting concluded and he made his decision. The incident, he said, demonstrated one of Peter Lewis’ most notable traits: his tendency to make an individual decision and stand by it, rather than to hide behind a bland committee solution.

More than a dozen interviews and a review of his student records show that Lewis was an independent thinker unafraid of sharing unpopular thoughts. At the University, he was a member of the varsity crew team and wrote his senior thesis about auto insurance, an industry in which his family owned a small business of only 40 employees at the time. Lewis later took over the firm, Progressive, growing it into the giant it is now. Although Lewis’ college yearbook biography called him a Republican, he later became an outspoken supporter of progressive causes. Lewis reportedly has directly funded the passage of almost every marijuana reform in the past couple decades and began using marijuana after he had a leg partially amputated in 1998. However, a friend said that Lewis’ marijuana use was not always strictly medical and that it even played a role in family interactions. Lewis, who died on Nov. 23 at his home in Coconut Grove, Fla. at the age of 80, was also the most generous trustee in recorded history, having donated $233 million to the University throughout his lifetime. He was born in Cleveland in 1933 and attended Cleveland Heights High School

before coming to Princeton. He was also a generous donor to Ohio-based charities. “Progressive may be the greatest company in the history of the world,” Lewis’ long-time philanthropic adviser Jennifer Frutchy said in her eulogy at Lewis’s funeral, “but what is not disputable, is that he was one of the greatest human beings in the history of the world.” A thesis on auto insurance When Lewis was a senior majoring in the Wilson School, he requested a special permission in order to drop a course, Chinese Art, in order to have more time to complete his senior thesis. His thesis adviser backed him up. “He has had a very strong and earnest interest in pursuing his study beyond the normal limits of a senior thesis,” his advisor, former politics professor Marver Bernstein, wrote in a letter on his behalf. Lewis’ thesis was titled “The Financially Irresponsible Motorist: A Problem in Practical Politics” and was submitted jointly to the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School. The thesis was a study of “compulsory automobile insurance and related problems of public See TRUSTEE page 2

ACADEMICS

After program restructuring, fellowship numbers remain similar By Regina Wang and Ruby Shao senior writer & staff writer

In December 2009, the University drew criticism when it fired then-Associate Dean of the College Frank Ordiway ’81, who oversaw postgraduate fellowship advising. Ordiway’s firing prompted numerous statements of support from the University community, including support from past scholarship winners and a letter to the Daily Princetonian signed by 34 faculty members expressing their “deep disappointment” with his departure. The controversial move prompted a debate over the effectiveness of campus fellowship advising. In a Princeton Alumni Weekly story after the firing, University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee ’69 noted that Princeton “has not performed as well as we would have liked” in the Marshall and Rhodes programs. In the same article, then-Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel said she be-

lieved Princeton “should be competitive over the long term with peer institutions for top scholarships such as the Rhodes, Marshall and Gates” and that the planned changes should help with this. Durkee and Malkiel declined to comment for this story. In the decade prefacing Ordiway’s firing, the University had 29 Marshall and Rhodes winners, compared to 52 from Harvard, 39 from Stanford, 38 from Yale and 24 from MIT. This year, Princeton had three winners of the Marshall and Rhodes scholarships, while Harvard and Yale each had seven. Although the University’s fellowship advising system saw heavy restructuring in 2010, which was at least partially motivated by the lagging number of Marshall and Rhodes Scholarship winners, its performance in these programs has not improved significantly. From 2008 to 2010, the University had six Rhodes winners, according to the Rhodes Trust, and it had the same num-

ber from 2011 to 2013. Meanwhile, Harvard had nine winners from 2008 to 2010 and 13 from 2011 to 2013, while Yale had four and 11, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of Princeton Marshall scholars has increased under Director of Fellowship Advising Dr. Deirdre Moloney, from three from 2008 to six from 2011. Harvard saw six in the first period and five in the second, and Yale saw six and then four. Moloney declined to provide the number of students who applied for University endorsement for the Rhodes and Marshall and the number who received endorsement. Yet members of the advising office explained that the University’s performance in major programs may be influenced by institutional factors that are hard to overcome. While the initial impetus for the restructure was partly motivated by Rhodes and Marshall statistics, the current priorities of the fellowship advising program suggest they may not be the appropriate benchmark, and

that the program should not be driven or evaluated based on quotas of winners. A controversial firing The University replaced Ordiway with Moloney as director of fellowship advising in April 2010. Under Moloney, fellowship advising is now part of the Office of International Programs, rather than the Office of the Dean of the College. In addition, advising has focused specifically on earlier and broader outreach to prospective applicants. As Associate Dean of the College, Ordiway was one of 12 fellowship advisers specializing in 20 fellowships. He personally advised half of the fellowships, including the Gates, Marshall and Rhodes scholarships. Meanwhile, the Office of International Programs, headed by Senior Associate Dean of the College Nancy Kanach, coordinated the Fulbright Scholarship application process, the Ito Foundation grants See ORDIWAY page 3


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