Princeton wants to help students in mental health crises. Can it succeed?
By
In December 2023, a first-year sat on a Zoom meeting with her parents, and University administrators including her deans of college, weighing a hefty decision. She was given a choice: Complete her end-of-term assignments in the remaining two days before Dean’s Date, Princeton’s deadline for all endof-term work, or take a leave of absence from the University.
Blaire, who requested this pseudonym and, like the other students in this story, spoke under the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive health information, had experienced a mental health emergency on campus earlier
in the semester. As a result, she spent eight nights in Penn Medicine’s Princeton House Behavioral Health (not affiliated with Princeton University), sandwiched on both ends by an overnight stay in McCosh Health Center. In total, she missed 11 days of school, including the last few days of class and almost all of reading week, the period of time between the end of classes and Dean’s Date, the due date for all written work.
On the Zoom call, Blaire was still reeling from the ordeal which landed her at Princeton House, an experience that she said left her “emotionally wrecked.” She was not given the option for coursework extensions, as Dean’s Date offered limited flexibility.
“They said I had to do all of my work in the next two days if I wanted to finish the term and still be a Princeton student,” she recalled. Feeling caught between her academic and mental wellbeing, Blaire decided to stick it out and finish her assignments.
“I made the choice to just continue and try to finish everything up as fast as I could,” she said. And she did, submitting everything in time, despite the guidance she said she received from a Princeton House social worker to slowly reintegrate into campus and academic life. She passed her classes and returned in the spring to continue her studies.
Still, the experience made her lose
Princeton boosts financial aid despite potential budget cuts, new endowment tax
By Devon Rudolph Associate News Editor
Princeton announced Thursday that most students with families making up to $150,000 a year will pay nothing to attend for the upcoming school year as part of the most significant expansion of financial aid since 2023. Most undergraduates with families earning up to $250,000 a year will not pay tuition as part of $327 million in financial aid spending, a $44 million increase from last year.
Previously, the annual family income threshold
to receive full financial aid was $100,000.
The financial aid increase for a program already known as one of the most generous in the country comes amid a rocky financial picture for many elite universities, which are confronting the loss of research federal funding and an endowment tax passed by Congress in July. In May, Princeton asked departments to prepare for budget cuts of 5 to 10 percent and acknowledged the potential of layoffs.
The financial aid increase could also reduce Princeton’s tuition-paying student
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population as the University faces down an 8 percent endowment tax as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill exempts educational institutions with fewer than 3,000 tuition-paying students from the endowment tax and is scheduled to take effect in 2026.
According to the annual Frosh Survey conducted by the ‘Prince,’ about 69 percent of students in the class of 2028, 65 percent for the class of 2027, and 63 percent for the class of 2026 came from households making
Opinion
Why you should join the ‘Prince’
By Miriam Waldvogel Editor-In-Chief
Ifirst realized The Daily Princetonian was more than just a fun extracurricular when I got a phone call from an Italian art dealer accused of illegally supplying hundreds of antiquities to Princeton’s art museum and other galleries across America.
I picked up the story of Edoardo Almagià ’73 when the ‘Prince’ broke the news that prosecutors had seized a dozen artifacts from Princeton linked to the alumnus. The night that article was published, I attempted to get in touch with Almagià to give him a chance to respond. My calls to his cell phone went unanswered, and I assumed that the story was a dead end.
I was wrong. Almagià called me back and kept me on the phone for over an hour with colorful tales of his exploits: Princeton’s museum staff were “idiots” for allowing the seizure of his artifacts, many of which he claimed had been in his family for years or had been found “in the countryside.” That interaction led to months of follow-up reporting, where I cataloged Almagià-linked objects that remained in Princeton’s collections
alongside the University’s efforts to update its acquisition practices.
This is the promise of The Daily Princetonian: to find something that interests you, and to inspire you to dig into it, relentlessly. More commonly known as the ‘Prince,’ we serve as Princeton University’s only independent newspaper of record, the ultimate source of campus news, and the pulse of the student body for nearly 150 years and counting. Unlike many student groups, we’re independent of the University; we run like a business, on advertisements and subscriptions, and our coverage is directed by students like you, not faculty or administrators.
I’m writing this column in our Opinion section, the training ground for thinkers like Elena Kagan ’81. I grew up, however, in our reporting sections — where you might find yourself flying cross-country to cover March Madness, reviewing coffee on the ‘Prince’ food budget, standing on Prospect Avenue with a microphone to record a podcast about why a building crossed the road, or, like me, spending hours on the phone with Almagià in between p-sets.
BY CYNTHIA TORRES
This Week In History
Recruitment season has begun for new members at The Daily Princetonian and emails are bombarding HoagieMail subscribers’ inboxes. This week, we dive into the ways ‘Prince’ staff have recruited emerging student journalists to the paper over the years, promising everything from a can of Coke to the meaning of life at their open houses.
Raphaela Gold H ead Features editor
ART BY MALIA GAVIOLA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Photos of Frist Health Center and Penn Medicine by Ori Orbach / Daily Princetonian
Eisgruber urges Class of 2029 to uphold scholarly rigor and university independence
By Cynthia Torres Associate News Editor
University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 urged incoming students to stand up for research excellence and the independence of universities in an address to the Class of 2029 at Opening Exercises on Sunday.
“Universities must be independent sources of data, theory, and argument,” he said. “Faculty members and students should have the incentive, the responsibility, and the freedom to pursue scholarly excellence even when the arguments they generate might anger or displease powerful people.”
“That independence gives universities a unique and essential role within a free and democratic republic. It also guarantees that they will be controversial,” he added.
Eisgruber has sought to defend the independence of universities from extraordinary pressure from the Trump administration in the past six months and is the author of a forthcoming book arguing that “colleges are getting free speech on campuses right.”
A theme of academic rigor was evident from the beginning of Eisgruber’s remarks. He
U. AFFAIRS
began by mentioning the 2029 pre-read, “On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience” by Dean of the College Michael Gordin. The pre-read introduces incoming freshmen to research by members of the University community.
“There is no simple test or rule that can distinguish a scientific argument from a non-scientific one,” Eisgruber said in reflection of the book’s primary discussion on distinguishing “fact from fiction, knowledge from opinion, and science from pseudoscience.”
Rather, Eisgruber said, arguments in a university context should be weighed by the standards of their respective academic field rather than parties like the public.
“When Princeton decides whether to hire or promote professors, we evaluate their scholarship by reference to the standards of their disciplines, not by whether their work is popular with the public, government officials, or powerful interest groups,” he said. “We expect faculty members and students to be loyal to the truth, not to the preferences of any party, official, agenda, or ideological platform.”
At the same time, he encour-
aged incoming students to engage with their professors — about their courses, about University policy, and about his address.
“They have no obligation to agree with it, and I find they often disagree with what I say,” Eisgruber said. “They have no obligation to agree with it, and neither do you.”
Eisgruber described disagreement as “desirable and beneficial,” referencing emeritus
physics professor and 2019 Nobel Prize recipient Jim Peebles’ belief that “new generations of scientists replace older theories with better ones.”
He also highlighted honesty as another pillar in Princeton’s scholarly community, referencing the undergraduate Honor Code — historically strictly enforced — alongside a swipe at generative AI.
“Trust that I don’t need to explain why honesty is better than
dishonesty, or why it is wrong to steal other people’s ideas or claim credit for words that are not our own — even words generated by a machine,” he said. Eisgruber ended his remarks with a classic “Welcome to Princeton!” as the Class of 2029 closed out a long orientation week.
the ‘Prince.’
Princeton and BP agree to end 25-year funding for Carbon Mitigation Initiative
By Vitus Larrieu Senior News Writer
Fossil fuel company BP will no longer fund the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), one of Princeton’s flagship climate research institutes, marking the end of one of the University’s most high-profile corporate partnerships.
Stephen Pacala, the initiative’s director, told The Daily Princetonian that BP and CMI had elected not to renew their contract after the current fiveyear term expires at the end of 2025.
“It has produced remarkable and influential work on solutions to the carbon and climate problem,” Pacala wrote. “But the world is very different from what it was 25 years ago. Neither party now seeks its continuation.”
BP did not return several requests for comment.
CMI, an independent academic research program spearheaded by the High Meadows Environmental Institute, works on alternative fuels, climate mitigation, and other elements of the net-zero transition. Key projects have included work on carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and a landmark study that outlined pathways to achieve net zero emissions in the United States by 2050.
CMI researchers will look to other funding to support their research.
“The work currently supported by BP will remain a central pillar in many of our research groups, but support-
ed by other funding in the new year,” professor Jonathan Levine, a lead investigator with CMI, said in a statement to the ‘Prince.’ Pacala wrote that the mutual agreement to end the relationship between BP and CMI “simply means a reduction in the funding of component projects, many of which will continue, and no annual meeting,” referencing an annual conference where BP executives and CMI researchers congregated to present research.
The partnership has supported a significant body of research on carbon mitigation strategies and is the longest running Princeton-industry partnership for climate research. While projects within CMI were financially supported by BP, allocation of funding was solely controlled by researchers at the University.
However, the fact that BP, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, would have a research relationship with Princeton was also a source of controversy, especially in the wake of the University’s divestment from fossil fuels in 2022.
An investigation by Congressional Democrats in 2024 argued that the company had used its partnership with Princeton to “advocate directly for energy and emissions policies like carbon capture without accountability for refusing to invest at scale.” NJ Spotlight News reported that communications staff at BP sought to “highlight how the Princeton findings align with
key elements of BP’s strategy, including our focus on CCUS, hydrogen and key renewables, including wind and solar” in an attempt to influence government policy. Campus activists with Sunrise Princeton have pushed the University to cut ties with BP for several years.
These cuts come amid a larger contraction in funding available for University research broadly, but especially for climate related issues. In June, the Department
of Commerce announced that it would end approximately $4 million in funding for Princeton research related to climate change, stating that the University’s programs “no longer align with the Trump Administration’s priorities.”
Levine said the end of BP’s funding will result in some researchers not having their contracts renewed, although the extent of reductions was unclear. The CMI website lists 19 principal investigators and 55 research staff and students.
While CMI does not currently have a new sponsor, Levine noted that the long term goal was to continue the group’s research with new funding.
“In the long term, we aim to find another sponsor for this critical research,” Levine wrote.
Cynthia Torres is an associate News Editor for
CALVIN GROVER / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Opening Exercises are held annually at Nassau Hall.
Vitus Larrieu is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Pensacola, Fla. and typically covers community activism, the state of higher education, and construction and architecture.
The financial aid increase could also reduce Princeton’s tuition-paying student
population as the University faces down an 8 percent endowment tax as part of the One
Big Beautiful Bill Act.
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under $250,000. All PhD students, as well as masters’ students in the School of Public and International Affairs, pay no tuition. Other master’s programs have alternative aid options and have comparatively lower enrollment (around 200 last school year).
The University declined to comment on the number of tuition-paying students at Princeton.
The announcement made by the University calls its financial aid program “one of the most generous in the country.”
“Through our increased investment in financial aid, we are making the transformative experience of a Princeton education more affordable for more students than ever,” said Provost Jen-
nifer Rexford ’91 in the announcement.
The announcement also acknowledged the alumni and other donors who contribute to the University’s ability to have a strong aid program. It does not, however, reference the increase on the tax on endowment, whose payouts cover about 70 percent of the financial aid budget.
In a press release announcing the expanded program, the University also said that Pell Grant recipients accounted for the 25 percent of the incoming Class of 2029, the highest percentage in Princeton’s history.
Devon Rudolph is an associate News editor and staff Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from northern Virginia and typically covers student life and USG.
Over 300 community members attend Labor Day vigil for immigrants detained in ICE raid
By Sena Chang Senior News Writer
Over 300 community members gathered in Hinds Plaza in Princeton on Labor Day, Sept. 1, for a vigil commemorating the 15 workers detained in an Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raid on Harrison Street in July.
The vigil was part of the nationwide “Workers Over Billionaires” protests opposing the Trump administration’s slashing of programs like Medicaid, and called for protections for workers. The event, organized by Resistencia en Acción New Jersey, followed earlier demonstrations against President Trump in Princeton, including a rally on May Day and a post-election protest last November.
“This was really a time to honor the families and to make space for them to be able to share these stories and remember their names,” said Juliana Lopez ’27, who worked with Resistencia over the summer as part of Princeton’s Recognizing Inequities and Standing for Equality (RISE) Fellowship. “This is the first time we did a vigil; we had a pretty big outcome,” she continued.
Rebecca Pavley and her husband Richard Pavley, who live in a neighboring zip code, told the ‘Prince’ that they joined “every [protest they] could get to” in the weeks leading up to Labor Day and on the day itself.
“There’s so many reasons: to protect our country from the descent into authoritarianism and fascism; speak up
for the undocumented; help speak up for people without my privilege,” said Rebecca Pavley, whose parents were union workers.
“We are the grandchildren of immigrants, and now, the country is taking the latest round of immigrants and sending them back,” Richard Pavley added.
The hour-long vigil, which lasted from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., featured testimonies from family members of those detained and deported by ICE, while attendees held candles in their honor.
Attendees displayed placards with messages such as “Keep the immigrants, deport Trump” and “ICE off my property.”
Many community members — including some who traveled from South Jersey — expressed their determination to continue speaking out against the Trump administration.
“I do think being loud in this world is important,” Rem Hlei Cuai, a Princeton High School graduate, told the ‘Prince.’ “It really breaks my heart that the people with the most money and weaponry are trying to put everyone else down and make them feel isolated.”
