Giants Upon the Earth

The Princeton Alumni Weekly is publishing a series of articles entitled "Interpreting Princeton by Decades", and in the issue of March 13, Thomas S. Matthews '22, contributes to the series interesting and amusing comment on "Those Inflated Twenties." His concluding paragraphs are here reprinted:

It has been a boom decade. Princeton has grown physically; socially it has tightened up. Every year has seen Princeton getting a little more like Yale, the bulldog of Success. Every year, as the practical social-business value of a college education has gone up, like a seat on the Stock Exchange, more and more embryo junior executives have hopefully applied for admission to the freshman class. But we are not yet indistinguishable from Yale. For one thing, we are smaller.

Princeton is a university in name only. A university is a place where all types mingle but where the different types can go their own way. You cannot go your own way in Princeton. Or rather, you can, but if you want to, you had better go somewhere else. Princeton is not a university but a college, whose tendency in the last ten years has increasingly been to turn out a more and more dominant type, a type less and less distinguish able from Yale's. I call him the junior executive, and I regard him as a very uninteresting kind of person. The Princeton product may have slightly better manners than his Eli contemporary (softening influence of pastoral surroundings) but I submit that he is approaching complete Elification with the speed of light.

I believe that a university ought to be, and is, an exciting place. I do not think that Princeton is now a very exciting place except to the embryo junior executives. --Alumni Bulletin.