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Princeton’s sixth annual Humanities Colloquium on Sept. 12 concluded with a lively discussion of the state of film studies at the University and at large. On the panel were four professors from the departments of German, visual arts, English, and comparative literature – a mix of academic fields that reflects Princeton’s multidisciplinary approach to film studies, in the absence of a dedicated program or department. An undergraduate certificate in film is offered by the visual arts program.

 

In P. Adams Sitney’s view, the deficiency in film studies is especially grim. A renowned scholar of avant-garde cinema, Sitney has taught film at Princeton for 32 years and fought tirelessly both for the recognition of film studies as an autonomous discipline and for the creation of a University film archive on par with those at peer institutions Harvard and Yale. Now Sitney admits that the “fight to maintain film has been lost” — derailed in no small measure by a generation “bred to think they had seen a film when they had looked at their furniture instead.”

 

His comment alluded to a cause celebre within the film community: the ongoing transition from photochemical to digital filmmaking. Today’s films are, almost without exception, produced and projected digitally, stripped of the rich color and grain of traditional celluloid stock. But perhaps more dire than the loss in image quality is the loss in cinematic experience, as films are increasingly seen on the small screen of a computer or smartphone. While digital technology has made filmmaking cheaper and more accessible, empowering the next generation of artists, it has also made filmgoing private and banal.

 

For those reasons, Keith Sanborn called the present “the best of times and the worst of times” for film. Sanborn is a filmmaker and video artist who teaches filmmaking at Princeton. He describes his pedagogical approach as “reinventing the wheel” — that is, “reinventing [students’] consciousness of their position as a historical subject.”

 

Three and a half minutes were left on the clock as host Lehigh prepared to run a third-down play with the game on the line. A conversion would allow the Mountain Hawks, undefeated and ranked 13th in the Football Championship Subdivision, to run more time off the clock and force Princeton to dip into its well of timeouts; a failure would give the Tigers possession with a chance to win the game. Quarterback Michael Colvin dropped back and threw under pressure — but the ball never got near his target, as defensive lineman Caraun Reid ’13 knocked it away at the line of scrimmage.

 

Though he was relatively quiet for parts of Saturday’s game, Reid has plenty of experience making big plays with his big arms. He batted down three passes and also blocked three kicks last season. He’s also rather adept at using the rest of his body. He recorded eight sacks and 16 tackles for losses in 2011 en route to first-team All-Ivy honors.

 

Here’s the scary part for the rest of the league: That wasn’t even Reid at his best. After missing the final nine games of the 2010 season with a pectoral injury, he had surgery in the off-season, which limited his ability to practice and bench-press that summer. Reid felt the effects throughout the season, but it didn’t show in his play. “I was expecting to have a good season, but not to the extent I had last year,” he says. “It was surprising, because I thought I was really weak.”

 

In many ways, Reid doesn’t look like a football player off the field. He dresses well, wears glasses, and is a member of the a cappella group Old NasSoul. But his size is a giveaway — after putting on 20 pounds with a full off-season of lifting, the defensive tackle stands at 6 feet, 2 inches, and 300 pounds — an intimidating figure for opposing linemen.

 

Reid isn’t the only standout senior in the Tigers’ front seven, which looks like Princeton’s biggest strength at this stage. Defensive end Mike Catapano ’13 and linebacker Andrew Starks ’13, the two defensive captains, also have earned all-Ivy recognition in the past. The defense led Princeton’s second-half resurgence Saturday, stopping Lehigh on several other third-down plays and holding the hosts scoreless after halftime.

 

The Tigers’ offense also turned its fortunes around in the second half. Connor Michelsen ’15 was named the starting quarterback — which he knew on Monday but the rest of us didn’t learn until game time — and played all but two series under center, hitting some receivers and overthrowing some others. Running back Akil Sharp ’13 was quiet in the first half, but he eventually found his stride, scoring Princeton’s first touchdown with an impressive 13-yard scamper and fighting for a second score from one yard out.

 

The Princeton entrepreneurship lab (or eLab) hosted its inaugural demo day Aug. 15, showcasing startups founded by Princeton students. The presentations were the culmination of 10 weeks spent in the Keller Center’s new startup incubator, which grants summer fellowships for Princeton students to found companies under the guidance of professors and local entrepreneurs.