Addressing the crowd, Resistencia organizer Asma Elhuni urged residents to “turn grief into action, fear into courage, and isolation into community.” Elhuni added that famine in Gaza and ICE raids across the U.S. are “not separate” and “connected to the same system of militarization and dehumanization.”
“Stand against the tyran -
ny. You are our only hope, the people,” Rev. Erich Kussman, the pastor of St. Bartholomew Lutheran Church in Trenton, told the crowd. Kussman recited the names of those detained while volunteers, their mouths covered with tape, held up their photographs.
“We’re a country that believes in freedom. We need to take a stand. If we don’t, fascism is coming,” Kussman told the ‘Prince’ after the vigil. “I came out on this Labor Day vigil today because people are being disappeared in our communities with no notifications, sometimes no warrants, and it has to stop,” he continued.
Speakers stressed the need for a strong community response to ICE raids and called for a united stance against the Trump administration. Chris Hedges, former New York Times editor turned Princeton pro-Palestine advocate, was in attendance and outlined two main demands: an end to ICE raids in Princeton and beyond, and the protection of workers’ rights and safe workplace conditions for all, regardless of citizenship status.
“We have to create a system by which the moment ICE arrives in this town, every church bell rings,” Hedges told the crowd. “We can create a model for the rest of this country to stop fascism.”
Sena Chang is a senior News writer for the ‘Prince.’ She typically covers campus and community activism, the state of higher education, and alumni news.
Yale University to join Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP)
By David Yun News Contributor
Princeton faculty, students, and researchers will be able to more easily access 2.7 million books and titles owned by Yale University after Yale joined the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), a library and research repository housed just miles from campus.
ReCAP is composed of Columbia University, Harvard University, The New York Public Library, and Princeton University. Yale was announced as the fifth member of the consortium, effective July 1.
ReCAP stores some 18 million items in a shared repository on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus, located across Route One, in a facility designed to maintain optimal preservation conditions. Due to the facility’s conditions, materials deteriorate at a rate four times slower than in traditional library stacks.
ReCAP members also have access to the Harvard Depository, Harvard’s large-scale storage facility that is also sometimes used by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The consortium additionally promises that items requested
from one member’s library catalog can be delivered to another within two business days.
ReCAP is a 501(c)3 not for profit corporation incorporated in 2000, and is owned and operated by its member universities. It was originally launched in 2017 with funding from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation.
According to an announcement made on July 18, Yale University will now contribute 2.7 million unique titles and will also gain access to 8.8 million unique titles within the consortium. Today, the consortium together holds 18 million items, held in a shared repository on Princeton’s Forrestal Campus. ReCAP fulfills approximately 300,000 research and library requests per year, with usage continuously growing due to access through the Discovery to Delivery Program.
In an announcement from Princeton University Library, Yale librarian Barbara Rockenbach said the university was “thrilled” to join.
“The ReCAP partnership embodies Yale University Library’s commitment to preserving and enhancing access to the scholarly record,” she said. “Through this shared
collection, we can leverage the deep investments each partner library has made in print holdings, both past and future, to ensure that all researchers have access to the print resources they need.
Anne Jarvis, Dean of Li -
braries at Princeton, added, “today, partnerships with libraries of similar mission are essential to creative and innovative services. ReCAP is an example of what can be achieved when we work together.”
Originally composed of Princeton, NYPL, and Columbia, Yale is the next university to join the group following Harvard’s admission in 2016.
David Yun is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’
David Piegaro ’25 sues Princeton and PSafe head, alleging retaliation for Clio incident
By Cynthia Torres Associate News Editor
Nearly 18 months after tumbling down the steps of Whig Hall after an altercation with Department of Public Safety head Kenneth Strother during Princeton’s ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment,’ David Piegaro ’25 is suing Princeton University and the department chief over the incident. In a civil complaint filed July 30, Piegaro alleged that Strother “physically assaulted” him during the incident, that the Univer-
sity’s subsequent internal investigation was a “sham,” and that the PSafe head made false claims during the months-long criminal case against Piegaro.
Piegaro and his attorneys are requesting a jury trial, seeking unspecified damages, expungement of Piegaro’s disciplinary violations from his school records, and a declaration that the University violated Piegaro’s rights. Piegaro has previously expressed his desire for an apology from the University.
The lawsuit stems from an
April 2024 incident where Piegaro claimed to be acting as a “citizen journalist” documenting the occupation of Clio Hall, referred to in the complaint as an “unrestrained pro-Hamas demonstration.” Piegaro attempted to record a conversation between Strother and two professors involved in the pro-Palestine protests and followed the three men up the stairs of Whig Hall, adjacent to the building where 13 students had been arrested.
What happened next was the focal point of several trial days
in February and April, where Piegaro was facing trespassing and assault charges. Piegaro claims that Strother attempted to block his exit into Whig, raised his arm, and pushed him down the stairs. The prosecution, however, maintained that Piegaro had attempted to grab Strother’s arm and had fallen.
Piegaro’s trespassing charge was dropped in February, and he was eventually found not guilty of simple assault in April.
His current lawsuit claims that Princeton and Strother
“made up” an excuse for Strother’s “abhorrent conduct,” describing Strother’s actions during the incident as “inexplicable” and “violent.”
“Princeton’s actions smack of retaliation and were blatant attempts to discourage Piegaro from pursuing charges or filing a civil complaint against Chief Strother,” it reads.
The University has vowed to fight the lawsuit.
“The University believes the complaint to be entirely without merit and plans to mount a vigorous defense. We look forward to a fair trial and expect our position to be fully vindicated,” spokesperson Jennifer Morrill said in a statement.
The case of Piegaro, a Jewish transfer student who served in the Army and the National Guard, has garnered national attention. He was profiled in The New York Times in April, and his lawsuit against Princeton was first reported in The Free Press, a publication that often weighs in on campus protests alongside national coverage.
Piegaro’s attorneys for the lawsuit are Andrew Schwartz and Andrew C. Bernstein of Kasowitz LLP. Kasowitz has filed antisemitism lawsuits against Harvard University, New York University, and Barnard College. All three lawsuits have been settled.
Piegaro and his attorneys did not reply for comment in time for publication.
Cynthia Torres is an associate News editor and an Archives contributor. She is from New Bedford, Mass. and typically covers University administration.
ALUMNI
PHOTO COURTESY OF BRANDON JOHNSON, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Stacks of materials in ReCAP, which currently stores up to 18 million items.
U. discontinues Wintersession, citing budget constraints
By Hayk Yengibaryan Head News Editor
Food trucks, trips to New York City, and rock-stacking activities during winter break will be no more.
Following the spring semester’s funding cuts, hiring freeze, and scrutiny from the federal government, the University will discontinue the Office of Campus Engagement (OCE) and its flagship program, Wintersession, effective Sept. 2, citing “challenging budgetary circumstances,” according to an email sent to Campus Life staff on Aug. 14.
The email, sent on behalf of OCE Executive Director Judy Jarvis and co-signed by the office’s three other staff members, announced that the office and Wintersession will be shut down after six years.
“We four on the Office of Campus Engagement team are incredibly saddened by this news, though we understand that these are unprecedented times,” the message read. “Having to sunset our office and Wintersession does not change our pride in the joy-creating, communitybuilding, and positive mental health-promoting that we have contributed to the campus.”
The office’s closure is one of the first significant cuts announced by the University, which asked most departments and units in May to prepare plans for 5–10 percent budget reductions.
“This change and other costreduction efforts reflect financial challenges spurred by
the federal government’s reassessment of its relationship with American higher education, as well as broader economic uncertainty,” the University said in a press release.
Launched in 2021, Wintersession was a free, two-week series of events open to all members of the Princeton community. Anyone could lead a session, which ranged from skill-based workshops to keynote events.
Any undergraduate and graduate student who signed up for at least one event received free dining hall meals and access to their housing for the full two weeks. As part of the end of Wintersession, undergraduate dorms will now be closed for the entirety of winter break until Jan. 23, the University said in its announcement.
The 2025 edition of Wintersession drew 4,359 attendees, an increase of more than 2,000 from the program’s inaugural year in 2021, according to data published on Wintersession’s website. Especially popular among graduate students, the two-week event was known for a wide range of programming: student-designed and led events, museum trips, mindfulness exercises, and often a celebrity event or two offering career advice.
While most of OCE’s work centered on planning Wintersession, the office also led or co-led several other University-wide initiatives. These included the creation of a virtual activities calendar during the COVID-19 pandemic, convening peer educator and
adviser group leaders, coleading Princeton Research Day, and co-leading Community Care Day.
The email also invited staff to a sunset celebration on Aug. 27 to “celebrate all the accomplishments of the Office of Campus Engagement throughout its six years.” It was not immediately clear whether the OCE’s four dedicated staff members would retain their positions at the University.
“This is a tough email to write and no doubt tough to
read,” the email read. “We wanted you to hear the news from us, and know that we will be okay. We also want to thank you for believing in us, dreaming with us, and partnering with us throughout Wintersession and the Office of Engagement’s time on campus.”
The University said in its statement that more cuts will come in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the semester.
“Starting this month, departments and units will roll
Amaarae to headline Fall 2025 Lawnparties
ties headliners, of which six of the past eight have been rappers.
Ghanaian American artist
Amaarae will headline Princeton’s Fall 2025 Lawnparties this coming Sunday.
Student band Casual Riot will open the main stage before Amaarae performs. Lawnparties is a biannual event featuring a headlining performance in front of Frist Campus Center, as well as various artists hosted by the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, food vendors, and other activities.
Amaarae is a singer and songwriter whose music combines elements of pop, R&B, alté, and afrobeats. She was born in the Bronx, New York and raised between Atlanta; New Jersey; and Accra, Ghana.
In April 2025, she became the first Ghanaian artist to perform a solo show at Coachella. Her most recent album, Black Star, debuted in August 2025 with more than 5 million streams. She is also known for her 2020 single “Sad Girlz Luv Money,” which gained international attention after a remix featuring Kali Uchis was released in 2021.
However, Amaarae also has a lower public profile than previous Lawnparties headliners, ranking below many of her predecessors in Instagram followers and Spotify listens.
Her performance will mark a genre shift from recent Lawnpar-
The Lawnparties headliner announcement comes only four days before Amaarae is set to perform — the shortest time between the announcement and the event since Fall 2021.
Misa Mims ’27, one of the Lawnparties organizers, said in a statement to the Daily Princetonian, “I think everything about Amaarae is visionary. She’s an eclectic artist, and her music is infectious.”
Amaarae has also been outspoken about her views on gender, describing it as fluid rather than fixed. In interviews, she has said that “nothing is binary the way we’ve been taught to believe,” and has emphasized that qualities such as masculinity, femininity, and emotion exist on a spectrum.
Her approach to songwriting often reflects this perspective, with lyrics that shift between pronouns and avoid assigning gender to expressions of love or intimacy.
In a statement to the ‘Prince,’ another Lawnparties organizer, D’Schon Simmons ’27, said, “I’m genuinely thrilled that we’re welcoming Amaarae, a groundbreaking Afrobeat artist, to Princeton this year. Right now, it’s more important than ever to highlight diverse voices and showcase the richness of Black culture on our campus.”
encouraged attendees to wear bohemian and lighter earth-tone colors. The day will also include inflatables, lawn games, and food vendors.
Vendors this semester will once again include Nomad, Tico’s, Rita’s, Taco Bell, and Cheesecake on a Stick; with new additions Alfalfa, Jammin’ Crepes,
out additional budget reduction measures that will affect programs and services. These impacts will range in size, from less free food and merchandise to reduced operating hours at some campus operations,” it said. “Collectively they will add up to significant savings that help the University protect its core mission.”
Hayk Yengibaryan is a head News editor, senior Sports writer, and education director for the ‘Prince.’
and Silver Line Wings. Safety and accessibility measures will include a Quiet Space, additional water stations, and collaborations with Public Safety and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS).
The committee has also partnered with the Office of Sustainability and circulated a form for accommodation requests. Amaarae is scheduled to perform at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 7, although past headliners have often started their acts late.
Nico David-Fox is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Washington, D.C. and typically covers University operations.
By Nico David-Fox Assistant News Editor
ANNIE RUPERTUS / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
Wintersession is a two-week, conference-style period of noncredit workshops and trips open to all graduate students, undergraduates, staff, postdocs, and faculty.
AMAARAE / PRINCETON USG SOCIAL COMMITTEE
Amaarae, the Ghanaian American singer-songwriter, is set to headline at Lawnparties.
Notes from a so-called enemy’s classroom
Jen Jennings Guest Contributor
Universities are the enemy. Or so we’ve been told.
So let me take you behind enemy lines to my undergraduate lecture course of about 100 students, called “Schooled: Education, Opportunity, and Inequality.” It’s cross-listed in Sociology and the School of Public and International Affairs, which is already a red flag to those who use “woke” as both adjective and diagnosis.
Class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, political belief, and immigrant status — the course covers all the topics that make Thanksgiving awkward. It looks at how those identities shape K-12 educational experiences and outcomes. Not to provoke guilt. Not to assign blame. Just to understand how schools work, and for whom.
If you’re Vice President JD Vance or conservative activist Christopher Rufo, a class like mine isn’t so much a course as it is a re-education camp with bespoke wood paneling. In their telling, I lead my students in a kind of academic séance. We dim the lights, light the incense, and summon the ghosts of systemic injustice. Then we hand out guilt like condoms at firstyear orientation. The accused? White, straight men, sentenced to 50 minutes of heavy sighs and punishing awareness. And yet, no one’s been forced to confess their privilege. No one’s graded on how sorry they feel. Quite the opposite. I remind my students that they
Avi Chesler Guest Contributor
When I graduate from Princeton in two weeks, I will leave holding almost $60,000 in debt, with an additional $20,000 in interest that will accrue over the 10 year standard repayment plan. This debt burden is spread across federal loans ($26,720 principal + $10,073 interest); Princeton Heartland-ECSI private student loans ($7,000 + $1,505); and Sallie Mae private student loans ($22,500 + $10,629).
