Category Archives: Publicity and Campaigns

“Princeton: A Search for Answers,” 1973

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Dur­ing a morn­ing ses­sion of the President’s Con­fer­ence in the early 1970s, a mem­ber of the stu­dent panel told the assem­bled alumni that she had come to Prince­ton “not to find a way of mak­ing a liv­ing, but instead to find a way of mak­ing a life.” Film­mak­ers Julian Krainin and DeWitt Sage used this state­ment in their pro­posal in 1972 for a new recruit­ment film for Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity. “It seems that it should be the respon­si­bil­ity of a great uni­ver­sity not so much to answer the ques­tion of how to “make a life,” but to present the stu­dent with at least the tools and courage with which he or she might dis­cover the answer.”

The result­ing film Prince­ton: A Search for Answers won an Oscar  in 1974 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject. Film pro­ducer and direc­tor Joshua Logan ’31, who had started his stage writ­ing and direct­ing career in Princeton’s Tri­an­gle Club, was one of the first to see it. “I not only believe that it is a mov­ing, funny, and stim­u­lat­ing account of a Uni­ver­sity I once knew but had almost for­got­ten,”  he wrote to his fel­low mem­bers of the Acad­emy. “It tells about the gleam that flits across the human mind and gives us all some­thing to hope for, to live for. It makes the human race quite a bit more respectable then (sic) we have recently thought it to be.” The film which has recently been remas­tered (2013) is fea­tured here.

In order to write the film treat­ment and script, Dewitt Sage spent sev­eral months on cam­pus, attend­ing classes and sem­i­nars, and talk­ing with stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff. Once the film treat­ment was approved, Julian Krainin took over to super­vise the actual cam­era work. Dur­ing 1972 and early 1973 four­teen and a half hours of 16mm color footage was shot for the thirty minute film. The out­takes are kept in the Uni­ver­sity Archives. To accom­pany the film, the Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­duced a hand­some brochure with quotes and infor­ma­tion about the fac­ulty fea­tured (see SearchForAnswers.pdf).

As already sug­gested by the title, the film’s main empha­sis is on edu­ca­tion, schol­ar­ship, and student-instructor rela­tions. The film includes footage of tuto­ri­als and lec­tures by physics pro­fes­sor and Dean of the Fac­ulty Aaron Lemon­ick (1:50, 9:11), and pro­fes­sors Edward Cone (Music, 3:01, 29:48), John Wheeler (Physics 7:05), Daniel Seltzer (Eng­lish, 12:39), and Ann Dou­glas Wood (Eng­lish, 25:02). Wheeler is filmed dur­ing a lec­ture about the impli­ca­tions of black holes (he is cred­ited with coin­ing the phrase in 1967), while Dan Seltzer teaches a Shake­speare act­ing class and lec­tures about Henry IV (Part 2). Addi­tional footage fea­tures Prince­ton pres­i­dent William Bowen dur­ing a ques­tion and answer ses­sion with alumni and under­grad­u­ates (9:55, 26:11, 27:49) and the work of two grad­u­ate stu­dents: Niall O’Murchadha (Physics, 5:10, 26:51) and Maury Wolfe (Archi­tec­ture, 16:11).

Pro­duced only a few years after the intro­duc­tion of co-education in 1969, at a time when diver­si­fi­ca­tion of the stu­dent body was a pri­or­ity for Prince­ton, women and African Amer­i­can stu­dents fea­ture promi­nently in cam­pus scenes (9:40, 20:56, 24:36) and in the class rooms. There is lit­tle empha­sis in the film on extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. In addi­tion to footage of the Glee Club singing Bach in Alexan­der Hall (directed by Pro­fes­sor of Music Wal­ter Noll­ner, 17:47), sport scenes are lim­ited to marathon run­ning and row­ing (23:25). Addi­tional footage includes stu­dents shar­ing their views of Prince­ton in a pub (19:45, the legal drink­ing age was still eigh­teen!) Some his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs and footage is shown at 22:27, includ­ing a frag­ment of a chem­istry lec­ture by the famous Hubert Alyea (pre­vi­ously fea­tured) and the Tri­an­gle Club.

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Residential Colleges and Wu Hall

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In this short video from around 1983, Pres­i­dent Bowen dis­cusses Wu Hall, the then-new din­ing facil­ity for But­ler College. The video high­lights three ele­ments that played increas­ingly sig­nif­i­cant roles in shap­ing Prince­ton over the fol­low­ing decades: the sup­port of alum­nus Gor­don Wu, the res­i­den­tial col­leges sys­tem, and the archi­tec­ture of alum­nus Robert Venturi.

