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Political secrets that could lead to illegal or catastrophic actions must be revealed, no matter the personal cost, Daniel Ellsberg told a capacity audience in Dodds Auditorium March 8.

 

Ellsberg, who in 1971 released the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, was interviewed by Bart Gellman ’82, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a visiting lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School. Together, they discussed the implications of leaking political secrets and the parallels between the Pentagon Papers and WikiLeaks.

 

“I identify very much with Bradley Manning,” said Ellsberg of the Army intelligence analyst who faces a court-martial on charges of obtaining secret war logs and State Department cables about Afghanistan and Iraq that subsequently were released by WikiLeaks. “Despite the stress of his position, he did the right thing.”

 

Ellsberg emphasized the importance of public employees leaking such information, highlighting situations in which it is necessary, such as government misrepresentations of the truth.

 

“[If] the effect of the lies is to get us into not just a war but a disastrous, unjust war,” he said, “that’s when they should consider giving up their job, clearance, career, and perhaps their marriage and their children’s education.”

In a candid and entertaining talk focused on college students and stress, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the talk-show host, surgeon, and author, addressed a packed McCosh 50 on March 8 as part of the student-organized Mental Health Awareness Week on campus.

 

Saying he “knows what Princeton life is like” because he is a Princeton parent (daughter Daphne graduated in 2008) and has a niece who is currently a junior, Dr. Oz added a rock-star quality to the event. Using video clips, slides, and demonstrations to illustrate his points (instructing the audience in deep-breathing techniques, for example), he rapidly touched on many aspects of mental and physical health.

 

We are living in a society in which we are disconnected from each other, Oz said, insisting that we need to recreate connections in our daily lives. “When good people see bad things happen and do nothing, that’s when societies dissolve,” he added.

 

“The best example of mental illness in this country,” according to Dr. Oz, is our “weight issue,” which he connected to chronic stress. Calling obesity the “main health care cost we can change,” he explained how a person’s waist-to-height ratio is the best indicator of a weight problem, pulling down his belt and puffing out his belly to create a big gut.

Bob Garfield, co-host of the syndicated public radio show On the Media, compared his professional role to that of a toaster oven in a March 5 speech at the Woodrow Wilson School: “useful, but largely obsoleted by technology” in an era where every blogger can wear the hat of media critic. But Garfield added that he has company. Major media institutions like NBC, The Washington Post, and the radio giant Clear Channel are beginning to take on the same a toaster-oven quality, he said.

 

The digital revolution has fragmented media and trivialized the barriers to entry, Garfield said. A costly network of affiliates used to be an advantage for broadcast television channels because it kept competitors out of the business, but as the costs of production and distribution have dropped, being big has become a significant burden.

 

Garfield, who also writes a column for Advertising Age, pinned a large part of the blame on the disintegrating relationship between media and marketing, once the “yin and yang” that made TV and newspapers profitable.

 

“For more than three centuries, consumers have put up with ads as part of the deal, the quid pro quo, the unspoken contract that provided us all with free or subsidized content in exchange for having to sit through 20 years of Mr. Whipple fondling toilet paper,” he said. “To most people, all advertising is spam.”

Economist Christina Paxson, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, will become the president of Brown University in July. She succeeds Ruth Simmons, who was an administrator at Princeton for a decade.

 

“The search committee at Brown University has made a truly inspired choice for its 19th president, although it means that Princeton will lose one of its most distinguished faculty members and effective academic administrators,” President Tilghman said.

 

Dean since 2009, Paxson has led the Wilson School though a period of significant change. Selective admission to the school will end next year as major changes in the undergraduate curriculum take effect.

 

Paxson, a professor of economics and public affairs at the University for 26 years, said she was grateful for “incredible opportunities to develop as a teacher, scholar, and administrator.” Her recent research has focused on economic status and health outcomes over the life course, especially on the health and welfare of children. In 2000 she founded the Center for Health and Wellbeing, a research center in the Wilson School.