For a university that advertises a generous “no loan” financial aid policy and has the highest per-student endowment funds in the country, such a debt burden at graduation is unconscionable.
Student debt is not vanishingly uncommon at Princeton: 11 percent of students graduate with debt — not including parental loans — and have an average of $17,500 in loans for all four years. But the problem seems to be worst for those whose actual need differs from the University’s formulaic estimations.
Take my story as an example. Despite repeated evidence — both before and after taking out loans, that I would be unable to pay what Princeton asked of me — the University never set a cost that I could truly meet loan-free.
When I was accepted to Princeton, the family contribution in my financial aid offer came as a nasty surprise that we could simply not afford. In my youthful naivete, I was sure that the financial aid office would come around quickly once I
didn’t choose the circumstances of their birth. They had no say in where the stork happened to drop them — whether into comfort or adversity, in the United States or elsewhere.
I also remind them: we are a “we.”
Not just members of the same university, but fellow bits of stardust, stumbling around with good intentions, trying to leave the world — and America — better than we found it.
When the midterm rolled around, I didn’t demand that they pen manifestos and take to the barricades. Instead, they read peer-reviewed research on real educational disparities, evaluated competing policy options, and justified their recommendations.
It wasn’t revolutionary. It was homework. But it was homework that asked: how do we build schools that work for all kids? Inclusion, after all, is the “I” in DEI. That’s what we’re thinking about together. And caring about each other’s experiences and opportunities, it turns out, isn’t something you can outlaw.
Here’s what they came up with:
One student wrote about men’s mental health, drawing on his own struggles to access care. He proposed expanding awareness of anonymous hotlines.
A student of faith explored how faculty could better support religious observance by proactively including major holidays on syllabi, rather than leaving students to educate their professors and negotiate absences.
Another explored how selective high schools could support the mental health of immigrant students, not just applaud their academic success.
Another wondered aloud: Why does
a roommate’s laptop say, “the future is female,” when any future worth having will be built — messily, together — by both men and women? At the same time, she asked, isn’t it also important to empower women, especially in spaces where they’ve long been excluded? These aren’t easy questions, and that’s the point — fostering the creation of spaces like these where such questions can be asked in the first place.
Once students start seeing the world this way, they can become engineers of inclusive educational design. They notice the invisible scaffolding and its flaws around them, and begin asking questions about how to rebuild it.
But when many Americans picture a college classroom, they imagine a
caricature: smug, partisan professors preaching from the lectern. That image was carefully manufactured by those who see political gain in tearing down the university as a public good. But we have done too little to complicate it. We haven’t told the full story of what college teaching looks like in practice — or what learning, at its best, makes possible.
In classrooms across Princeton’s campus, professors don’t divide students into oppressors and oppressed. They work to stitch together a community: E pluribus unum, across identity, background, and belief. Students come to understand not just the systems they live in, but each other. They learn to think across difference, to disagree
without dehumanizing, and to listen as carefully as they speak.
It’s not a story that trends on TikTok or makes for good clickbait. But it’s one we urgently need to tell — loudly, clearly, and together. Princeton administrators, professors, students, and alumni all have a role to play in showing the country what higher education really is, and why it matters. The university will survive as a public good only if the public understands its value — and is willing to fight for it.
Jen Jennings ’00 is a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Education Research Section at Princeton University. She may be reached at jlj[at] princeton.edu.
showed them how I would have to take on first federal and then also private loans to cover the cost of attendance.
My first year came and went with no grace given. But I was hopeful that by sophomore year, when they could see that I was taking out loans in my name (cosigned by a parent), they would see that their math was off. Surely, I thought, they could not chalk up my $18,000 in loans that first year to a ruse to help my parents avoid coughing up money they had neatly tucked away. No such money existed.
In sophomore year, I initiated the appeals process. It was a grueling and lengthy experience that almost barred me from registering for classes on time, since I had delayed applying for more loans, and thus paying my tuition, in the hopes that I would receive the aid I needed. Yet I got no reprieve.
That year, my family had suddenly taken on the costs of a close relative’s funeral and the repair of our flooded basement, and I was especially optimistic that the University would be understanding this round. As I sat with a financial aid officer to plead my case, I recall how she told me that my family would need to provide receipts for these irregular costs as part of the appeal — but that I should not expect a dollar-for-dollar reduction in my expected contribution.
When they ultimately rejected my appeal, they pointed vaguely at my “parents’ income and assets,” without giving any additional information. Perhaps Princeton thinks that they are seeing something that I am not. But even after appealing and annually expressing my family’s financial straits and our confu-
sion over the price, the financial aid office has never explained where they think the money should come from.
Princeton’s outsized expectations of my family continued to require me to turn to student loans. My sophomore year, I took out about $14,000, followed by about $17,000 my junior year and about $7,500 for my senior year. And Princeton knows the exact dollar amount that I am on the hook for. Before I can take out a loan, the loan servicer must certify the loan with the University.
I would not be taking out these loans if I did not have to: The loans themselves, especially the private loans, are expensive. Although I was able to borrow some from the federal government — $5,500 for my first year, $6,500 for my second year, and $7,500 for each of my final years — there was still a sizable portion that I needed to borrow on top of this.
This forced me to take on private market loans that have much less favorable interest rates and conditions. Unlike federal loans and Princeton student loans, private loans use a cosigner to determine interest rates, tying the overall cost of the loan — and my attendance — on my parents’ credit scores, something I have no control over. Over the lifetime of the loan, my interest payments will amount to 67 percent of the principal of the loan, about $15,000.
After I graduate from Princeton, I want nothing more than to devote my time to be “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” I hope to work for NGOs that help disadvantaged communities. But these are not jobs that pay high salaries, and they are certainly not
professions that would allow me to have around $8,000 each year to devote to paying down student debt for the first 10 years after graduating.
The financial aid system calculates the price parents — folks at the heights of their careers (and salaries) — can afford. But in my case, I will be paying this cost as a young graduate at the very beginning of his career.
If my case is truly unique, it should have been simple for the financial aid office to adjust my aid to give me the help I needed. Alternatively, if I am part of a much larger pattern — and it seems likely I am — it feels disingenuous for the University to keep talking up its “no-
loan policy … [that] makes it possible to graduate with little to no debt.” Princeton has precisely calculated how much debt they are comfortable with me owning. If $56,000 (+ $22,000) is so “little” for the University, perhaps Princeton can find the funds to cover the cost. Otherwise, it seems the financial aid policy is designed not with students’ actual needs in mind, but only to look good on paper.
Avi Chesler is a senior studying Religion, Theatre, and Humanistic Studies. He is a former head Print Design editor for the ‘Prince.’ He may be reached at achesler[at]princeton.edu.
LOUISA GHEORGHITA / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Robertson Hall, home to the SPIA department.
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LETTER
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There’s also plenty to do on the ‘Prince’ that doesn’t involve harassing strangers with questions. You might have clicked on this letter from an Instagram post, or from one of our newsletters. You’re probably reading it on our website or our app — which you should download here — maintained by our developers and software engineers. This column was polished by one team of editors and fact-checked by another.
Each piece you read might only have one or two or three bylines, but is the product of dozens of people who make things better and have a lot of fun while doing it. Joining the ‘Prince’ means joining a community of people who are fascinated by campus life, dedicated to getting the facts right, and obsessed with the art of writing well.
All we require is curiosity about the what, how, and why of what happens around you. It might take you years to become a famous tenured professor or a University administrator or an influential
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Campus-focused journalism is also a form of service. On a campus where most goods can seem relentlessly abundant — have you ever seen that much free food in your life? — good information isn’t always easy to come by. Want to understand how mental health care at Princeton really works? Or get behind the scenes of the secret bakery underneath RoMa? Or see why Princeton might not actually have to pay the new federal endowment tax? That’s what the ‘Prince’ is for. Our work at the ‘Prince’ is also important on a national level. Higher education is under extraordinary scrutiny from the Trump administration, and the national media is writing about Princeton more than ever. That means they rely on our leading coverage of grant suspensions, budget cuts, and visa revocations. This is a difficult moment for campus speech, especially for international students, but the reporting
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We are still local journalists, and our campus still relies on us for the coverage that only other Princetonians will care to dig up. Anyone on this paper can learn something interesting or make an impact, even if they would prefer not to write about the state of America’s political affairs. You might single out why some instructors aren’t eligible for teaching awards, dig into the woes of our men’s basketball team, or finally decode Princeton’s feeder schools once and for all The ‘Prince’ has something for everyone. The craft — and the pleasure — of finding things out is applicable to anyone, anywhere. So come join us at our open houses on Thursday, Sept. 4 and Tuesday, Sept. 9, 8–10 p.m. at 48 University Place. You can learn about the sections that call the ‘Prince’ home at join.dailyprincetonian.com.
Miriam Waldvogel is the 149th Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Princetonian and a senior studying mathematics. Say hi to her at eic[at]dailyprinceton-
‘They said I had to do all of my work in the next two days if I wanted to finish the term and still be a Princeton student.’
trust in University Health Services and question whether she belonged at Princeton.
“I felt so alienated from my community,” she explained. “It didn’t make me feel good about being a Princeton student.”
Blaire is not alone. She is one of about 30 undergraduate and graduate students each year who experience severe mental health crises that escalate to the point of inpatient hospitalization, according to Director of CPS Dr. Calvin Chin. On a campus where resources for students are remarkably abundant, and where around 35 percent of the student body seeks mental health care each year, many students expect that the University’s mental health system can and should meet every student’s needs.
But in cases that challenge that system, both students and administrators are confronted with a difficult bind: how to balance the uninterrupted high achievement Princeton expects with the often disruptive mental health care some students need. Over the course of a year, in dozens of interviews with The Daily Princetonian, students, professors, mental health professionals, and administrators provided a window into the difficult decisions at the heart of that balancing act, one where each student’s case may be different and challenge the system in new ways.
And while each case is different, Princeton is not alone — it is just one institution of many navigating the nationwide mental health crisis among college-aged students.
“Adolescents in general are experiencing much more stress, anxiety, and depression across the country,” said Dr. Jerome Miller, a clinical psychologist and lecturer emeritus in psychology at the University of Michigan. “Health centers everywhere are feeling overwhelmed, [because] there are so many more students asking for resources.”
Dr. Zainab Okolo, Senior Vice President of Policy, Advocacy, and Government Relations at the Jed Foundation — which is working with Princeton to help it meet its mental health goals — echoed this. “Princeton is absolutely and unfortunately not alone. We as a nation are facing a national youth mental health crisis,” she said.
Conversations around mental health on campus invariably return to the fact that Princeton has confronted seven undergraduate student deaths due to suicide and mental health struggles in the last four years, most recently that of Lauren Blackburn ’26. It can be difficult to wrap one’s head around the fact that even a campus as well-resourced as Princeton still struggles. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 nodded to this during a public forum in early 2024, days after the death of James Li ’27.
“There are tragedies that take place, even when people do all the things that they should be doing,” Eisgruber said in the meeting, while citing the University’s investments in CPS and the new Frist Health Center.
Each of these deaths has left its mark on the Princeton community, often launching new conversations around
mental health on campus in their aftermath. In this regard, too, Princeton represents a microcosm of a nationwide crisis, in which suicide is now the second leading cause of death for individuals aged 10–34.
At the same time, though addressing suicide remains an open question, Princeton has made extraordinary investments in mental health resources. Students can make CPS appointments for free without a formal limit. While there is often a long wait time for these appointments, and CPS is designed to be a short-term resource, CPS also connects students with a robust network of outside providers, generally providing an initial consultation within three days or less before referring the student either to an outside provider or internally within CPS. And after years of student advocacy work, students on the Student Health Plan can now see those outside practitioners for only a $10 copay, less than many peer institutions.
Students have also seen an increased emphasis on wellness in daily life, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. From community care days packed with plant-potting and yoga to emotional support puppies visiting the residential colleges during exam season, from wellness programming grants to an easily-navigable resources website, from a 24/7 emergency care line to mental health training for first-years during orientation, Princeton has made a significant effort to address both everyday wellness and more serious mental health issues.
Yet every semester, some students are hospitalized for mental health emergencies. Some have difficulty paying the bills for their short- and longterm treatment. And some feel like CPS isn’t working for them.
With students in crisis and colleges and universities across the country seeking solutions, Princeton is a resource-rich and expert-laden campus that has the opportunity to lead by example. Can it?
‘The whole student’: The evolution of mental health care on American campuses
Mental health care at Princeton was first conceived with academic achievement in mind.
In 1910, Princeton became the first college in the United States to establish a mental health-specific service for students, in response to a psychiatrist’s observation that students were dropping out due to “emotional and personality issues.” The goal of the service was to help students remain at Princeton while dealing with these concerns.
Other schools followed suit over the next decade — University of Wisconsin in 1914, Dartmouth in 1921, Yale in 1925. Intense moments of national trauma have brought significant changes to the system since its inception. In the 1940s, largely driven by the psychological weight of World War II, the University started including CPS as part of its healthcare plan. After disagreements between students and administrators in the 1980s about the level of access students should have to counseling on campus, University administrators approved expansion of the student health plan to include mental health coverage in 1992.
