The ne plus ultra.
For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.
Name a discipline and the chances are good that Princeton in New Jersey will be ranked #1 or #2 nationally. Or internationally, come to think of it. One of the few pre-Revolutionary War schools, dating from 1746, this large 500 acre campus offers every major you could possibly want to its 5,400 undergraduates and 2,800 postgraduates and does so at the very highest academic levels. The endowment at over $22 billion (yes, billion) sees to it that everything is of the highest quality and the many refurbishment projects ongoing during our visit testify to the administration’s intent to keep it so.
And it’s not just academic standards which excel here. The art collection is simply breathtaking, the campus rivals Colgate, Lafayette and Union Colleges for unity of design and sheer quality, if on a much larger scale – it is breathtakingly beautiful – and the adjacent city exudes charm like nothing else. As our tour of many New England private Ivy League schools comes to a close we can honestly report that we have left one of the best to last.
To cap things off, our visit coincided with a perfect, if roasting hot, day and we enjoyed lunch in the college town to break up our meanderings. What follows needs few words.
Ivy League.
The Art Museum.
Rudolf Hoflehner, Human Condition, 1960.
David Smith, CUBI XIII, 1963.
Monet’s garden at Giverny. The collection of Impressionists, Cézannes and Degas is Louvre-quality.
A nice place to marry.
Henry Moore, Oval with Points, 1969-70.
Memorial to the Trumbull and Davis families.
Winston with John Witherspoon’s statue, a key early President of the school.
To add to the seeming perfection of our visit, there was a magnificent recital of Olivier Messaien‘s organ music in progress in the Chapel, the latter gloriously built in the Gothic style of the 14th century. The organist, name unknown, was truly world class …. and we were but two of four people present. Messaien, Princeton, world class musician, full throated, wide range organ. How do you improve on that?
Jacques Lipchitz, Song of the Vowels, 1969. Compare with the like piece at Cornell.
Another snap of the Witherspoon statue.
The Walter Augustus Wyckoff Quad. Princeton has more quads than you can count.
Remembrance, Toshiko Takaezu, in honor of alumni murdered on Nine-Eleven.
Neo-Parisian scenes in town.
The town is immediately adjacent to the campus.
Simply charming.
More French style.
It’s hard to know where to start when detailing alumni and faculty of Princeton. Alumni include Presidents Madison and Wilson, VP Aaron Burr and First Lady Michelle Obama, three sitting US Supreme Court Justices (Alito, Kagan and Sotomayor), Pete Conrad (Apollo 12), Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jimmy Stewart, José Ferrer, Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Richard Feynman, Lee Iacocca, John Nash, Alan Turing, JFK, Robert Mueller (pig investigator), Cornell West, Carl Icahn, George Will and accidental billionairess Meg Whitman. Faculty include Joyce Carol Oates, Cornel West, Johnny von Neumann, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Tony Morrison, and Woodrow Wilson.
You have to be very smart to get admitted here, with but one in sixteen applicants making the grade. That’s how it should be.