We don’t know the exact pur­pose for which this video was cre­ated, but it may have been part of the pro­mo­tional mate­r­ial for A Cam­paign for Prince­ton, the fundrais­ing cam­paign that offi­cially ran from 1982 to 1986. As pre­vi­ously dis­cussed on this blog, A Cam­paign for Prince­tonwas enor­mously suc­cess­ful, bring­ing in an aver­age of $1,000,000 per week at its height.The Sup­port of Gor­don Wu ’58

In 1981, before the cam­paign even offi­cially began, alum­nus Gor­don Y.S. Wu donated $1,000,000 to it. Wu earned a Bachelor’s of Sci­ence in Engi­neer­ing from Prince­ton in 1958 and sub­se­quently returned to his native Hong Kong. There, he founded Hopewell Hold­ings, a firm whose notable projects have included high­ways, hotels, rail­roads and power plants through­out Asia. Wu has been described as one of the wealth­i­est busi­ness­men in Hong Kong and as one of the most influ­en­tial engi­neers and busi­ness­men in the world.
As A Cam­paign for Prince­ton was offi­cially being launched in 1982, Prince­ton announced that Wu had donated an addi­tional 25 mil­lion Hong Kong dol­lars in honor of his class’s upcom­ing 25th anniver­sary reunion. The funds, then equal to approx­i­mately USD $4.3 mil­lion, were used pri­mar­ily to con­struct a din­ing facil­ity for the then-new But­ler College.
As gen­er­ous as these dona­tions were, they rep­re­sented only a small frac­tion of what was to come. In 1995, Wu made a his­toric pledge to the With One Accord fundrais­ing cam­paign, which was held as part of the University’s 250th anniver­sary. That year, Wu pledged to donate USD $100 mil­lion, the largest gift ever by a for­eigner to a U.S. uni­ver­sity, with the last pay­ment sched­uled to coin­cide with his class’ 50th anniver­sary reunion in 2008. Wu is cur­rently serv­ing as a Trustee of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, with a term end­ing in 2012.
BowenWuHall.jpg

The Vision of William Bowen *58

Although dwarfed in mag­ni­tude by his later dona­tions, Wu’s 1982 dona­tion has impacted the lives of lit­er­ally thou­sands of Prince­to­ni­ans. It gave phys­i­cal form to Pres­i­dent Bowen’s aspi­ra­tions for the res­i­den­tial col­lege sys­tem, which has defined the Prince­ton under­grad­u­ate expe­ri­ence for every class since.
Pres­i­dent Bowen (right) formed the Com­mit­tee on Under­grad­u­ate Res­i­den­tial Life (CURL) in 1978. Made up of admin­is­tra­tors, fac­ulty and stu­dents, the com­mit­tee was charged with address­ing the inter­twined issues of Prince­ton stu­dent hous­ing, din­ing and social­iza­tion. Although some of the pro­pos­als in the committee’s final report – par­tic­u­larly those relat­ing to eat­ing clubs – did not come to pass, its pri­mary pro­posal, the estab­lish­ment of three new res­i­den­tial col­leges, came to fruition within a few short years.
Two of the three new col­leges, Rock­e­feller and Mathey, were estab­lished in extant build­ings in Princeton’s tra­di­tional col­le­giate gothic style. But­ler Col­lege, how­ever, was housed in the “New New Quad,” which the Daily Prince­ton­ian defined for incom­ing fresh­man as, “Group of five newer dorms located on the lower-lower cam­pus, fondly known as “The Sticks,” “New New World,” or “Brave New Quad.””
The con­struc­tion of Wu Hall trans­formed this “group of dorms” into a true res­i­den­tial col­lege. As the first Mas­ter of But­ler Col­lege, Emory Elliot, said near the end of the first semes­ter that Wu Hall was open, “It’s enabled the spirit of the col­lege to come into full blos­som.” He also described the new servery and din­ing facil­ity as hav­ing a “friendly atmos­phere con­ducive to hav­ing peo­ple come together.” Footage about But­ler Col­lege and Wu Hall after the 2009 ren­o­va­tions can be found here.