The pandemic inundated the mental health system, forcing it to significantly transform. At Princeton, the number of students seeking care at CPS had already been steadily increasing before the pandemic — it reached an all-time high in the spring of 2021. Following a student referendum, a sweeping report from the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) recommended the University implement 24/7 on-demand CPS counseling and fund transportation to off-campus care, among other changes.
Some, but not all, of the recommendations from the report have been implemented. Still, the mental health ecosystem on campus today would be unrecognizable to a student 15 years ago. There are more resources, clearer websites, reduced copays for outside providers, and a more open administrative approach to suggesting leaves of absences. And this spring, the University will be required to start providing annual suicide prevention training for all faculty and staff by a New Jersey law passed in 2023.
Still, these changes have only gone so far in individual cases, and each student’s experience differs vastly from the next. Though Blaire got the care she needed — she was taken into CPS, received treatment at Princeton House that she later reflected positively on, and regained her footing at Princeton in the aftermath — the experience itself was wracked with anxiety and confusion.
If Blaire took a leave, her return would not be automatically guaranteed: According to Princeton’s guidelines for Academic Standing, Leaves of Absence, and Reinstatement, it might be contingent on evidence of her mental rehabilitation from a provider. For health-related leaves of absence, the guidelines state, “Careful consideration will be given to the opinions and recommendations of the student’s treating physician or mental health professional, if available.”
University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss emphasized in an email to the ‘Prince’ that being unable to return from a leave of absence is rare, writing, “The vast majority of students who take a leave return to the University within a year and successfully complete their degree.”
Leaves of absence have long been a point of contention for universities in the United States. In the 2010s, reports circulated of students in mental health crises being forced to take mandatory leave from colleges, in some cases because universities feared that these students were a liability. This changed when students and their parents began filing lawsuits claiming that these forced leaves disrupted students’ studies and induced deeper depression, including a suit filed against Yale in 2022. Such a lawsuit was filed against Princeton in 2014, when a student alleged that Princeton had discriminated against him in the wake of his suicide attempt. The student claimed that forcing him to withdraw likely exacerbated his condition and caused him emotional distress. The student and the University settled the case in 2019 after five years of litigation.
The ‘Prince’ reported in 2023 that CPS requiring a student to take a leave of absence is now incredibly rare.
According to Chin and Associate Dean of Students Mellisa Thompson, who regularly handles cases that might involve a leave of absence, administrators try to work with students to choose the best path for them when considering a leave of absence.
When she meets with students, Thompson emphasizes that Princeton is not going anywhere. “Students should not try to struggle through this place, when students are at a point when the type of treatment that they need to engage in doesn’t feel like it’s compatible with the academic rigor and the demands,” she said. “Mental and physical health — we treat both of those the same, because they’re both just as important.”
According to Chin, more than 2,000 students seek CPS care each year. In Fiscal Year 2024, CPS had contact with 2,300 students, with 1,500 total sessions. With just 14 psychologists, nine social workers, two psychiatrists, and two psychiatric nurse practitioners, that’s around 85 students per every professional on staff.
Many mental health professionals associate the spike in seeking care with the pandemic, and though numbers continued to climb in the postCOVID-19 years, the 2025 senior survey conducted by the ‘Prince’ revealed a decrease in the amount of students who sought mental health care in the Class of 2025 over their four years at Princeton. This coincides with the 44 percent of the recently graduated class who expressed dissatisfaction with the mental health resources Princeton offers.
Chin explained how CPS handles this level of demand. “We have to be thoughtful about the students we keep and the students we connect to community providers who can provide weekly treatment,” he explained. For its part, according to Chin, CPS typically meets with students every other week, though other arrangements can be made on a case-by-case basis.
“The question of resources is a challenging one,” Chin said. While Chin welcomes more resources, he said that Princeton has more therapists than is typical of peer institutions. Additionally, CPS never turns a student away, he said; if the center lacks capacity to take a student on, the student is referred to an outside provider. “The bottom line is to make sure anyone who needs mental health care has access to it,” said Chin.
In keeping with this promise, many students are referred by CPS to outside providers or, in more severe situations, sent to Princeton House, an inpatient and outpatient mental and behavioral health facility focused on supporting recovery from mental health, substance use, or co-occurring disorders and affiliated with Penn Medicine, the hospital closest to Princeton. Princeton House declined to respond to a list of questions, instead telling the ‘Prince’ in a written statement, “We are committed to providing every patient with respectful and compassionate treatment according to their clinical needs and our professional standards of care.”
‘Everything is piling up’: Leaning on CPS during stressful times
The transition to college as a firstyear can be extremely challenging for anyone, anywhere. But for students
with mental health needs at Princeton, it can be a particularly vulnerable time. Okolo, from the Jed Foundation, explained that students often discover their mental health issues for the first time when they arrive on campus. Part of this is simply a matter of being in a new setting. “It’s the first time that you’re out of your safety context, and on top of that, there are the academic stressors and other challenges that come along with growing into yourself,” she explained.
She added that mental health is often particularly stigmatized in highpressure environments like Princeton. “That means competition is high. It’s the first time a lot of folks have not been the smartest person in the room.”
Former chair of the USG Mental Health Committee Meera Kochhar ’25 was inspired to take on that role after becoming a Residential College Advisor (RCA) in her junior year and being reminded of her own difficulties as a first-year.
“I just feel like it’s so difficult for anybody to go into college — throughout the whole country, the whole world,” she said. “In most cases, this is a very different environment for students than what they grew up [with] in high school.”
Blaire described the start of her first semester at Princeton as “really rough.” She was facing many pressures common to first-years: moving far away from home for the first time, friction with roommates, and adjusting to academics after coming from an underresourced public school. On top of this, she had a parent sick with a terminal illness at home.
Blaire began seeing a counselor through drop-in appointments at CPS. However, she said she could only see a counselor once every 2–3 weeks.
Another first-year, who asked to be identified by one of his initials, M, was able to see a CPS therapist more frequently. These appointments helped him contend with both past issues and his academic adjustment to Princeton, he said, “to an extent.”
But CPS’s care could only go so far during a particularly intense academic week. “I didn’t really have the opportunity to sleep. I had so much work; I was just really stressed. Everything was piling up,” M explained.
One night, fearful that he was going to hurt himself, M called the 24-hour care line. M remembers the care line provider asking him to walk to McCosh. After being promised he could spend the night there, he complied. But when he arrived, he says he was immediately told he would be sent to Princeton House.
The psychiatrist on call that night was the same person M had been seeing regularly for months. M said that he told her, “I just need one night to cool down, just one night to be in a safe environment.”
The psychiatrist cleared M to spend the night in McCosh and be released back to his dorm the next day, without being sent to Princeton House. She also told M that if he ever needed to stay overnight at McCosh again, he could email her. He ended up doing so when he faced another mental health emergency later that year, and he was able to spend the night again with no trouble.
Friday September 5, 2025
“She’s really great,” M said of his CPS psychiatrist. “She’s going way beyond her commitments.”
Still, M believes that if any other psychiatrist had been on call that day, he would have been sent to Princeton House and would likely have missed multiple days of school.
“After that whole experience, now I trust CPS a lot less, and it’s taken a long time for many people to gain my trust back,” he said.
‘Penn Medicine was kind of like the calm before the storm of being discharged’
Of course, mental health emergencies are not limited to first-years. After experiencing a personal tragedy her sophomore year, N, a member of the Class of 2025 who asked to be identified by her first initial, said she did not feel that CPS would be enough to meet her needs.
“By that time, there were three students who had already committed suicide on campus, and I had some pretty down thoughts at that time, but I didn’t feel like CPS was helpful enough, especially the psychiatrists,” she explained.
That year, N scheduled an appointment with her dean, who she said recommended that she take a leave of absence. The suggestion to step away from campus altogether was difficult for her to take, she said.
“It made me feel like garbage,” N said. “Initially, I felt like I needed just some encouragement, or some mentorship of some sort.” From her perspective, N had been seeking increased support at Princeton — and the suggestion that she take a break from Princeton entirely felt to her like the opposite of that.
As a senior, N reflected on how her first three years at Princeton were affected by student death. Kevin Chang ’23, Jazz Chang ’23, and Justin Lim ’25 in her first year. Misrach Ewunetie ’24 in her second. Sophia Jones ’27 and James Li ’27 in her third.
N and Li were in a class together, so his death had a particularly lasting impact on her. “I wouldn’t say I was that close to James, but I saw him every single day,” she said. “When you see someone every single day, you kind of get used to seeing them. So that was Friday, and when I went to class Monday, I just looked at where he usually sits, to the left in the front, and he wasn’t there, and Tuesday, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t ever there.”
For some students, depression and suicidal thoughts require more intensive interventions.
Blaire said Jones’ death contributed to her own spiral. The day after the tragedy, Blaire felt stunned to see classes continue as normal. “At the time, walking around on campus, it was lively and bustling. Everything was moving. It just made me feel so sick,” she said. The next night, Blaire called the campus mental health hotline, Princeton Peer Nightline, sobbing. She said she found the call, which was answered by another student, unhelpful and began to feel worse. Her friend called Public Safety (PSafe) and explained the situation. Blaire was then picked up by PSafe and transported first to CPS, then to Princeton House.
Though she felt in the dark during the process of getting to the hospital, Blaire was pleasantly surprised by the care she received there. “The actual facility was honestly helpful, to an extent,” she said. “Princeton House is a lovely place, and I think that the University using that as their facility is good because they were very nice to talk to.” According to Thompson, Princeton House is the most common example of multiple facilities to which Princeton sends students in crisis.
According to Blaire, her Princeton
House social worker was understanding and provided good assistance. “She was the first person I talked to that made me feel human,” Blaire said.
After her eight days in Princeton House, Blaire arrived back on campus to what felt like the edge of an academic cliff.
Blaire said that her professors didn’t know she was sent to Princeton House. Without access to her computer or phone, Blaire herself was not able to send them an email.
Hotchkiss explained in an email to the ‘Prince,’ that in the case of any inpatient stay, the University’s practice is to notify faculty that the student has a medical issue without disclosing additional information, such as the nature of the stay.
According to Chin, staff from CPS meet regularly with the staff at Princeton House and the staff at the Penn Medicine emergency room to ensure “clear channels of communication” between them. This is meant to help the process of sending a student to the hospital — and the process of the student’s return — to go smoothly.
However, “Penn Medicine was kind of like the calm before the storm of being discharged,” Blaire said. She said she was required by the University to spend another night in McCosh on the backend. This was followed by a formal meeting with her parents and University administrators.
After the meeting, Blaire received an email signed by her residential college deans and the assistant dean for student life outlining her options clearly, described as “action items” she would need to take.
“Consider the possibility of taking some time off to prioritize managing your health without the academic pressures of Princeton. Time away could provide you with an increased period of stability to ensure that you are stable and healthy enough to continue your studies,” read the first bullet point.
The email continued, “Should you elect not to take a voluntary leave of absence and decide to continue your enrollment this semester and in the spring term, you will be accountable for your conduct and academic requirements, as are all Princeton students.”
Thompson, who manages crisis intervention efforts and emergencies involving undergraduates, said the University views time off as a way to grow and reach a point where they can return and make use of all Princeton has to offer.
“I think sometimes students think they’re the only ones that have been in this situation, and I like to dispel that myth,” she said. “We’ll talk through all the realities, and we have conversations where it really is a choice.”
After weighing the decision, Blaire made her choice to stay, although she found it “jarring” to throw herself back into her studies so soon after being in a “very surreal and vulnerable place.”
Still, she stayed because she was scared of the possibility of no longer being a Princeton student. She stayed because her parents could not afford to pay for an extra semester, even with financial aid. And she stayed because when she finally was able to email professors and let them know what had happened, she found that they were compassionate.
“Professors are pretty wonderful about mental health,” she said. “I ended up staying because of professors who were genuinely kind and understanding.”
Blaire said that by her sophomore year, she had better safety nets. “First year, you don’t know who your people are,” she said. Now, she describes feeling more hopeful. “I think the biggest thing was [discovering] that Princeton
is a lovely campus, as long as you’re getting your support from the right places and finding external therapists and psychiatrists.”
Struggling in Princeton’s safety net
For all the swipes students take at Community Care Day and the constant list of study breaks, Princeton’s mental health resources are substantial.
The Jed Foundation, which Princeton contracted last spring to assess student mental health, produced a preliminary assessment last spring finding that the University gets a lot of things right. Most categories in the strategic plan for FY 2025 were marked as “Meets Requirements” or “In Progress.” The categories ranged from social connectedness to clinical services and included specifics like training students “to identify, reach out to, and refer their friends/peers who may be struggling with mental health or substance issues,” and developing “proactive Action Steps to help identify disconnected/isolated students.”
There is an extensive web of resources, for instance, to cover various expenses for mental health emergencies. The TigerLife website, launched in 2024, helps students navigate these resources and offers guided walkthroughs to determine which services will most benefit a student at the moment. These include the Dean’s Emergency Fund, which typically has a $500 cap, the University Health Services Special Needs Fund, with a $300 cap, the University Safety-Net Fund, also capped at $500, and the Aryeh SteinAzen Memorial fund.
There is also a Mental Health Loan, in which graduate and undergraduate students “may apply for a loan of mental health expenses not covered by insurance up to $1250 per semester to cover off-campus psychological services,” as explained on a University website. The loan does not accrue interest until after a student graduates.
Even then, the financial safety net doesn’t always catch everyone.
Financial consequences weighed on Blaire’s decision to seek mental health care in the first place and continued to pose concerns for her after the fact.
She had a copay of $3,000 for the hospital visit that she described as “entirely unfeasible” for her family. Blaire was not on the University Health Plan, but rather on her own Aetna health plan, which required the copay. When she consented to be admitted to Princeton House, Blaire does not remember being informed of the cost at the time.