 

“I am drawn to Brown’s distinctive approach to education and scholarship, with its emphasis on intellectual independence and free inquiry,” she said.

 

Big changes for new Wilson School majors OK’d by faculty (March 7, 2012, issue)

Wilson School to end selectivity for major (May 11, 2011, issue)

A moment with Dean Christina Paxson (Sept. 23, 2009, issue)

 

On the Thursday before Valentine’s Day, the upper galleries of the Princeton University Art Museum showcased original works of Princeton students in a different medium. Surrounded by oil paintings, Ben Taub ’13 crooned, “You don’t know what love is, until you know the meaning of the blues,” as Eric Weiser ’13 accompanied on his double bass.

 

Their performance was one of 10 at the third annual “Failed Love: heARTbroken” event. “Broken heart? Great art,” was the slogan of the night. The performers’ original songs and poetry – plus an assortment of pastries and heart-shaped cookies – drew an audience of about 20 students.

 

“In honor of failed love, I’m going to play some songs from a time full of that,” said Caroline Reese ’14, who played an acoustic guitar as she sang. This was Reese’s second time performing at the event: “There’s something really special about singing in a place [where] you can usually hear a pin drop,” she said.

 

Failed love isn’t always a downer, however. Some performers brought humor to the stage. The audience tittered when Mark Watter ’14 strummed his electric guitar and sang, “I don’t have the sex life to find someone new,” a line from his song “Horse.” Arielle Sandor ’12 began her poem, “Something About Trust,” by musing, “Maybe it’s the tooth fairy’s fault.”

Princeton doesn’t often pit members of different class years against one another, and when it does, the contest usually involves a grassy tumble for a cane on Poe Field.

 

The Whig Senate Chamber hosted a more civilized alternative to Cane Spree Feb. 25: the Class of 1876 Prize Debate. Four students, James Hao ’12, Evan Larson ’13, Anthony Paranzino ’14, and Aaron Hauptman ’15, competed for the historic prize, established in 1886.

 

The debate, held annually on Alumni Day, pairs a senior and a freshman to debate against a junior and sophomore team. The four were selected as the top debaters in their respective class years from a pool of 25 students who competed in preliminary rounds. Based on the strength of the preliminary competition, Chelsea Ayres ’12, chairwoman of the Woodrow Wilson Honorary Debate Panel, introduced the four as “the best their class has to offer.”

 

With notes in hand, the two teams faced off across an intricately carved table in the center of the Senate Chamber. Students, alumni, and parents were seated around the debaters, with the judges, Ayres, Benjamin Weisman ’11, and Jason Anton ’10, poised at the chamber’s main podium.

 

Scholar and international affairs expert Joseph S. Nye Jr. ’58 spoke to packed audiences in Robertson Hall Feb. 21 and 22, discussing American presidential leadership in foreign policy as part of the 2012 Richard Ullman Lecture Series.

 

Nye, a former dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, worked with collaborator (and current Princeton professor) Robert Keohane to develop the theory of neoliberalism in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. He also has held posts that included chairman of the National Intelligence Council in 1993-94 and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Clinton administration.

 

Nye's first lecture focused on the efficacy of seven presidents who presided over what Nye called the “American era.” He separated the definition of leadership into two categories — style and objectives — with two subtypes each. Leaders, he said, can have inspirational or transactional styles and transformational or incremental objectives.

 

According to Nye, the differences between broadly transformational and transactional leadership can also be described in terms of “soft power” and “hard power,” with the ideal mix of the two being “smart power,” which uses “contextual IQ” to combine resources and understand the situation.

Each of Alumni Day’s top honorees dreamed of becoming doctors, they said in campus addresses Feb. 25, but FBI director Robert Mueller III ’66 and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson *86 ended up on very different paths. Each talked about how formative experiences at Princeton and elsewhere reshaped their career paths and led to their leadership of government agencies.