 

This summer’s startups included two social entrepreneurship ventures — one aimed at the Kenyan job market and another designed to incentivize academic achievement for at-risk children — as well as a new web library and a digital marketplace.

 

The eLab incubator funds students to stay at Princeton over the summer while they build businesses. Cornelia Huellstrunk, associate director of the Keller Center and administrator of the eLab program, explained that creating a community of entrepreneurs was critical to developing eLab’s first group of startups. Sharing work space, collaborating with peers, and participating in entrepreneurial training “gave students a unique opportunity to develop their ventures,” Huellstrunk said.

 

The summer eLab program is an offshoot of recent demand on campus for a stronger culture of entrepreneurism. For Duma, a text-message based job placement service in Kenya, the summer at eLab was the culmination of a plan that hatched at a Princeton hackathon — a kind of 24-hour jumpstart event designed to expose budding entrepreneurs to industry mentors.

 

Duma cofounder Arielle Sandor ’12 explained that the long-term, highly specialized mentorship eLab participants received distinguished it from the more informal hackathon setting. “Hackathons are short and you get the minimum viable product out, and don’t really focus on business model,” said Sandor. Over the summer, Sandor explained, eLab offered “a very different kind of mentorship — much more holistic.”

 

 

Nothing seems more out of place in Bangkok than a 20-year-old Chinese American female toting a Canon 60D video camera and looking to make an artistic documentary about Thailand’s transgender individuals.

 

But two months later — with nearly 80 gigabytes of film footage, dozens of bilingual interviews, and a preview trailer on YouTube — I’m attempting to do precisely that.

 

I first became aware of the Thai community of “ladyboys,” who are born male but look like and live as females, when I visited Thailand last summer on vacation. I work closely with the LGBT community in America, including at Princeton’s LGBT Center, but until Thailand, I had never seen such open and prominent instances of Asian gender fluidity before, especially not in my native China. I wanted to explore whether our journeys through understanding our bodies and our place in the world were similar, and whether Thailand was really the safe haven for sexual diversity that it appeared to be.

 

 

While many Princeton students associate coffee with Dean’s Date and Friday-morning precepts, Greta Shum’ 14 is spending her summer studying the beverage across the Atlantic – not as an antidote to sleep deprivation, but as a rich tradition steeped in artistry and rituals.

 

Armed with a Martin A. Dale ’53 Summer Award and the German language proficiency she picked up in her first two years at Princeton, Shum left for Vienna June 7 to observe and write about the historic coffee house culture of Vienna. She has visited over 30 coffee houses so far, and hopes to profile each one.

 

“I brought three notebooks to Vienna and filled all of them in the first month,” she said, noting that she has talked to waiters, tourists, and other coffee lovers to get a stronger feel for the coffee-house culture. Coffee houses became something of a “salon culture” in the area after being brought by foreigners from Turkey and Italy, according to Shum. In Vienna, sitting down with a newspaper and a cup of coffee in a coffee house is standard practice for many. The establishments typically are very elegant, with newspapers available in holders and well-dressed waiters. “People here have developed a very interesting sort of ‘snobbery’ about it the way they have about wine,” said Shum, who is herself slowly learning the difference between “good” and “bad” coffee with the aid of a course at a barista school.

 

 

Having grown up reading stories like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jackson Dobies ’14 always had wanted to raft on the Mississippi River with his brother, Justin. In March 2012, he received a Martin A. Dale ’53 Summer Award that would finally let him do it.

 

“To find out I was getting $4,000 to do something completely outrageous was so cool, and completely ridiculous,” he said.

 

Dobies’ summer adventure, which he describes as “a kind of Huckleberry Finn old American adventure where we get away from technology and live on the river, cook our own meals and totally support ourselves,” began June 22. Dobies and his brother spent three weeks before the start of the trip constructing a 24-by-8-foot raft from a pontoon boat built in the 1970s (purchased for $4,000). The raft is made up of “two huge 24-foot tubes with a flat deck on top,” according to Dobies.