Blaire applied to a number of University crisis funds for help with the cost, and was initially denied from all of them. Though Blaire received partial financial aid, she was shocked to discover that she originally did not have “high enough financial need to qualify [for the funds].”
Ultimately, Blaire qualified for a $1,000 reimbursement from the Dean’s Emergency Fund, according to documents reviewed by the ‘Prince.’ Blaire said that she was reimbursed the $1,000, but did not hear back from any of the other student emergency funds to which she applied to cover the rest of the cost, leaving her with an outstanding balance of $2,000 to cover on her own.
N has also had difficulties getting reimbursements for mental health expenses from University sources. When she was prescribed medication for a mental health disorder her freshman year, she was able to receive funds from the McCosh Health Services Center Fund. “But it’s only $300 per academic year, not enough if I want to get off campus health,” she said.
“That can be a really complicated and unnerving process, but we try to sort
of give students advice around how to navigate that,” Chin said. “We typically advise people to never let financial concerns get in the way of getting the kind of care they need.”
Faculty and administrators seek the ‘human response’
While administrators play a crucial role in supporting students, the adults to whom students form their closest connections are often professors.
The University recently rolled out suicide prevention training which all faculty and staff are expected to complete on an annual basis as part of a new requirement for colleges in New Jersey. Still, not everyone knows what to do when a student comes to them in distress.
Nine years ago, Professor Ilya Vinitsky came to Princeton from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had participated in a round table on mental health for students. He described this as a “revelatory experience” because it helped him understand that the issues students had already been talking to him about for years were more widespread. “The absolute majority of students experience these problems and they want to talk about this,” he said.
As Vinitsky sees it, one problem is that professors are not trained to speak about mental health issues with their students. Professors are not taught what to do when a student bursts into tears during class. They are not given a template for responding to a student who opens up about their mental health during office hours.
“There really is a moment where you want to do something as a human being, but you cannot, because you do not know how to do this,” Vinitsky said. “And it just contributes to your own psychological uncertainties. What to do?”
In 2023, New Jersey passed a law requiring all colleges in the state to provide mandatory suicide prevention training for faculty and staff. Until recently, training has mostly taken the shape of an optional Princeton Disaster Awareness Response partnership.
The new training, launched this summer, uses a software called MindWise SOS. According to its website, the program combines educational videos, discussion guides, advice, and interactive scenarios related to suicide prevention.
For Vinitsky, training faculty on protocol is significant, but it must be paired with advice for what professors can say in the moment.
“I need some kind of concrete human recommendation, suggesting what is to be done in accordance with University policy but also with normal human behavior as someone who wants to help.”
The faculty-only view also has its limitations, Head of Yeh College Yair Mintzker said.
“The residential colleges are a place where you can see much more obviously than professors [who] see students in a classroom environment,” said Mintzker, who is also a full-time professor in the Department of History. “We have a more holistic view of what happens.”
He now has a deeper understanding of certain challenges students face: competitiveness, high expectations from both outside and within, and imposter syndrome.
“People should realize they’re not alone, that it happens to everyone,” Mintzker said, emphasizing that he and the other residential college heads want to support students.
That’s why Mintzker encourages students to be open about their experiences and failures with one another. He also encourages professors to learn about what happens in the residential colleges and how many resources there are to help students.
“We’re really eager to talk,” Mintzker said. “They don’t bother us, we’re eager to see them.”
If professors and residential college staff can provide holistic support, there are also systemic practices universities can implement to help students who face severe mental health crises, experts say.
Brian Ahmedani, who authored a 2025 paper about a set of guidelines called the “Zero Suicide Approach,” said that screening was a particularly useful tool.
“The most important thing to start with is asking people if they’re at risk,” he said. “There are some screening tools that work as well as those for cholesterol do.”
The Zero Suicide Model offers a systemic approach to improving suicide prevention in healthcare systems based on the core “belief and commitment that suicide can be eliminated in a population,” via seven elements (Lead, Train, Identify, Engage, Treat, Transition, Improve).
Ahmedani’s paper, published in the journal the JAMA Network, argued that implementing the model is “associated with a reduction in suicide attempt rates among patients accessing outpatient mental health care at most study sites,” that it might be able to eliminate suicide entirely in well-resourced institutional settings.
‘Not turning a blind eye’ on mental health
How does an administration design a mental health care system that can work for young, ambitious students facing a host of academic and social pressures? How do professors respond to students who come to their doors asking for help? And how does a campus respond to the tragedy of a student suicide?
Okolo discussed the importance of talking about mental health, including suicide, while resisting normalization. “When it comes to mental health, having these conversations and not turning a blind eye is very important,” she said.
“Sometimes we conflate the fact that it’s happening everywhere with thinking that it’s normal having several suicides on a campus or within a state,” she said. “It’s not normal.”
Chin acknowledged the tough balancing act of experiencing mental health concerns while at Princeton. “It definitely is really hard to be a Princeton student when you’re also struggling with a serious mental health issue,” Chin said.
He also emphasized that CPS’s goal is to focus on the whole student.
“You have options. You can make choices. We want to take away any kind of internal or external pressure you feel to have to do Princeton in any particular way,” he said.
But for some students, there’s still lingering resentment and distrust in the system.
“I understand that not everything happens overnight,” said M, who said he was still frustrated and disillusioned after his first experience staying overnight at McCosh.
“First, address that there’s an issue, address the problems with mental health care by making it accessible and not a financial burden. And while we’re addressing these surface issues, the long term always needs to be, how do we make Princeton’s environment better?” he said. “We need to reflect.”
Raphaela Gold is a head Features editor for the ‘Prince.’
By Helena Richardson Staff Features Writer
When the last class of First College first-years moved out in Spring 2022, they bid their dorm rooms farewell forever.
In anticipation of the residential college’s impending demolition, some saved a brick from their building, marked their favorite bench, or signed their names underneath their common room’s stairwell, former First resident Sarina Hegli ’25 recalled.
This spring, those students graduated as members of Yeh and New College West (NCW), and the construction of Hobson College is underway on the central grounds where First once stood.
“Now people ask where First College is, and you just point to the hole that’s missing in the middle of campus,” Hegli said.
“We’ve retained the First College jacket, and that’s lovely, but I feel like there’s a lot that was lost about First that didn’t need to be,” she said.
As construction continues on Hobson College, located on First’s old grounds, the Class of 2025 was the last generation of Princeton students to live a full year in First’s aging brick dorms. The first step in Princeton’s modern residential-college system, First has been a site of community — and controversy — since its start.
Recollections of First First College began as Woodrow Wilson Lodge, a group of a dozen members of the Class of 1959 who sought to “to provide a place where individuals … could be accepted for what they are and not forced to conform to the narrow specifications of Bicker.” They dined in a small facility adjoining Madison Hall (now Rockefeller College).
In the fall of 1960, Wilson Lodge members moved into newly constructed Gauss, 1937, 1938, and 1939 Halls. Dodge-Osborn Hall opened its doors later that year.
By the time the Class of 2025 moved into First, the room conditions were a source of much derision. To a survey question from The Daily Princetonian about the worst parts of First, several respondents listed housing-related troubles.
“There were many bugs everywhere and no air conditioning during summer,” Thomas Verrill ’25 wrote. Lauren Harris ’25 mentioned spider and centipede infestations, and Bryce Springfield ’25 wrote that the dorms were “built like ovens.”
“In general, the dorms were musty,” Verrill wrote.
Springfield also noted “depressing architecture and interior design.”
Adrian Moreira-Behrens ’25 recalled “the old wood floors,” and Basha Waxman ’25 mentioned “the orange brick.” Meryl Liu ’25 likened the architecture to that of a prison.
“First was always thought of as the worst residential college and dining hall of them all,” Springfield recalled.
Some had indeed criticized the architecture of First’s original halls at their opening, displeased that the buildings could “be turned upside down without changing the skyline or external structure.” Still, the rooms themselves garnered more positive reviews back then. In a 1960 ‘Prince’ Survey of New Quad residents, the question, “How do you like your rooms?” yielded answers “rang[ing] from ‘great’ to ‘absolutely unbelievable.’” Professor James W. Smith ’38
The last First graduates
commented that the rooms were too plush.
Since then, the college has remained famous for its large suites, including the infamous 12-person “Zoo.”
“The fact that we once had seven, eight, and even 12-person dorms on this campus still boggles my mind,” Cassandra Eng ’25 wrote. “As someone who lived in a seven-person dorm as a freshman, I was lucky that my roommates were awesome — some of them are still close friends. Others weren’t so lucky.”
Paige Sherman ’25 appreciated the sense of community that her freshman year’s eight-person suite provided. She has lived with two of her suitemates every year since, and she shared that others have stuck together, too.
Some of the First College spirit came from a sense of solidarity, according to Sherman, and some came from the college’s centrality.
“First was … probably the most central residential college, which almost made up for the bad parts,” Verrill wrote.
This centrality made the dining hall a hotspot despite controversial food, according to Sherman.
“People like to talk badly about Wucox dining hall, but … when the 12:20 classes let out, everybody ate there,” she said.
Sherman and others remembered the dining hall’s pasta bar fondly, as well as nighttime study sessions at its booths.
“The Wucox dining hall on the Butler side had a really nice, college-y vibe to it, and especially late at night with people working in it and eating the leftover pastries/cereal from earlier in the day,” Verrill wrote.
“There was kind of a familiar stickiness to the tables in there,” Hegli said. “You just knew that if you put a notebook down, you were gonna rip the last page off.” Since First’s demolition, Hegli has spent her dining hall visits exclusively at the Butler extension of the Whitman dining hall, where she said those sticky tables now reside.
For study spots, Waxman and others also cited the Julian Street (“JStreet”) Library, housed in Wilcox Hall.
Likewise in Wilcox, students could access a beloved dance studio and black box theater.
“The Wilcox Dance Studio was one of the best dance spaces on campus,” Eng wrote. “Its gorgeous wood-paneled floors, large windows that let in natural light and welcomed a gentle breeze at night, and its central location made it hard to beat.”
First’s central quad also garnered several mentions.
“There were some really beautiful spaces in the courtyards throughout the residential college, which were great when the weather was nice,”
Emma Mohabir ’25 wrote. MoreiraBehrens and others mentioned the sand volleyball court in particular.
“I’ve missed having a res college that really felt like an enclosed community, with all the buildings centered around a beautiful quad where anyone could enjoy time outside,”
Abigail Rabieh ’25 wrote.
Abigail Rabieh is a former Public Editor and former Head Opinion Editor for the ‘Prince.’
These common spaces built a strong rapport among members of First.
First at First: An “opportunity for
rebellion”
The dining hall, the central quad, the overlapping social spaces and dormitories — both beloved and panned by students today — were once the source of a gradual revolution in Princeton social life.
Woodrow Wilson Lodge’s choice of name carried deep symbolism. Fifty years prior, Wilson — then president of Princeton — had called for a “radical reorganization” of Princeton undergraduate life, in which “residential quadrangles or colleges, each with its own dining hall, common room, resident head of college, and resident preceptors” would replace the clubs and integrate students’ social and intellectual spheres. The University’s trustees had rescinded support for the plan after resistance from the clubs and alumni.
“In the old snooty days — something like the ’20s, ’30s and so on — [Prospect Street] really had an absolute stranglehold, and a very snobby one, on undergraduate social life,” said John V. Fleming, Master of Wilson College (which became First College) from 1969–1972 and 1989–1997.
Sociological shifts after World War II changed this inertia. The student body diversified following the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, including larger numbers of public school graduates, as well as older and married students matriculating after wartime deferrals.
Students again protested exclusionary practices in the club selection process. In 1950, nearly 80 percent of the sophomore class signed a petition demanding that all bickerees receive bids. Then the “Dirty Bicker” of 1958 violated this “100-percent bicker” policy, with 23 students — more than half of whom were Jewish — left out of the clubs.
National uproar followed — as did Princeton undergraduates’ desire to find social spaces outside of Prospect Avenue. Sophomore class secretary Darwin Labarthe ’61 joined Wilson Lodge that December, and within the next year, nearly 10 percent of the sophomore class had followed suit. Labarthe was elected junior class president soon after.
This “fifties’ social problem” created demand for the first instantiation of Wilson’s “quadrangle” idea: Plans were put in place for a “New Quad.” Wilson Lodge members would be eligible to move into its “somewhat modernistic” rooms of Gauss, 1937, 1938, and 1939 Halls in the fall of 1960.
Meanwhile, Wilson Lodge had added a program of faculty fellows, contributing to the group’s “unsnobbish and intellectually stimulating atmosphere.” The group renamed itself the Woodrow Wilson Society in January 1961 and began dining at an “ultra-modern” Wilcox Hall that fall. Wilcox Hall’s undergraduate-run Julian Street Library was meant to “stan[d] for the ideal of Woodrow Wilson, bringing together the social and intellectual life of the students.”
The group continued with the spirit of providing an alternative social space. When five women registered to spend their junior year in Princeton’s Critical Languages Program in 1963 — nine years before women became eligible to earn Princeton undergraduate degrees — they received an invitation to “take their meals” with the Wilson Society.
The women faced “heavy dating pressure” from the outset. “We plan to have a ceiling of two dates a week,
but of course this will vary depending on how much work we have,” student Barbara Alpern told the ‘Prince’ at the time.
Still, three women accepted the invitation and began dining at Wilcox Hall.
In the meantime, more Wilcox-adjacent housing came with the completion of a so-called “New New Quad” in 1964.
