Princeton's Latest

One crisp autumn day in 1896, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Professor of Jurisprudence at the College of New Jersey, eloquently addressed a crowd of alumni and visitors who had gathered to witness the formal changing of the institution's title to Princeton University. Professor Wilson solemnly charged his audience to think of the University's destiny as "Princeton in the Nation's Service." Said he:

"It is indispensable, it seems to me, if the University is to do its right service, that the air of affairs should be admitted to all its classrooms. I do not mean the air of party politics, but the air of the world's transactions, the consciousness of the solidarity of the race, the sense of duty of man toward man. . . ."

Last week, at a meeting of the National Alumni Association, Princeton made known that at least one Wilsonian ideal was to be put into actual pedagogical practice. For its new School of Public & International Affairs, the college had already acquired a building, a faculty and a collection of impressive names for its advisory board. An endowment drive for $2,000,000 will get under way soon.

In Dickinson Hall, latest of Princeton's overnight architectural feats, most of the classrooms and administrative offices will be housed. Undergraduates will be required to take certain preliminary courses in Sophomore year to orient them for their upperclass studies, which will be fully under the guidance of the School. Graduate courses will be provided. Operating in conjunction with the new School is the recently endowed Bureau of International Finance, under the direction of famed Professor Edwin Walter Kemmerer, whose succoring of commercially sick nations has taken him to Chile, Colombia, Bolivia. Ecuador, Poland, South Africa.

Graduates will be expected to have "a good working knowledge of at least one foreign language." Not content with book-learned appreciation of foreign affairs, students will go abroad in their upperclass summer vacations to study and observe while living in "homes where only the foreign language is spoken."

In its announcement the School observes: "The outstanding successful men we see at present have acquired such a 'total perspective' in mature years; the practical problem is how to give it to a new generation earlier and at less pains."

Among the members of the advisory board are: John William Davis, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow, Owen D. Young.

Another institution that some Princetonians have long awaited came into existence last week. President John Grier Hibben, in the presence of 1,100 members of the Alumni Association and faculty, accepted from Architect David K. Este Fisher Jr. the keys to the new McCarter Theatre, with the same grace and dignity which he exhibited upon the occasion of the dedication of the $2,000,000 chapel 2 years ago.

The theatre, constructed at a cost of $450,000, is to be the showplace of the Triangle Club (most famed college musical comedy organization), founded in 1893 by Author Booth Tarkington. Annually the club produces and takes on tour a homemade theatrical durbar, written, musicalized and acted by undergraduates fortunate enough to gain club membership. The largest individual donation ($250,000) to the theatre, which rises like a Norman barn in front of the railroad station, came from Thomas Nesbitt McCarter, '88, president of Public Service Corp. of New Jersey. No Triangle mummer himself, the building bears his name.

Although the theatre is primarily built to give the Triangle Club a place in which to rehearse, replacing the cramped town lofts used in recent years, Professor Donald Clive Stuart, popular dramatic pedagog and Triangle director, vaguely intimated that it might become a laboratory for serious theatrical experimentation.

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