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Dean Fred Hargadon on Princeton admissions, circa 1990

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Today’s post was writ­ten by Lisa Dunk­ley ’83, Project Ana­lyst at the Office of Devel­op­ment, who worked under Fred Har­gadon from 1988 to 1994.

“Yes!”  Those of us who knew, or knew of, Dean Fred Har­gadon can­not hear that excla­ma­tion with­out think­ing about the blunt, wel­come way suc­cess­ful Prince­ton appli­cants (and Stan­ford stu­dents before them) learned their admis­sion results.  The phrase became so strongly iden­ti­fied with him that Har­gadon Hall, the Whit­man Col­lege dor­mi­tory that was an hon­orific gift from sev­eral anony­mous alumni, has the word engraved in stone at the build­ing entrance.  The sim­plic­ity of the mes­sage belied the long hours and deep expe­ri­ence that led to those decisions.

I worked in Princeton’s under­grad­u­ate admis­sion office from 1988 to 1994, and was one of the first three peo­ple the Dean hired. I first met Fred at my interview—he is a tall, unas­sum­ing and often endear­ingly rum­pled man. I was work­ing in book pub­lish­ing, and he is a vora­cious reader. We talked at length and with ease about books, and on occa­sion he would inter­ject a question. I was a lit­tle tense, wait­ing for the “real” inter­view to begin. After about 45 min­utes or so Fred stood and thanked me for com­ing: that was the inter­view. In ret­ro­spect I was impressed at how my answers revealed much more than I real­ized, an expe­ri­ence I found as dis­con­cert­ing as it was fascinating. When Fred offered me the job a few weeks later, there was only one answer: Yes!

An admis­sion neo­phyte, I was clue­less about how dif­fer­ently the office oper­ated under his watch com­pared to his pre­de­ces­sors, but I didn’t par­tic­u­larly care. Fred’s approach seemed right to me: admis­sion was all about the appli­cant: our respon­si­bil­ity was to pay very sharp atten­tion to all details and to make the play­ing field as even as pos­si­ble for every­one, from the child of itin­er­ant migrant farm work­ers to the off­spring of roy­alty, both real and conferred. Our job was to ren­der a rea­soned opin­ion about how well each stu­dent took advan­tage of what­ever resources were at his or her disposal. “Children don’t choose where they grow up,” he once told me.

Fred was very open about how he ran the annual process and dis­cussed it with audi­ences on many occa­sions over the years (of which this video­tape is one). When he was asked how he man­aged to bal­ance all of the com­pet­ing inter­ests at play in each year’s appli­cant group—a fre­quent question—he said that his goal was to leave every spe­cial inter­est group only slightly unhappy.
Staff train­ing was unlike any­thing I’d known before. During the admis­sion sea­son, “first read­ers” like me passed our fold­ers to more senior officers. Later we would review the finer obser­va­tions they had added to our sum­maries: it was the best kind of one-on-one tutor­ing we could have. Summers are tra­di­tion­ally slow in admis­sion, when most of us either meet with cam­pus vis­i­tors or take vacation. In this “off sea­son,” Fred’s strong pref­er­ence was for us to read books of all kinds. He had a list of rec­om­men­da­tions (from On Excel­lence to The Phan­tom Toll­booth), but there was sound rea­son­ing behind this exer­cise: it was our respon­si­bil­ity to have a wide, deep and flex­i­ble vocab­u­lary to describe each appli­cant with as much accu­racy as pos­si­ble. “There is a right word for every­thing,” he told us.

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A lesson for fundraisers: the solicitation process for “A Campaign for Princeton,” 1982

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In a pre­vi­ous blog we dis­cussed the three-year $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, launched at the begin­ning of Robert’s Goheen’s pres­i­dency in 1959. On an even larger scale was the five-year fundrais­ing cam­paign that was launched on Feb­ru­ary 19, 1982 dur­ing the pres­i­dency of Goheen’s suc­ces­sor William G. Bowen. The goal for “A Cam­paign for Prince­ton” was set at $275 mil­lion (raised to $330 mil­lion in Jan­u­ary 1984). Three years into the cam­paign, the fund drive ran like a “well-oiled machine,” accord­ing to the Daily Prince­ton­ian, bring­ing in more than $1 mil­lion a week. Fifty-five pro­fes­sion­als worked with a body of 2.500 alumni vol­un­teers, spread over sev­en­teen regions, who were trained to ask fel­low alumni to give at their max­i­mum capac­ity. Fea­tured here is “You Ask For It: An Intro­duc­tion to Cam­paign Solicitation,” an instruc­tional film that, how­ever much a prod­uct of the 1980s, may still be of inter­est for today’s fundraisers.