Wilson’s vision advanced further in 1967, when Professor Julian Jaynes, Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society from 1966–69, called for a “residential system for the quadrangle similar to the Yale system,” proposing “the establishment of a residential ‘college.’”
The Woodrow Wilson Society became Wilson College, Princeton’s first residential college, with membership open to all four classes.
Wilson College students would continue to innovate, leading seminars and creating a “Knight School” in the early 1970s that offered training in “auto mechanics, bartending, drawing, music theory, baking, foreign languages, bicycle repair and maintenance, [...] bridge,” and even “predicting the future.”
“There was this countercultural, outsider sort of fringe to being a member of Wilson College for a lot of people,” Fleming said. “It was an opportunity for rebellion. It was an opportunity to opt out of social rituals that you might not be interested in.”
Wilson College’s legacy would also develop via the expansion of the residential college system.
In 1970, Princeton Inn College (now Forbes) joined Wilson College as Princeton’s second residential college. In 1982, a controversial plan for five underclass residential colleges took effect, with the “New New Quad” becoming Butler, and the up-campus Commons and dormitories becoming Rockefeller and Mathey.
Wilcox gained the new neighbor of Butler’s Gordon Wu Hall, the other half of “Wucox” today. (The ‘Prince’ reported on 8 a.m. construction work and other “hardships” Princetonians were “forced to endure” for the benefit of future classes.) Then Wilson expanded further with the addition of Feinberg Hall in 1986.
Despite pushback, a four-year residential college system would eventually come to fruition. In the 2000s, Whitman, Mathey, and Butler became the four-year corollaries to the twoyear Forbes, Rockefeller, and First, respectively. Then, all colleges transitioned to four-year in the fall of 2022.
By then, Wilson College had become First College.
Racial reckoning and First’s farewell
During a 2015 sit-in protest in Nassau Hall, the Black Justice League called for (among other demands) the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from both the residential college and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on account of his legacy regarding race.
In response, the University Board of Trustees convened a Woodrow Wilson Legacy Review Committee.
Professor Eduardo Cadava, Head of Wilson College from 2009–2017, assembled an ad hoc student committee to consider the fate of an enlarged photograph of Wilson on Wilcox College’s wall. Cadava and the committee came to regard the photograph’s “size and prominence […] as ‘unduly celebratory’ and not in keeping with the
spirit of Wilson College’s founding wish to have Princeton be a place that is truly diverse and inclusive, and one that embraces, respects and values all its members.”
The photograph was removed in the spring of 2016.
Wilcox’s walls would welcome something new in the spring of 2022: a photo exhibit of the 1964 Princeton Summer Studies Program (PSSP), curated by students in an effort to “show the long journey of Princeton coming to terms with its relationship with race.” A model for the national Upward Bound program, PSSP had invited 40 public high school students — 30 of whom were Black — to spend the summer taking classes at the University while living in First’s 1937 Hall and dining in Wilcox Hall.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 2020, the Trustees removed Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs and gave First College its name “in recognition of its status as the first of the residential colleges that now play an essential role in the residential life of all Princeton undergraduates.”
“I was always incredibly proud of that, because First College was founded by students, for students,” said Professor AnneMarie Luijendijk, who was Head of the College during the transition from Wilson to First — and who is now Head of NCW. Eng similarly wrote in her survey response, “I carry a sense of pride in having experienced a part of Princeton’s history by living in its first residential college.”
“Maybe the beauty is that now we sort of all share that legacy,” Luijendijk said. She pointed to Residential College Advisors and Peer Academic Advisors as two groups helping to carry out First’s student-driven spirit. Luikendijk has also seen positive changes since the Fall 2022 move from First to NCW. Regarding her own role as Head of College, she appreciates NCW’s Jones-Feliciano Head of College House for its proximity to student life, in comparison to the Prospect Street house she occupied as Head of First. This proximity facilitates eating with students in the dining halls and makes group dinners and tea hours in the House more convenient for students.
She brought up NCW’s Coffee Club, state-of-the-art ceramics studio, and dorm-adjacent common spaces as assets to NCW’s community offerings — not to mention the air-conditioning.
“I’m happy the next group of Princeton students will be able to live more comfortably in NCW, Yeh and Hobson,” Harris wrote.
Still, some of the last First graduates take preserving the bygone college’s legacy seriously.
Hegli, for one, misses Wucox and hopes the Hobson dining hall will give students the sense of community Wucox gave her.
“Crazy to think I was the last to live in the famous Zoo dorm and all those memories are now gone with a new building in its place,” MoreiraBehrens wrote.
“It’s bittersweet to be the last group of people to remember a piece of Princeton history,” Harris wrote, “but that place was in need of a serious remodeling anyway.”
Helena Richardson is a staff Features writer for the ‘Prince.’
the PROSPECT. ARTS & CULTURE
Incoming seniors find summer is a fresh canvas for creativity
It’s not so easy to explore mountain ranges or interact with the diverse population of Princeton’s township during the school year. For student artists at Princeton, summer is the time to delve into passions otherwise untouched during a busy school year. This summer offered a chance for two members of the Class of 2026 to put on a creative lens.
Visual Arts, Jules Martin ’26
Jules Martin ’26, an Art and Archaeology major on the Practice of Art track, started sketching out her summer during her spring semester. She shaped her project proposal around polaroid photography and received the Lewis Center for the Arts Alex Adam ’07 award. This award, established in memory of Alexander Jay Adam ’07, provides each student $7,500 toward the creation of new art during the summer.
“I’ve always … been drawn to tak-
ing photographs of my own family and the landscapes around home,” Martin told The Daily Princetonian. Her project entailed exploring these main subjects through the theme of decay: her grandparents’ aging process and the effect of local wildfires on the natural environment.
After settling back in her hometown of Truckee, Calif., Martin spent time working closely with her grandparents, saying they felt “almost like collaborators.” She particularly reflected on their elderly lives and explored thematic details through seemingly inconsequential parts of the day, such as taking photos of her grandparents getting ready for bed.
“I wanted the portraits to be more intimate,” Martin told the ‘Prince.’ “I was thinking a lot about subject matter, like the aging process and watching them age in my own lifespan.”
Martin also captured the landscapes that shape her hometown, taking her digital camera and her medium format film camera on a backpacking trip for a few days. On the trip, she discovered an area she once hiked through had been burned down by a wildfire, and she became acutely aware of how much her home had changed.
“I was taking a lot of photos of dead wood or dead trees or these different things I felt like were kind of paralleling my grandparents.”
In some of the project’s polaroid photos, Martin employed polaroid emulsion. This technique allows an image to be lifted off the polaroid and adhered to another surface, creating a layered image effect. Martin used the final polaroid
emulsion lifts when photographing the alpine lakes surrounding her hometown.
“In my project proposal, I had written about submerging the floating polaroid emulsions in lakes and trying to document how they move underwater,” she said. According to Martin, her initial plan was upended when she experienced difficulties with submerging the delicate polaroid emulsions in the lake.
As a result of additional research on lighting, camera focus, and underwater camera housing, Martin soon pivoted. As Martin explained, she successfully submerged the polaroid emulsions by attaching them to a glass lens port of an underwater camera. The final element allowed her to exhibit the decay of the photographs, almost as a lens, layered before the underwater background.
As Martin returns to campus for senior year, she is preparing to present her work at a later this academic year. Therefore, although the summer is over, Martin carries the memories of photographing her grandparents back to Princeton.
“One of my favorite parts of the creative process is getting back into the studio after taking photos and being out in the field,” Martin said, as her project continues to unfold this year.
Theater, Zach Lee ’26
Zach Lee ’26 found his artistic calling in the high energy and spirited work of Princeton Summer Theater (PST), where he is an actor and the publicity director. Over the summer, PST debuted three mainstage productions, offering an endof-season Cabaret, a children’s show, and
various workshops. PST’s second show was Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot,” followed by Nick Dear’s adaptation of Frankenstein.
Lee is a former associate Audience editor at the ‘Prince.’
Lee’s work with PST was extremely fastpaced with “each of the turn-arounds for the shows [being] very, very quick and rigorous.” The student theater company’s first mainstage production of the summer premiered with the musical “The Bridges Over Madison County.” According to Lee, it was “really fun to play [Bud] and be able to perform and sing.”
Many of the actors who perform with PST also hold leadership positions within the group. As publicity director, Lee reaches out to theater critics in town and runs the social media.
Reflecting on the difference between school year and summer theater, Lee noted a change in audience and demographics with the lack of undergraduate students on campus. According to Lee, the summer audiences were “mostly the older folk who live in the town or live in nearby towns who know about Princeton Summer Theater [and] are returning viewers.” PST also delivered shows catered to children. According to Lee, “there’s a bunch of parents who are like, ‘Oh my God, what can I do with my kids that is not in the sun during the hot Princeton days?’” PST had an answer. Lee acted in a children’s adaptation of the Odyssey playing roles such as a Greek suitor, Calypso, and a Cyclops.
Lee also worked with the company to host children’s theatre workshops, stating, “It’s a good way [for the kids] to exert energy and the parents are very happy because their children are tired afterwards.” Lee, a Spanish and Portuguese major pursuing minors in Journalism and Theater, will apply the skills he learned at PST to his independent artistic work this fall. After studying in Seville, Spain the summer before his junior year, Lee has already decided on a topic. “I know that I want to use Flamenco … maybe it’s a show, maybe it’s an album,” he said.
Ysabella Olsen is a member of the Class of 2028. She is an associate editor for The Prospect. She can be reached at yo7647[at] princeton.edu.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ZACH LEE. Members of Princeton Summer Theater sit together in front of the set of the musical The Bridges Over Madison County.
By Ysabella Olsen | Associate Prospect Editor
PHOTO COURTESY OF JULES MARTIN Martin’s camera set up in front of a scenic view.
PHOTO COURTESY OF JULES MARTIN
An underwater camera dome used to adhere and capture images of polaroid emulsions.
DISPATCH | Bonnaroo 2025: a halfway ruined weekend
By Mackenzie Hollingsworth | Head Prospect Editor
Last year, I wrote a summer dispatch and signed off with the final line “Now, I’m off to buy my ticket for next year. See you at the farm in 2025!” When I wrote that, I had no idea what was to come.
Bonnaroo, a four-day music and arts festival in Tennessee, is always my favorite part of the summer. I go with some friends — mostly people my boyfriend met in college — and we revel in the in the energy of the festival, despite the tent-camping and baking heat of it all. We typically get there to set up on Tuesday, two days before the official beginning of the festival. While there are annoying moments — including the sunburn I got in the couple of hours it took to set up our camp — the days on the farm are the best of the summer. This year was my third year attending Bonnaroo, and I thought that it would be the best yet: headliners like Luke Combs; Tyler, the Creator; Olivia Rodrigo; and Hozier made me feel like the lineup was especially curated for me. I was most excited for Hozier; I had been
waiting years for the chance to see him live.
Going into the festival, my group was beyond excited. From pop to country to rap to EDM, Bonnaroo brings something for everyone. Everyone in my group had at least a handful of artists they wanted to see.
My group — seven in total — arrived at the farm on Tuesday morning. We waited in the security line for hours until we were finally directed to our spot. We were surprisingly close to the arch, the main entrance to “Centeroo,” the part of the farm that holds most of the major performances — a lucky thing, as some have to walk close to an hour to get to a main entrance.
Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, we set up our camp, wandered around the farm, looked at the shops, and got to know our camping neighbors.
One of our favorite things to do is attend shows at the House of Yes; this year they put on a two-part show consisting of “Roolesque,” a drag burlesque show, and “Wet Nightmare,” a collection of weird and intentionally slightly uncom -
fortable acts, such as a girl dressed as a clown poking needles through a remarkably real-looking latex bodysuit. The House of Yes is a gem of the week — it’s unapologetically weird, queer, and accepting of all.
The next day marked the official start of the festival, but I was only interested — and only somewhat — in seeing Luke Combs that day. Though I was never a huge fan of his, I’ll admit that he put on an incredible show.
And then, right as we reached the weekend, it all fell apart.
On Friday, it started raining — and lightning storming. A lightning spotting within a certain radius of the festivities stops the show, to be restarted only after the lightning ceases for 25 minutes. The rain lasted for hours on Friday, so we had to lower our canopies, sit in our cars, and hope for the end of the storm — despite missing some exciting performances scheduled for that afternoon, we hoped to catch Tyler, the Creator that night.
Eventually, the rain and lightning stopped, but the farm was flooded. Manchester, Tenn. had seen a lot of rain in the weeks leading up to Bonnaroo, and the rain that day pushed things to the edge. On my way to the restroom on Friday afternoon, I walked through a patch of water at least five inches deep — not ideal for sandals — and saw multiple camps submerged in water.
But despite the puddles in our campsite, my group held strong. There was no way, we thought, that the festival would possibly cancel a headliner as big as Tyler — we just needed to wait out the rain.
But around 8 p.m., 3 hours before the show, a girl in our group said that they had cancelled the rest of Bonnaroo.
We didn’t believe her, until she showed us a Facebook post that confirmed that the entire rest of the festival was cancelled. We’d be spending the remainder of our weekends at home, with no Tyler, the Creator, no Olivia Rodrigo, and
no Hozier. At least, the Facebook post confirmed, we’d be getting a 75 percent refund for all tickets and parking passes bought directly through Front Gate Tickets, an amount that was bumped up to a full refund after backlash from attendees.
We left that Friday night in chaos. Since the festival was canceled, many volunteer workers simply stopped working. Without most workers or people directing traffic, we managed to get off the farm only after a few hours of waiting in line. During this time, I saw very little communication from Live Nation, which owns a controlling stake in the festival — it felt as if they announced the cancellation and then clocked out for the day.
