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Luke Grippo and Irene Kim
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: An hour after the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) meeting on Monday, March 24, President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 addressed the Princeton town community to address the state of higher education, the University endowment, and ways to maintain collaboration between the town and the University.
The Princeton Town Hall Meeting is an event held annually by members of the Princeton Council in collaboration with Eisgruber, with the goal of facilitating open communication between the University and the town.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
In April 1995, University maintenance crews spent two days cleaning “walkways, benches, plazas and walls on campus,” working to remove not dirt or debris, but simple sidewalk chalk. The chalk drawings, according to a report from The Daily Princetonian, consisted of “pro-gay messages” written by hand during Pride Week. After the removal, advocates were rightly in uproar. Following the incident, the University, claiming that the discrepancy had transpired because of “cross-office confusion,” clarified its chalking policy — it was henceforth banned, in all cases.
Three decades on, chalk at Princeton has found itself relegated to dusty trays in classrooms and lecture halls. Hardly anyone — students, activists, artists, campus organizations, candidates, schoolchildren — chalks University grounds anymore. Simply put, the University’s ban has worked. But the question remains: Why is Princeton so afraid of chalk?
There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
The University has implemented a new limit on the number of Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Graduate Student Government, and Council of the Princeton University Committee (CPUC) student representatives allowed to attend faculty meetings.
In an email to student leaders obtained by The Daily Princetonian, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Ian Deas wrote that the new changes will go into effect at the Sept. 14 faculty meeting and each constituency will be able to send a maximum of two observers to a meeting. The Rules and Procedures of the Faculty do not specify the number of observers permitted from the student governments or CPUC.