The cam­paign goals were sum­ma­rized in a Cam­paign Primer, pub­lished at the launch of the cam­paign. A full list and descrip­tion of the goals, which included aca­d­e­mic pro­grams, facil­i­ties, stu­dent aid, and res­i­den­tial col­leges, can be found at  CampaignPrimer.pdf.

Alumni solic­i­tors pre­pared to “make an ask” to prospec­tive donors with the help of a writ­ten solic­i­ta­tion plan, pro­vided by Princeton’s cam­paign staff. The solic­i­ta­tion plan, accord­ing to the Vol­un­teer Hand­book, con­tained par­tic­u­lar infor­ma­tion about the “prospect” as well as spe­cific guide­lines on how to work with the per­son to “help ensure max­i­mum giv­ing.”  For the first time in Princeton’s fundrais­ing his­tory, alumni with cap­i­tal gift poten­tial were asked to make one sin­gle com­mit­ment to the cam­paign that included both Annual Giv­ing (AG) and a cap­i­tal gift (this was known as a “joint ask”). As the cam­paign was spread over five years, it allowed for all alumni to be addressed with their class’ major reunion goals in mind.

Solic­i­tors were not meant  to be bash­ful about their “ask.” Out­right gifts of cash or assets (gen­er­ally secu­ri­ties) were first pri­or­ity, accord­ing to the Vol­un­teer Hand­book, but if that was a prob­lem, other char­i­ta­ble tax plan­ning tech­niques were encour­aged. “If you are per­suaded that a donor sim­ply can­not meet the requested level through an out­right gift, you should then intro­duce Planned Giv­ing to the nego­ti­a­tion.” Since these tech­niques were rather sophis­ti­cated, fur­ther nego­ti­a­tions were referred to Princeton’s Planned Giv­ing staff.

The above VHS video fea­tures two alumni ‘novices’ to the solic­it­ing process, who ask an expe­ri­enced alum­nus named Jim, a regional chair­man in charge of Major Gifts, in a staged inter­view for advice. The woman in the film is in charge of “Spe­cial Gifts” for her Class’ 10th Reunion, and the male novice alum­nus is asked to solicit money for a large cap­i­tal gift from a man who never donated more than $2.500 for Annual Giv­ing. The film lets Jim go back in his­tory, show­ing one failed solic­it­ing attempt at the begin­ning of his career, because he was not well enough pre­pared (1:05). This is fol­lowed by his account of one recent suc­cess­ful attempt, in which an alum­nus ended up giv­ing much more than he ini­tially thought he could man­age, par­tially through Planned Giv­ing (5:03).

Although the Uni­ver­sity Archives con­tain a lot of infor­ma­tion about the cam­paign itself, infor­ma­tion about the VHS film fea­tured here is lack­ing. In the lists of Regional Chair­men Major Gifts, pro­vided in the Vol­un­teer Hand­book, there is no James or Jim, hence the peo­ple in the staged inter­view may not be actual alumni. If you can pro­vide more infor­ma­tion about the mak­ing of the film, please let us know!

For more infor­ma­tion on the cam­paign itself, see The Story of A Cam­paign for Prince­ton, 1981–1986 by William McCleery.

This VHS video is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (Item no. 1422)

“Princeton University: Conversations that matter,” 1991

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After the 1960 and 1961 “Prince­ton news­reels” fea­tured last week, which marked a new stage in Princeton’s pub­lic rela­tions efforts, it is inter­est­ing to make a 30-year leap to view a film that was pro­duced for the Admis­sions Office by Andrew Greenspan: “Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity: Con­ver­sa­tions that Mat­ter” (1991). Focus­ing on the aca­d­e­mic cli­mate and intel­lec­tual exchanges, the film uses a markedly dif­fer­ent for­mat than the Orange Key Soci­ety film of 1962, which was also aimed at prospec­tive students.