“Are you planning to go next year?” my family asked me as I returned days early.
Yes, despite how unfortunate it all was this year, I’m sure I’ll be back in 2026.
I love meeting the people of Bonnaroo. Our campsite neighbor helped my boyfriend get his car started after his battery died and he didn’t have any jumper cables. After we forgot seasonings for our burgers, another neighbor lent us theirs. People drift in and out of our camp, stopping by to say hello and introduce themselves. It is these interactions with people that I’d never otherwise meet that keeps me coming back.
The positive energy and atmosphere is indestructible: Attendees still said “Happy Roo” to anyone passing by after the cancellation was announced, and people started using the flooded portions of the farm as a slip ’n slide.
Even though Bonnaroo was cancelled, the heart and soul of the festival remained with the people trying to spread positivity and good vibes. There will always be another year to see the main acts, too.
Mackenzie Hollingsworth is a head editor for The Prospect. She is a member of the Class of 2026 and can be reached at mh5273[at]princeton.edu.
DISPATCH | Experiencing Philly’s Gayborhood
By Irene Kim | Prospect Contributor
As the home of the Liberty Bell, Rocky Statue, the iconic cheesesteak — and the literal birthplace of the United States — history and culture greet visitors and locals alike on every street corner in Philadelphia. Something I was less familiar with, though, is the city’s rich history of LGBTQ+ activism and community.
Although my older sister had lived in Philly for the past four years, it wasn’t until this summer that I was able to spend more than a day there. While my friend and I visited popular attractions like Reading Terminal Market, people-watched picnicking residents, and discovered beautiful street murals, we were particularly drawn to the city’s vibrant queer presence, particularly in Philly’s “Gayborhood” and annual pride parade.
The Center City neighborhood known as the Gayborhood — a nickname coined in 1995, recognizing the area as an important site of LGBTQ+ rights activism and resilience — quickly became my favorite place in Philly. Today, the neighborhood features 36 rainbow street signs, rainbow cross walks, and a plethora of LGBTQ+ flags on every corner. It is also home to the William Way LGBT Community Center, a non-profit organization serving Philly’s queer community; and Giovanni’s Room, America’s largest LGBTQ and feminist bookstore named after James Baldwin’s 1956 queer novel.
The lively and colorful space of Giovanni’s Room is housed inside Philly AIDS Thrift,
a Gayborhood cornerstone that donates its proceeds to local organizations that fight HIV/AIDS. The bookstore felt constructed with love and community at its heart. In addition to books available for purchase, I explored display cases with vintage photographs, books, and magazines. Selected items depicted moments of queer representation in history, such as a 1930s edition of Moby Dick and a collection of vintage gay pornography. I also enjoyed shifting through racks of colorful vintage clothing and accessories at the thrift store, which showed the defiant self-expression characteristic of queer culture.
While in the space, I also experienced Giovanni’s Room as a community. Its busy layout encouraged spontaneous interactions, and its many unique artifacts served as wonderful topics of conversation. I was unsurprised to learn that Giovanni’s Room also hosts book clubs, art shows, and music performances, offering a cultural hub for local artists and community members as well as a safe space. I felt especially lucky to be in the Gayborhood during Pride Month, as nearly every conversation warmly ended with a “Happy Pride!”
The spirit of the Gayborhood felt more alive than ever during early June’s parade weekend, which brought together tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ community members and allies for celebration through music, dance, learning, and advocacy. I was especially moved by its diverse age range: I saw young adults, families with small children, and elderly couples alike.
For the majority of the festival, my friend and I sat and watched people in silence, awed by the sheer number of attendees and their self-expression through fashion. Shirts, pins, and flags declared “Dykes for dolls,” “I love sluts,” and “We’re here. We’re queer. We riot!” Attendees reclaimed words historically used to demean the LGBTQ+ community. In recognition of the intersectionality of struggles for justice, many attendees also embraced symbols of Palestinian solidarity with statements like, “Queers for Palestine.”
Philadelphia is Philly because it is unapologetically queer, and it is precisely its queerness that makes the city feel so imbued with love, hope, and community. Philly has become a reminder of ongoing struggle and progress, reminding myself of the value of safe spaces, visibility, and the radical power of community.
Irene Kim is a contributing writer for The Prospect and a member of the Class of 2028. She can be reached at ik7641@princeton.edu.
MACKENZIE HOLLINGSWORTH / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
The Bonnaroo arch communicates to festival goers that the Centeroo stage is closed due to weather.
DISPATCH | Housing and human rights policy in Hawai’i
By Isaac Bernstein | Prospect Contributor
Writing this article with the Honolulu skyline in the background, I have two reasons to be content. Not only do I have a beautiful view in front of me, but I have also gained research insights that strengthened both my housing policy interests and my goal of becoming an attorney.
From the beginning of June to mid-August, I am interning at the Hawai’i Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for housing, transportation, food equity, and tax equality in Hawai’i through qualitative and quantitative research, community conversations, and drafting legislation. Specifically, I am researching for the Housing Policy team, focus -
ing on two key areas: Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Climate Change Housing Insurance.
As plots of land held by non-profit organizations for the purpose of providing cheap leases, CLTs result in family home ownership, sales significantly under market price, and increased stability for inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Climate Change Housing Insurance project revolves around insurance company claim modifications after natural disasters.
The CLT project implements a qualitative research strategy with interviews as the predominant form of collection; by summer’s end, I will have interviewed over a dozen CLT leaders. Thus far, my most influential interview experiences have been with Hawai’i Land Trust (HILT), Nā Hale o Maui, and
Trust for Public Land - Hawai’i, as learning about their experiences with legal and real estate councils on land acquisition have further driven my curiosity. The project’s end goal is to increase the accessibility of CLTs to nonprofits such that they too can create them for their communities and encourage increased availability of affordable housing units.
One such interview that deeply influenced my outlook on Hawai’i housing was with Nā Hale o Maui’s Executive Director. She was a teacher for decades, and explained that Hawai’i had to fly in staff from the Philippines because of massive attrition to higher-paying states. She said that after decades of teaching and winning accolades for her education methods, her annual salary was shockingly low compared to
every other state in the U.S. As a result, she turned to Nā Hale o Maui and is now a homeowner of one of their homes, with the land trust allowing her and her family to have housing security.
I am also researching climate change insurance policies at Hawai’i Appleseed. For this project, I have been conducting a literature review of coinsurance companies and how climate natural disasters impacted their policies. This research outlines the effects of natural disasters on the insurance market, its regulatory response as a market, and data about the disaster itself.
Additionally, the project sponsored the creation of a contacts list for my organization to potentially interview about climate change’s impact on insurance policies, including individuals involved with State Farm’s lack of renewal of 72,000 of claims in Los Angeles. Moreover, the document outlines avenues for future research as well as a literature review of scholarly articles detailing the shifts and effects of climate change on insurance policies and companies. Through this project, I realized the extent to which insurance losses affect local economic markets. For example, an estimated 95,000 people lost their jobs from Hurricane Katrina due to the approximately $161,000,000 in damages in New Orleans.
I am beyond fortunate and excited to spend my summer here in Honolulu and participate in these endeavors. This summer will certainly be one to remember.
As I sign off of this article, I am headed to either visit Makapu’u Beach with the largest waves I have ever seen or hike Mt. Olomana (Three Peaks) here on ‘Oahu. Mahalo for following along!
Isaac Bernstein is a staff News writer for the ‘Prince.’ From Pittsburgh, Penn., he often covers academic departments, faculty research, and alumni news.
DISPATCH | The mountains and metropolis: exploring Salt Lake City
By Eliana Du | Head Cartoon Editor
As I write this, I am sitting in my University of Utah dorm, illuminated by the massive window that shines into our common area and kitchen. Right outside the dorm is a busy local road, on which cars are perpetually passing by. Beyond that, a small, green-speckled mountain watches over us all.
Such a view is typical of Salt Lake City, where nature and society are never far apart. I’ve been here for a little over two weeks for a Computer Science Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) run by the University of Utah, titled “Trust and Reproducibility in Intelligent Computation.” In this time, I, along with my cohort of a dozen undergraduates, have been taking classes on weekday mornings and wandering the city in the evenings. For now, we’re getting a taste of different areas of computer science research through lectures and hands-on projects. In a week, we’ll transition to specific projects with faculty once we’ve gotten a sense of what we want to work on. The theme of the REU — trust — and its exploratory nature, as someone who has little coding experience and is undecided about her major, were what drew me here. I’ve loved hearing about the wide array of things people are researching — cryptography, theoretical machine learning, human-computer interaction. Nonetheless, I’m excited to
spend time diving into a more specialized area to gain the skills I need to create something new.
In the meantime, though, I’m absolutely relishing my free time. I’m collecting experiences like fireflies in a jar, practicing spontaneity with every flashing invitation: “Who wants to watch a movie?” “Anyone down to hike?” Since arriving, I’ve watched my first Wes Anderson movie, seen the largest Latter-Day Saints temple in the world, and gone on a gorgeous 6 a.m. hike.
Out of necessity, I’ve started to cook for myself. Turns out if you boil red cabbage, you may be drinking purple soup for days on end. What I’m proudest of is that I’ve finally gotten into a gym routine, assisted in large part by my new gym buddy.
As someone who’s lived in New Jersey for all 19 years of her life, one of my primary goals this summer was to get out of the Garden State. Baked into that goal, I realize now, was a yearning to finally become myself. I have never been good at making decisions, always concerned about the optimal outcome, about the what-if of a bad one — merely a log buoyed by the river of opinion.
But here, I am forced to choose — what to make for dinner, what project to work on, who to hang out with when plans coincide. These small choices feel large, though they’re not so different from the ones I make in Princeton. I think it’s because they
finally feel like my own.
Though it’s 6 p.m., the mountain outside my window still basks in the hot Utah sun, which doesn’t set until 9 p.m. The cars rumble by, shiny vans and glinting pickup trucks. One of my roommates, who was sewing beside me for most of this piece, just left to go participate in a city protest.
“What are you doing tonight?” she asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
Maybe I’ll go on a sunset hike along the Bonneville Shoreline Trail; maybe I’ll grab ice cream at Cloud Ninth; maybe I’ll read some papers by the window. Regardless of what I choose, though, I’m excited to see how the future turns out.
Eliana Du is the head Cartoons editor for the ‘Prince.’
ISAAC BERNSTEIN / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN Waves crash on Sandy Beach, on the south-eastern shore of O‘ahu.
The Prospect 11 Weekly Event Roundup
By Mackenzie Hollingsworth and Gavin McLoughlin, Head Prospect Editors
1
Spinnerets
Gi (Ginny) Huo
Sept. 9 -Oct. 24, 10 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Hurley Gallery, LCA
Through drawings, sculptures, photographs, and film, Princeton Arts Fellow Ginny Huo’s exhibition spinnerets represents the histories of belief systems and their geopolitical impact. Named for the spider’s silk-creating organ, Huo’s exhibit spans from messages between North and South Korea via balloon to images of her childhood in Hawai’i. This event is free, unticketed and open to the public.
2
3
4
5
Music in the Alley
Halo Pub
Sept. 6, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Halo Pub
Halo Pub hosts live music in the alley outside its doors every Saturday night. The ice cream shop is located on Hulfish Street between Palmer Square and Hinds Plaza.
Live Music on the Patio
Rob Messina
Sept. 5, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Yankee Doodle Tap Room in Nassau Inn
Stop by the Yankee Doodle Tap Room to enjoy live music on the patio as you dine! This week, Rob Mes- sina, who plays covers of the Dave Matthews Band, will be at the Nassau Inn as the live performer.
Triangle Frosh Show:
“Can you feel the love ’2 9?”
The Triangle Club
Sept. 5, 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.
McCarter Theatre
The Triangle Club will perform its annual Frosh Week Show, featuring a comedic collection of original sketches and songs from its 134 years, including “Traffic Safety Rap” and jazz standard “East of the Sun.” The two performances will take place at McCarter Theatre at 7:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. with no tickets required.
Electric Stingray
Fall Music Series
Sept. 6, 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.
On the Green at Palmer Square
With fall’s arrival, there’s no better way to start the vibe than with live music on the Green at Palmer Square. This Saturday, Electric Stingray, a rock and alternative cover band, will be performing.
6
Jameson Moore Art Exhibit
Sept. 3 – Oct. 6
Small World Coffee Nassau location
Jameson Moore, a printmaker of 20 years, will be showing an exhibit at Small World this month. In recent years, he has hosted and taught many print making events, and the exhibit shows how he has developed his craft and honed his skill as a print maker.
8
Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
The Justice John Marshall Harlan Lecture in Constitutional Adjudication
Sept. 10, 4:30 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Yankee Doodle Tap Room in Nassau Inn
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will appear in conversation with Deborah Pearlstein, the director of Princeton’s Program on Law and Public Policy, to discuss law, justice, and human rights. Tickets are available to Princeton University students, faculty, and staff with PUIDs and are required for entry.
The event follows an event on campus with fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’76 in the spring for the dedication of 36 University Place in her honor.
Art of Science 2025 Exhibition
Princeton Friend Center
Main Atrium, Friend Center for Engineering Education
Explore the Art of Science Exhibition, which seeks to depict the intersection of scientific innovation and artistic expression. With 41 still images, videos and animations from 80 creators, the exhibit hopes to “reveal both the possibilities and limits of science’s determined reach into the unknown.” The exhibition, which debuted in May 2025, will remain open for the entirety of the 2025-2026 academic year.