 

For Mueller, the Woodrow Wilson Award winner, a difficult Princeton class on organic chemistry derailed his plans for a medical career, he said in remarks in Richardson Auditorium. He earned his bachelor’s degree in politics instead. But it was the death of David Hackett ’65 on a Vietnam battlefield that helped set Mueller on the path to public service, he explained. Hackett and Mueller played together on Princeton’s lacrosse team.

 

“One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps. But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be,” Mueller said. “And a number of his friends, teammates, and associates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I. … He taught us the true meaning of leadership. One teammate can change your life. And David Hackett changed mine.” 

 

Jackson, who won the James Madison Medal, spoke about being one of the few women in Princeton’s chemical engineering graduate program, from which she earned a master’s degree in 1986. Her interest in science and math, she said, began with a calculator that she received at an engineering summer camp, and was fueled by attending an all-girls’ high school. “The qualities that have traditionally discouraged young women from pursuing science — that we are not interested in a cold and hard and disconnected discipline — are a misrepresentation of both women and science,” she said.

 

She initially wanted to be a doctor “because I wanted to help people by treating them when they got sick. I came to realize that if I studied chemical engineering, and started working to protect our environment, I could help people by making sure they didn’t get sick in the first place.” Studying at Princeton “set the trajectory for my entire life. This university is where I had the opportunity to fully immerse myself in what became one of the greatest passions of my life — the exploration of science.”

 

 

 

 

Answering a reporter’s questions in the White House Rose Garden last year, Michelle Shearer ’95 spoke of the need to “elevate the teaching profession.” Teachers, she said, are not adequately recognized for their service, and the teaching profession is looked down on as a lesser calling, for smart people who just didn’t have what it take in areas like medicine or business.

 

Shearer has been rising above those preconceived notions since she first set out to become a teacher. A pre-medical student early in her Princeton career, Shearer volunteered at Trenton’s Marie Katzenbach School for the Deaf and eventually decided that teaching — not medicine — was her life’s passion. Since then her biography has included stops at the Maryland School for the Deaf, where she taught advanced placement chemistry, and at a Maryland public high school, where she taught chemistry in the international baccalaureate program.

 

Last May, Shearer was honored at the White House as the National Teacher of the Year, and since then, she has traveled throughout the United States and to China and Japan, speaking about how to improve the standard of education around the world. On Feb. 21, she spoke to a group of students, alumni, and faculty from Princeton’s Program in Teacher Preparation on what it meant for her to pursue K-12 teaching at a time when her classmates at Princeton were preparing for law school, medical school, or business.

The final project for VIS 261 comes with only one guideline: a five-minute time limit. This fall, eight students in Introductory Video and Film Production wrote and directed their own short films, under the guidance of professor Keith Sanborn. A screening of the students' work was held at the Lewis Center for the Arts on Tuesday night.

According to Sanborn, the class is not so much about technical skills as it is about “learning how to see.” “I want students to get in touch with their own imaginations,” he said. They practice the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process, including lighting, camerawork, and sound editing, but they are encouraged to “take what they need” and “find their way.”

Judging by the diverse showing, Sanborn's students took that message to heart. Their short films encompassed a wide range of styles, from photo montage to documentary to point-of-view cinematography.

Rivka Cohen '12 offered a heartfelt paean to home and friendship with her film, “This Is NOT a House,” set in her West Virginia backyard. Agisae Kim '15 tackled everyday “insincerity” in “This Is You,” which featured subtitles revealing the inner thoughts of characters as they spoke.

Music professor Steven Mackey and collaborators Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird won the 2011 Grammy for Best Small Ensemble Performance. The collective’s 11-track album, Lonely Motel: Music from “Slide,” was nominated in four categories, including a Best Contemporary Composition nod for Mackey. Drawn from a music theater piece that premiered at the 2009 Ojai (Calif.) Music Festival, the album features Mackey on electric guitar, Eckert on vocals, and the new-age sextet eighth blackbird on instrumentals.

 

Mackey, the chairman of the University’s music department, began his musical career as a rock guitarist and has composed music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance, and opera. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1985.

 

Below, listen to a brief excerpt from Lonely Motel: Music from “Slide.”