 

Exactly one week before Bob Dylan’s 71st birthday, students in AMS 332: Bob Dylan celebrated the end of the semester with a field trip to Greenwich Village. Professor Sean Wilentz led the tour, making stops at the Kettle of Fish bar, Cafe Wha?, and the Washington Square Hotel, among other famous Dylan haunts. The last stop on the tour was the site of the Eighth Street Bookshop, once owned by Wilentz’s father. “I still get the spooks when I come here,” said Wilentz. “New York changes, but it never changes all that much.”

 

For Wilentz, the class was a return not only to his personal roots but also to the subject of his bestselling book, Bob Dylan in America. Wilentz saw the book as an “exploration,” which renewed his interest in the singer and inspired him to create the seminar through Princeton’s Program in American Studies. The program’s multidisciplinary approach lent itself particularly well to a study of the musical magpie. “It allows people to come together who speak in different idioms,” said Wilentz.

 

The seminar embraced a variety of genres and periods in Dylan’s career. Each week consisted of extensive listening in addition to biographical, historical, and literary studies. The class “started off with a bang” — the electric controversy of 1965 — then progressed chronologically from Dylan’s formative folk years, through his dabblings in rock, country, gospel, and other styles, to the present. Wilentz made a conscious effort to transcend the conventional image of Dylan as a protest singer — “the young man with the guitar and harmonica singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’” The syllabus encompassed some of Dylan’s more recent work, including tracks from his so-called Christian period in the 1980s, his 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous, and his latest album, Christmas in the Heart.

 

As six boats traveled 2,000 meters in the men’s heavyweight grand final of the Eastern Sprints on Sunday, Harvard opened up a sizeable lead on most of its competitors – not a surprise, considering the Crimson eight was undefeated on the year and had won the last two Sprints titles. The surprise was that Brown would not fall off of the pace. Brown – which had lost three of its six races this season, including one against Harvard – edged the Crimson by 0.3 seconds, taking the Sprints title and surprising many rowing enthusiasts.

 

As a Princeton sports junkie, I was captivated by this result as well, though for a slightly different reason: Brown’s victory denied Harvard the Ivy League heavyweight rowing title. With wins in Sunday’s other races, men’s lightweight and women’s crew, Harvard increased its conference championship count to 10. One more title – say, in men’s heavyweight crew – and the Crimson would have had 11, topping Princeton.

 

But the Bears pulled off the upset, and Harvard finished with 10 championships, tied with the Tigers. It wasn’t quite the dominant performance of last year – when Princeton claimed 15 titles and nobody else had more than seven – but if finishing first in 30 percent of sports marks a decline, the athletic department is in pretty strong shape. (The rest of this year’s list: Cornell 6, Yale 3, Brown 2, Penn 2, Dartmouth 1, Columbia 1.)

 

Three of this year’s titles, in fact, came in sports that were not among last season’s 15: men’s fencing, men’s squash, and men’s lacrosse. In other words, Princeton won at least one championship over the last two years in more than half of the 33 Ivy League sports. (And remember that these standings do not include non-championship sports such as men’s and women’s water polo, in which the Tigers reached the NCAA Championships this season.)

 

Princeton will sit atop the unofficial all-sports standings for a 26th straight year, though Harvard will make it much closer than usual (less than 10 points, if my math is correct). To make a run like that, which started before I was born, a program needs a deep base of talent across all teams. Here is the complete list of Ivy League sports in which Princeton teams finished last this year: football (tied with Columbia, which the Tigers beat) and wrestling (tied with Harvard, which the Tigers beat).

 

In his second State of the Union address, Abraham Lincoln said, “We can succeed only by concert. It is not, ‘Can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘Can we all do better?’” This line inspired former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley ’65 to write his seventh book, We Can All Do Better, which he introduced to an audience of nearly 200 in McCosh Hall May 9 on the first stop of his national book tour.

 

Bradley, a onetime presidential hopeful who now serves as a managing director at the investment firm Allen & Company, wrote the book out of frustration with America’s current political gridlock in the face of overseas war and economic difficulty, exemplified by the debt limit debacle in Washington last summer.