7
Co-Curricular Classes with Vivia
Font
Sept. 8, 15, 22. 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
Donald G. Drapkin Studio, LCA
For anyone looking to win their first Oscar this fall, meet with professional actress, writer, and producer Vivia Font for drop-in acting workshops. Geared towards both experienced actors and those just starting out, the classes will be held on September 8, 15, and 22 from 4:45 to 6:15 p.m. in Drapkin Studio.
Murray Dodge Reopening
Sept. 8, 4:30 p.m.
Murray Dodge Cafe
Murray Dodge Cafe will reopen on Sept. 8 with reduced operating hours from 4:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week. The cafe’s slogan is “dedicated to the fine art of being open,” and it has historically been open with free tea and cookies until midnight. 9
Gallery Opening: Tarang
Sept. 6, 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Taplin Gallery
This exhibition brings together art from three artists to explore themes of change, emotion, and identity while embracing their Indian roots and Western backgrounds. Together, they showcase “Tarang,” aiming to evoke a feeling of fluidity in relation to their cross cultural experiences.
MEN’S WATER POLO
Pros in Princeton: Tigers host top water polo clubs in the world for exhibition games
By Bryant Figueroa Assistant Sports Editor
Few collegiate teams can say they’ve had the privilege of facing the best in the world — and this week, No. 10 Princeton men’s water polo team (0–0 overall, 0–0 Northeast Water Polo Conference) will do it twice. As part of their USA tours, A.S.D. Pro Recco, the most decorated club in men’s water polo history, and Ferencvárosi Torna Club (FTC), the reigning backto-back European Champions League winners, will play a series of exhibition matches against each other and various American teams — including the Tigers. The best part? They are playing here at DeNunzio pool.
“You can’t write this, it’s unmatched,” Princeton men’s water polo head coach Dustin Litvak said about the events. “We are just thrilled to have them and excited for the opportunity to play the best players, the best teams in the world.”
“It literally is as if the [Oklahoma City] Thunder and the [Boston] Celtics came down to practice here and played against our basketball team next week,” Litvak added. “It’s kind of unprecedented.”
Widely regarded as the best men’s water polo club in history, Pro Recco is a northern Italian club that has won a record 20 European trophies and a record 55 domestic trophies. Meanwhile, FTC hails from Budapest and has won the last two European Aquatic Champions League titles, the most prestigious competition in international water polo. Together, these clubs have won the last five straight European Champions Leagues and are arguably the current best two in the world.
In addition to being popular in many European countries, water polo has become one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Sandro Sukno, Pro Recco head coach, told The Daily Princetonian he is excited to use the tournament to “help promote water polo in the United States and inspire young athletes to reach their goals.”
Although Princeton has hosted international competition before, a matchup of this pedigree is unprecedented. The planning for this event goes back months, when the Hammarskjold family joined the Behring family as co-owners of Pro Recco in November 2024. Philip Hammarskjold ’87, a former University Trustee, was a crucial player in bringing the tour together. Hammarskjold’s son, Luke, a member of the Class of 2025, played four years for Princeton’s men’s water polo team.
Philip Hammarskjold told
the ‘Prince’ he first thought of the tournament when he watched Pro Recco play in California five years ago.
“I was just really struck by the excellence and the professionalism of the team and the caliber of water polo of the top level of the international game,” he said.
The team’s leadership wanted the tournament to take place on the East Coast, rather than the West Coast, a more conventional location for water polo.
Indeed, the West Coast dominates collegiate water polo, with the NCAA men’s championship having been won exclusively by California schools, the latest one being 13-time victor UCLA. Meanwhile, no East Coast team has ever even reached the final, with Princeton having reached the semifinals the most times (five) from the East, most recently in 2023.
“I’d say the goals for the trip and what our objective is are twofold,” Hammarskjold said. “On the one hand, we want to help showcase the game of water polo at the highest international level on the East Coast, to try to build the exposure of the sport ... The second thing we wanted to also do is promote the rising excellence of East Coast water polo in the United States onto the global stage.”
The Princeton crowd will be in for a treat.
“Even if people are casual
fans or have never heard of water polo, it’s not often you ever get to see the best two teams compete in anything,” Litvak said. “So I would highly encourage as many students to come out and watch.”
Apart from just showcasing the best teams in the world, these matches will also feature some global stars. Among them is FTC’s Dušan Mandić, one of the best water polo players of all time. Coming off a third gold medal for his home nation of Serbia in the 2024 Summer Olympics and the MVP of the tournament, Mandić is looking forward to these preseason matchups as practice for FTC’s upcoming season.
“I’m excited to see how the American college teams are playing, which level they are, and to feel their level in person,” Mandić told the ‘Prince.’
Among the new roster of Pro Recco players is the team’s only American, national captain and 2024 Summer Olympic Bronze medalist Max Irving, who will play against his alma mater UCLA in Wednesday’s event in New York City.
“It’s a privilege and an honor, first and foremost, for me to be able to wear the Pro Recco water polo cap,” Irving told the ‘Prince.’ “I think what’s so cool about what Pro Recco is doing right now is, they are committed to bringing and exposing high-level water polo to the United States.”
Irving was also part of a successful Pro Recco clinic hosted at DeNunzio Pool on Sunday afternoon, where aspiring water polo athletes aged 11–18 enjoyed the opportunity to meet and train with Pro Recco players and coaches.
“As successful as [the clinic] was today, I think that this is something that we’re going to be continuing to do in the future,” Irving added.
“To really inspire, to encourage, and to connect with the next generation of water polo players, especially in the U.S. as we approach the LA 2028 Olympic Games — I think that’s something really, really close to what we aspire to do as water polo players.”
As for the next generation, the Tigers themselves boast one of the best goalkeepers in collegiate water polo, two-time All-American and co-captain junior Kristóf Kovács, who is excited about facing some familiar faces as a Hungarian himself.
“It is very exciting, especially that a team from Hungary is here,” Kovács told the ‘Prince.’ “I played against some of the guys already, and some of the players were also my teammates on the U19 Hungarian national team, so it’s special for that as well.”
“It’s a privilege to play against those teams and to be able to guard them, so we can learn from them,” he added.
The two clubs will stop
in New York on Wednesday, where Pro Recco will take on reigning national collegiate champions No. 1 UCLA, and FTC will match up against the Tigers. The two European giants will then face off against each other the following day, marking a historic event for the sport in American waters. All New York matches have sold out but will be livestreamed on Overnight.
However, for the Orange and Black faithful, the Princeton Invitational is the event to watch. On Saturday in DeNunzio Pool, Princeton will play Pro Recco at 5:00 p.m. while FTC will play No. 3 Fordham afterwards at 6:30 p.m. On Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., the European clubs will clash with each other once again, this time at DeNunzio.
Until the highly anticipated matchup, Princeton continues to train and work towards the goal of a national championship — with no better practice than the best two teams in the world.
“We want to make sure that we’re battle tested and ready,” said Litvak about this season’s schedule. “So on top of [playing top-ten collegiate teams], to play two of the best clubs in the world, I don’t know how much more battle-tested you can be.”
Bryant Figueroa is an assistant Sports editor for the ‘Prince.’
WOMEN’S SOCCER
Women’s soccer falls to Ohio State after strong first half
By Harrison Blank Head Sports Editor
On a clear night at Roberts Stadium, women’s soccer (0–2–2 overall, 0–0 Ivy League) fell to the No. 25 Ohio State Buckeyes in a physical matchup. The Tigers are off to an up and down start to the season, tying Rutgers and losing to Loyola (Md.) in their first two games.
The Buckeyes, who made it to the Round of 16 in last year’s NCAA Tournament, started strong, applying significant pressure to the Tigers and receiving two corner kicks. Princeton struggled to establish possession in the offensive third for the first 15 minutes.
The Orange and Black defensive line held strong, however. Junior goalkeeper Cecilia Cerone made a diving save and junior midfielder Kayla Wong blocked a shot from outside the box.
Junior defender Zoe Markesini, one of two captains, led the Tigers defensive line and was critical in keeping the game scoreless.
“I think playing a Big 10 opponent like that brings a different game, but I think we adapted and gave it back to them and switched the game in the first half,” Markesini told The Daily Princetonian after the game.
The Tigers found their footing by ramping up pressure on defense, taking away time from the Buckeye players and forcing turnovers. The persistent defense allowed the offense to flow.
“We calmed down a little bit with our nerves, caught off guard with the physicality of the game, and I think a little bit tentative, and then we got back into it.”
Head Coach Sean Driscoll told the ‘Prince’ after the game. “The momentum shifted after that.”
Shouts from the home crowd erupted in the middle of the half
after a no call on a clear hand ball from a Buckeye defender slightly outside the 18-yard box. Despite the lack of help from the officials, the Tigers secured a few corner kicks and continued to search for offensive opportunities.
With three minutes left in the half, the scoreless tie was broken by sophomore forward Alexandra Barry. First-year forward Aubrey Crisostomo sent a bouncing ball into the box and Barry cleaned up to put the Tigers ahead.
After losing several critical members of last year’s team, Princeton saw strong first-half play from the youth on offense. First-year forward Nina Cantor was also involved on the scoring play with Barry and Crisostomo.
“The first years have hit the ground running, I think that’s
credit to their skillset and the welcome environment we have here with our captains and seniors,” Driscoll told the ‘Prince.’ “The support around them is the reason they do so well.”
Play resumed in the second half with both sides making pushes down the field, but neither could consolidate any advantage into a goal opportunity in the initial minutes.
The Buckeyes found their first chance of the game when the Tigers were whistled for a foul in the box. Forward Amanda Schlueter placed the ball into the back of the net to even up the affair.
Things began to unravel for the Tigers following Schlueter’s goal. Just five minutes later, midfielder Ellie Britt gave Ohio State the lead, poking the ball over Cer-
Ode to the Open House
By Lianne Chapin Head Archives Editors
“THE MEANING OF LIFE. Open House, Feb. 11, 8:00 p.m., 48 University Place,” declared a 1988 notice in The Daily Princetonian’s classified section, sprinkled among ice cream store job postings and a desperate plea to look for a lost silver bracelet.
Almost 40 years on, the medium has changed. The ‘Prince’ now competes with consulting clubs, dance groups, and finance firms in the wilderness of HoagieMail, campus’s undergraduate-wide listservs, where free food is the ultimate currency and subject lines determine events’ destinies. While the paper vies for student attention in inboxes rather than in print pages, the open house is a first impression of the physical newsroom that continues to
inspire from beyond a laptop screen.
Year after year, coming face-toface with the paper — meeting the masthead of the ‘Prince,’ hearing about their work, and sitting in on a bustling night of publication at an open house — has successfully lured generations of ‘Prince’ staff into the ranks of Princeton’s paper of record.
“Come meet the ‘human side’ of the ‘Prince,’ where the accents range from Brooklyn to Fort Worth, the garb from jacket-andtie to threadbare jeans, and the personalities from difficult to impossible. You can’t tell who you might get to know…” coaxed a 1973 announcement. “Join the Princetonian, the kingdom, the power,” commanded the piece from the middle of the front page.
While the magic of 48 University Place speaks for itself,
rone’s head after it trickled into the box.
Two more goals followed in the next three minutes, and the Tigers now stared down a threegoal deficit just eight minutes after having a lead. The offensive spurt from the Buckeyes stunned the Tigers and the home crowd.
The Tigers battled on for the rest of the game, however, they were not able to generate any significant offensive chances. Driscoll made sure that the youth on the team had substantial playing time.
“The positive is how we looked in the last 25 minutes of the first half,” Driscoll told the ‘Prince.’
“We really fought and were physical and didn’t back down. We were much more assertive and progressive with how we played. It’s
‘Prince’ leadership still took steps to sweeten the deal. Much in the style of today’s student group email blasts, a 1966 open house announcement opened with “FREE REFRESHMENTS,” enticing hungry readers before announcing the main event. Another hooked students in with “Sex, Adventure, Intrigue!” before adding a self-deprecating jab to clarify that “these are just a few of the things you’ll have to forego when you join the ‘Prince.’” Another from 1969 showed a smiling Woodstock reveler with the caption “Woodstock! ‘Prince’ photographers were there…”
As far back as 1906, the ‘Prince’ advertised a meeting to demystify its recruitment process, which selected members from each class year to the paper’s editorial board after a competitive trial period. The 1906 pitch to prospective
a really good mentality to have.” Markesini drew positives from playing strong opponents early in the season, despite the loss.
“I think it’s really important that we play opponents like this and get the side of physicality, something we can compete with and then learn from our mistakes in the game,” she told the ‘Prince.’ The Tigers drew 0–0 with the Syracuse Orange yesterday in a morning game to bring their overall record to 0–2–2 on the season. The team will travel to Miami on Thursday to face off with the Miami Hurricanes (4–1 overall, 0–0 ACC) at 7.
Harrison Blank is a head Sports editor for the ‘Prince.’
writers highlighted that mere participation in the trial period “promotes initiativeness and selfreliance, enlarges a man’s circle of friends, and offers an excellent opportunity for those who intend to take up journalism in after life.”
This Thursday, September 4, and the following Tuesday, September 9, starting at 8:00 p.m., the newsroom doors are once again open to welcome the pitter-patter of prospective student journalists’ shoes as they join a decades-long tradition. Whether they want to enlarge their circle of friends, discover the meaning of life, meet the human side of the ‘Prince,’ or have a snack, they will follow the footsteps of countless ‘Prince’ people past.
Lianne Chapin is a Head Archives Editor for the ‘Prince.’
PHOTO COURTESY OF PRINCETON ATHLETICS
First-year Nina Cantor shoots against Syracuse in the Tigers 0–0 draw on Sunday.