This film uses footage of dis­cus­sion groups, lec­tures and sem­i­nars, and indi­vid­ual meet­ings between stu­dents and fac­ulty, touch­ing upon a wide range of sub­jects within the sci­ences and human­i­ties. Pro­fes­sors fea­tured include, among oth­ers, Cor­nel West (African Amer­i­can Stud­ies, 1.13 and fol­low­ing), Peter Brown (His­tory, 4:31), Robert Fagles (read­ing from his trans­la­tion of the Iliad 6:57), Toni Mor­ri­son (Eng­lish, 8:27 and fol­low­ing), John Flem­ing (Eng­lish and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture, 9:05), John Con­way (Math­e­mat­ics, 12:36), Steve Mackey (Music, 18:24 and fol­low­ing), and Michael Littman (Mechan­i­cal and Aero­space Engi­neer­ing, 19:19). In addi­tion, the film addresses indi­vid­ual stu­dents’ research and cre­ative writ­ing projects. The footage includes an act­ing class by play­wright David Rabe (16:02) and train­ing ses­sions with bas­ket­ball coach Pete Car­ril (2:50 and following).

The film won a Gold Award from the Coun­cil for Advance­ment and Sup­port of Edu­ca­tion (CASE).

This VHS video is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 1293).

Keeping the donor base informed: Princeton newsreels, 1960–1961

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Dur­ing the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign (1959–1962) a 13 x 10 foot scale model of the Prince­ton cam­pus  toured 19 major cities and dis­played at meet­ings of the regional lead­ers of the fund drive. To keep Prince­ton alumni fur­ther informed about progress and devel­op­ments on cam­pus, the Alumni Coun­cil spon­sored two “Prince­ton News­reels” in 1960 and 1961. The two 30-minute films are inter­est­ing to watch, not only because they fea­ture new facil­i­ties, achieve­ments in sports and sci­ence, and notable events (from Hur­ri­cane Donna in 1960 to the dona­tion of $35 mil­lion for the Woodrow Wil­son School in 1961), but because they also doc­u­ment the University’s first attempts to reach out to its donor base through the medium of film.  Con­trast­ing the two films, one can­not help but note that the sec­ond film is much smoother in its pre­sen­ta­tion than the first.

The first news­reel opens with an intro­duc­tion by the 41 year-old pres­i­dent Robert F. Goheen ’40, and a fresh­men lec­ture about the honor sys­tem by Walker Steven­son ’35, pres­i­dent of the National Alumni Asso­ci­a­tion (1:30). The scale model of the cam­pus, men­tioned above, is fea­tured at 6:41, when admin­is­tra­tive vice-president Edgar M. Gem­mell ’34 explains the expan­sions planned for the next three years. The footage fol­low­ing cap­tures the Hibben and Magie fac­ulty apart­ments under con­struc­tion (6:41) as well as the five new dor­mi­to­ries of the New Quad (Class of 1937, Class of 1938, Class of 1939, Dodge-Osborn, and Gauss Halls), the first build­ings to be fin­ished since the start of the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign (7:27).