 

“When you look and see the fragility and inequality of our economy, if you see the direction of our foreign policy, if you see the paralysis in our national dialogue, it’s relevant — can we all do better?” he said. Bradley also emphasized personal responsibility, asking, “Can each of us do better? Can we find that part of ourselves that honors the selfless and project it into the world we live?”

 

Bradley, a history major at Princeton, relied heavily on U.S. history to create practical, cautiously optimistic recommendations in three areas — the economy, U.S. foreign policy, and domestic political institutions.

 

The 2011-12 season was a charmed one for the men’s track and field team. Princeton shattered numerous program and Ivy League records and cracked the national top 10 in cross country en route to Heptagonal championships in the fall and winter seasons. In the context of this success, as well as Princeton’s No. 24 national ranking in the outdoor season (the next Ivy League team, Cornell, was ranked 59th), one could have thought that the final leg of an Ivy League triple crown was just a formality.

 

But records and rankings are determined by a handful of top runners. Heptagonals is a two-day, team-wide marathon with 22 different events. Having star athletes capable of winning events is certainly a boost, but Ivy League track championships are often determined by which team has more finishers in second, third, and fourth place. Heading into this weekend’s championships, HepsTrack.com actually projected Cornell to win a close competition.

 

Instead, Princeton secured its second straight triple crown with plenty of room to spare, collecting 193 points to Cornell’s 161.75. After winning the last six Ivy League championships, the men’s track and cross country teams are at their highest point since the turn of the century, when they won three straight triple crowns from 1998-2000.

 

Certainly, many of Princeton’s top athletes performed to their billing at Penn’s Franklin Field this weekend. Donn Cabral ’12 won the 10,000-meter race and hammered the field in the steeplechase, while Conor McCullough ’15 outdistanced his competition by 40 feet in the hammer throw, joining three other Tigers as individual champions.

 

The women’s lacrosse team has had its share of highs and lows in recent seasons. But the Tigers certainly do not back down from pressure – in several must-win situations over the last three years, Princeton has played its best games.

 

Entering the final game of the 2010 regular season, the Tigers had lost three straight games by a combined 16 goals, but they beat Dartmouth – which was ranked in the top 10 nationally – in overtime to qualify for the inaugural Ivy League Tournament. Last season, Princeton toppled Penn in Philadelphia before beating Harvard to win the conference tournament, snatching the automatic bid for NCAAs; the Tigers then extended their season once more with an 11-10 victory over James Madison in the first round.

 

And on Saturday, when a loss would have knocked Princeton out of postseason contention, the Tigers handed No. 8 Dartmouth its first Ivy League loss of the season with a 12-9 victory at Class of 1952 Stadium.

 

“We knew we had to win this game … but the one thing we didn’t want to do was to come in thinking that we had to win and focusing on the negative aspects of it,” said midfielder Cassie Pyle ’12, who scored four goals. “We wanted to think of how big an opportunity it was for us. I think that mindset was really what kept us so calm throughout the game.”

 

How does science inform public policy? Can regulating science undermine essential human values?

 

On April 13 and 14, 22 scholars and writers, including prominent physicist Freeman Dyson and former University president Harold Shapiro *64, sought to answer these questions in a public conference on “Governing Science: Technological Progress, Ethical Norms, and Democracy,” hosted by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

 

Participants and conference attendees discussed the role science plays in the “elevation” and “reduction” of man, the abuses and limits of science, and how to govern science ethically in a democratic republic.

 

The conference concluded with a panel discussion headed by Robert P. George, founder of the James Madison Program and the McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence, featuring Shapiro and Donald W. Landry, a professor of medicine at Columbia University.

 

The panelists examined the importance of trust in governing science and discussed questions from George and the audience about the ethics behind government grants; politicization and globalization of science in issues such as climate change; science education; and the role of government science councils such as the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which Shapiro chaired from 1996 to 2001.

 

Shapiro remained optimistic about science education and the level of support research has from the government, foundations, and universities, calling it a “miracle” that American society invests as much as it does in scholarship.

 

Ultimately, the panelists concluded, the greatest challenge in governing science might lie in the very fact that scientific thought is constantly changing. 

 

“Something that puzzles me is people’s unwillingness to accept the uncertainty of our condition,” Shapiro said. “Part of life is to learn to deal with that uncertainty.”