Recently in Alumni News

A New York Times profile of billionaire financier Carl Icahn ’57 asks “Does Icahn still make them tremble?” [New York Times]

Reviewer Douglas Brinkley calls David Remnick ’81’s new biography, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, a “flawlessly written” exploration of the president. [Los Angeles Times]

Sophie LaMontagne ’00, co-owner of the popular D.C. bakery Georgetown Cupcake, will soon co-star in a TLC reality show, Cupcake Sisters. [Politico]

This photograph of Lima at night is one of eight images in a solo exhibition of Carlos Jiménez Cahua ’08’s latest work on exhibit in the James S. Hall ’34 Memorial Gallery at Butler College through April 9.

In this series of photographs, titled Ciudad de los Reyes, Jiménez Cahua explores Peruvians’ relationship to their landscape. The people of Lima “don’t sculpt the land,” he wrote in a statement on his Web site. “The earth remains visible if not nearly unaltered despite their development. … The people of Lima quite literally merely scratch the surface — their relationship to the ground is not one of dominance, but of acquiescence.”

A native of Peru, Jiménez Cahua had his first solo exhibit in New York last summer at Anastasia Photo gallery space. It featured images of towns springing up in and around Lima’s desert landscape.

Alumni Day honorees Gen. David Petraeus *85 *87, Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10, and former Rep. James Leach ’64 posed for this photo at Jadwin Gym after Diemand-Yauman, the Pyne Honor Prize winner, joked with the general about his push-up prowess. “We actually ended up doing only one,” Diemand-Yauman said in an e-mail to PAW. “We didn’t want to push the congressman.” Petraeus is well known for his stamina, and Leach is no stranger to fitness: He was a standout 147-pound wrestler as an undergraduate.

(Photo by Sameer Khan/Courtesy of the Princeton Alumni Association)

By Katy Pinke ’10

Professor David P. Billington ’50, who recently took emeritus status after 50 years of teaching civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, gave a Feb. 20 Alumni Day talk that explored “engineering in politics and history, and engineering as art.”

Billington’s lecture centered on a discussion of structures. “The study of structural engineering is different — but parallel to — the study of architecture,” he explained. As is the case with architecture, “history, politics, and art become integral lenses through which we must look at engineering.”

Billington’s personal views reinforce this interdisciplinary approach. “I see structures as art forms,” he explained, “[and] in the beginning of my career, there was no particular literature for this kind of idea. The teaching of a new idea requires new scholarship, much of which was created at Princeton.” Billington has authored several books using this aesthetically and socially driven approach to structures.

Big day for ’64

On Alumni Day Feb. 20, former Rep. James Leach ’64 received the Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest honor conferred on Princeton undergraduate alumni. But Leach wasn’t the only ’64 honoree: James Madison Medalist Gen. David Petraeus *85 *87 noted that he is an honorary member of the class. He was inducted at Reunions last May, the morning before he delivered the Baccalaureate address for the Class of 2009. Petraeus even brought his orange-and-black plaid ’64 blazer back to campus — though he confessed he had not yet found an occasion to wear it.

Heard on campus

(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)

“The truth is that the surge of ideas was even more important than the surge of forces, though clearly, the increase in forces enabled us to implement the new ideas.”

— Gen. David Petraeus *85 *87, commander of U.S. Central Command, explaining the importance of “big ideas” in the success of the 2007 U.S. troop surge in Iraq.

(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications)

“If 400,000 American soldiers sacrificed their lives to defeat fascism, if tens of thousands gave their lives to hold communists at bay, and if we fought a Civil War to preserve the union, isn’t it a citizen’s obligation to apply perspective to incendiary remarks that once summoned citizens to war? … Asserting that someone who prefers another approach or is a member of a different political party is an advocate of an -ism of hate that encompasses Gulags and concentration camps is out of bounds.”

— James Leach ’64, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, on hyperbolic political rhetoric that includes labeling opponents “fascist” or “communist” and raising the threat of secession.

Three of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture have Princeton ties: A Serious Man was written and directed by Ethan Coen ’79 and his brother Joel (the pair also received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay); The Blind Side is based on a book by Michael Lewis ’82; and Up in the Air is based on a novel by Walter Kirn ’83. [Oscar.com]

Stony Brook University mathematics professor Dennis Sullivan *66 is one of seven winners of the 2010 Wolf Prize in Mathematics, a prestigious award based in Israel. The prize committee selected Sullivan for his innovative contributions to algebraic topology and conformal dynamics. [Jerusalem Post]

Physician and women’s health advocate Donnica Moore ’81 appeared in a January Good Morning America segment about “America’s Dirtiest Hotel Rooms.” [ABC News]

Republican Chris Cox ’01, the son of New York GOP chairman Ed Cox ’68 and grandson of President Richard Nixon, announced Jan. 28 that he is running for Congress in New York’s first congressional district. [FoxNews]

Golf Magazine published a Jan. 18 feature story about Rick Hyde ’75 and Burton Smith ’77, the Ivy League’s first African-American golfers. [Golf.com]

A Jan. 24 New York Times article marked the 35th anniversary of the 1975 NHL All-Star Game, where hockey reporter Robin Herman ’73 became one of the first two women to be granted entry to the locker rooms of a North American pro sports league. [The New York Times]

Click here to view the full image of Francis Nimick’s fall 1910 tuition bill.

Each January, Princeton’s trustees meet to approve the University’s operating budget, including tuition and fees for the coming academic year. According to a Jan. 25 University news release, the total cost of a year at Princeton will be $48,580 in 2010-11.

This announcement reminded us of a recent piece of mail that David Nimick ’46 sent to PAW with the simple message that “things were different 100 years ago!” Attached was a copy of the tuition bill that his father, Francis, Class of 1913, received in August 2010, for the fall semester of his sophomore year. Tuition, room, board, and fees added up to a grand total of $271.25. The full year — less than $550 — converts to about $12,000 in today’s dollars.

Incidentally, the elder Nimick knew something about tuition bills: Five of his sons attended Princeton between 1935 and 1950.

Scores of Princeton alumni have made headlines in government, business, law, arts, entertainment, sports, and other pursuits in 2009. Read our choices for the top newsmakers this year, and add your favorites in the comment section below.

1. Sonia Sotomayor ’76

When Sotomayor was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court Aug. 8, she became the first Hispanic justice and the third woman to serve on the court. She also is the court’s 11th Princeton alum.

2. Eric Schmidt ’76

Google, the undisputed king of search engines and online advertising, is reaching into new markets ranging from mobile-phone apps to online word processing, and Schmidt, the CEO with a computer-science background, has led the way.

If you were gazing out on the New York Harbor over Labor Day Weekend last fall, you might have seen an 85-foot-long ship with large white sails leading a flotilla. The majestic ship was a full-scale replica of the 17th century Dutch ship de Halve Maen, or Half Moon, which Henry Hudson sailed from Holland to the New World in 1609. The man behind the ship’s construction: Andrew Hendricks ’70. About 20 years ago, he spearheaded the building of the Half Moon, which houses the New Netherland Museum that he founded.

Using a Dutch-American crew, the Half Moon sails up and down the East Coast, stopping at festivals and other events, and serving as a floating classroom for Dutch-American history. Touring the vessel, visitors learn about Hudson’s voyage. The New Netherland Museum also sponsors a fourth- and seventh-grade curriculum that is used in the New York school system.

For his efforts promoting Dutch-American relations and Dutch contributions to North American culture, Hendricks was knighted Sept. 7 in a ceremony filled with Dutch and American dignitaries at the Consulate of the Netherlands in New York City. In addition to founding the New Netherland Museum, he established the Hendricks Manuscript Award given annually to the best manuscript on early Dutch-American history.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ’86 explained the best way to read in the bathtub using his company’s Kindle. [New York Times Magazine]

Walter Kirn ’83 and director Jason Reitman discussed the film adaptation of Kirn’s novel Up in the Air. [Studio 360]

At Stanford, Ge Wang *08 turns iPods into instruments in an effort to “push the frontiers of the four-decade-old field of computer music.” [New York Times]

Matt Laurer and Cornel West *80 talked about the Princeton professor’s new autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. [Today Show]

By Martha Vega-Gonzalez ’09

This article, the second of two about the dawn of coeducation at Princeton, is part of an occasional series about Princeton history and the University archives at Mudd Library. Vega-Gonzalez, a recent graduate who majored in history, lives and works in New York City as a freelance writer.

In the first installment about Princeton’s decision to become a coeducational undergraduate college, we saw how certain alumni were scandalized by the University’s change in policy. Director of Development Arthur J. Horton ’42, known to his friends as Jerry, was a voice of dissent from within the University, and as a result, he fielded letters of support from like-minded alumni.

The decision, however, was not universally unpopular, and Horton received and preserved letters from those who did not agree with him as well as letters from those who shared his views (now available at Mudd Library in the Arthur J. Horton Collection on Coeducation). These letters ranged in tone from polite disagreement to open ridicule.

One alumnus, James S. Lane III from the Class of 1961, wrote a good-natured letter to Horton:

Dear Jerry:

Were I not the father of three daughters, I might enthusiastically associate with your well publicized dissent from the Patterson Committee Report. Unlike yourself, however, I shall enjoy the luxury of waiting until 1980 to decide whether young ladies’ presence on the Princeton campus will be as disruptive to their own educations as it was to those of their fathers. I’m also assuming that by then, the Director of Development will have struck oil under Nassau Hall and thereby properly solved the tuition problem caused by the need to properly accommodate all the young lovelies in the proper manner.