aircar.jpg“Exam­ples of Research” opens with a bird exper­i­ment on the roof of Guyot Hall (7:55), fol­lowed by the Princeton-Pennsylvania Pro­ton Accel­er­a­tor, a par­ti­cle research facil­ity on the For­re­stal Cam­pus since 1957 (8:59). In addi­tion, the news­reel includes a demon­stra­tion of the ther­mo­he­liodon and the heliodon, devel­oped by the Archi­tec­tural Lab­o­ra­tory to deter­mine the effects of sun­light, wind and radi­a­tion (10:19), and research at the Depart­ment of Aero­nau­ti­cal Engi­neer­ing into prob­lems that occur with low speed flight (11:29; footage includes “air car” shown above). In addi­tion, the news­reel fea­tures fac­ulty who won an award in 1960: the later Nobel Prize win­ner Eugene Wigner, Pro­fes­sor of Physics, who received the “Atoms for Peace Award” (15:02) and His­tory Pro­fes­sor Robert Palmer, who won the Ban­croft prize for his book Age of the Demo­c­ra­tic Rev­o­lu­tion (15:25).
The sec­ond half of the film fea­tures par­tic­u­lar places and events, includ­ing alumni in the “Prince­ton Today” pro­gram who vis­ited the new C-site at the “Mat­ter­horn Project” (renamed the Prince­ton Plasma Physics Lab­o­ra­tory in 1961), a project for mag­netic fusion research funded by the Atomic Energy Com­mis­sion that had only been declas­si­fied in 1958 (15:47, with more about the Prince­ton Plasma Physics Lab­o­ra­tory in the sec­ond news­reel). This is fol­lowed by the appoint­ment of three new trustees (17:15), the for­eign lan­guage lab­o­ra­tory (18:57), achieve­ments in sports (track, squash, and lacrosse at 20:06; foot­ball (with coach Dick Col­man) at 25:04), and Reunions (20:54, with the Class of ’35). In addi­tion, the film includes footage of Tri­an­gle chorines dur­ing a per­for­mance of Break­fast in Bed­lam, which toured var­i­ous mil­i­tary bases and hos­pi­tals in Europe dur­ing the sum­mer (18:05). The news­reel also doc­u­ments Hur­ri­cane Donna, the only hur­ri­cane on record to have struck every East Coast state between Florida and Maine, which hit the cam­pus on Sep­tem­ber 12, 1960 (23:38).
The sec­ond news­reel that was pro­duced dur­ing the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign is more crisply pre­sented, with a clear divi­sion into five chap­ters. The first chap­ter, “New Facil­i­ties,” shows new cam­pus edi­fices: the Engi­neer­ing Quad­ran­gle (1:42), the John Fos­ter Dulles Library of Diplo­matic His­tory (2:11), the Hibben and Magie apart­ments at Carnegie Lake (2:22), the new play­ing fields (2:37), and the dor­mi­tory quad with Wilcox Hall (2:48). It is fol­lowed by images of stu­dents mov­ing into their dor­mi­to­ries (3:44), Class of 1965 fresh­men, the new Dean of the Col­lege J. Mer­rill Knapp with Dean Ernest Gor­don (4:36), and key­cepts “in oper­a­tion” (4:57).
“Sports” (6:26), the sub­ject of the sec­ond chap­ter, fea­tures bas­ket­ball (6:28), swim­ming (7:04), track (8:11), and foot­ball (8:24), with brief footage of impor­tant games and close­ups of ath­letes. In the next chap­ter, “The Search for Knowl­edge” (11:32), the num­ber of research project pre­vi­ously fea­tured is reduced to two. The first con­cerns the new Model C Stel­lara­tor at Prince­ton Plasma Physics Lab­o­ra­tory (PPPL), the new name of “Project Mat­ter­horn” dis­cussed in the ear­lier news­reel. The large stel­lara­tor, for which facil­i­ties had been built in 1960, replaced pre­vi­ous mod­els that had been used in the 1950s. As a sec­ond exam­ple of Princeton’s achieve­ments in sci­ence the research of biol­ogy pro­fes­sor Arthur K. Parpart is dis­cussed (14:21).
The fourth chap­ter, “Going Back” (15:43) includes footage of the Class of 1936’s 25th and the Class of 1911’s 50th reunion, with Joseph Cash­man and Dr. William H. Hud­nut from the Class of 1886 as mem­bers of the Old Guard. (Footage of Pres­i­dent Robert Goheen ’40, Grant Sanger ’31, Harold Helm ’21, and Walker Steven­son ’35 is at 16:43). The “major Prince­ton event of 1961” is saved for last: “Prince­ton in Inter­na­tional Affairs” (19:29) fea­tures the $35 mil­lion anony­mous gift from a foun­da­tion (ini­tially called the “X” Foun­da­tion, later known as the Robert­son Foun­da­tion) to estab­lish a pro­fes­sional school for pub­lic ser­vice at the Woodrow Wil­son School. The news­reel ends with a state­ment by Gard­ner Pat­ter­son, who was the direc­tor of the Woodrow Wil­son School and of the new program (20:35).
These 16mm films are part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0083 and 0079)

 

Kicking off the $53 Million Campaign, October 1, 1959

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On Octo­ber 1, 1959, Trustees and Alumni gath­ered in Prince­ton for a sig­nif­i­cant event. “This cause we serve is a cause of great impor­tance to all Amer­i­cans and through­out the Free World,” James F. Oates ’21 boomed, before hand­ing over the micro­phone to Judge Harold R. Med­ina ’09 and Pres­i­dent Bob Goheen ’40. The cause was Princeton’s $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, and the 500 alumni from twelve dif­fer­ent states, the first vol­un­teers for the cam­paign, were attend­ing the kick-off meet­ing of the total solic­i­ta­tion phase.

Oates, the Chair­man of the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, may have sounded over­wrought, but the three-year cam­paign was of his­tor­i­cal pro­por­tions indeed. It was Princeton’s first pro­fes­sional fund rais­ing effort, run with the help of the new Devel­op­ment Office (estab­lished in 1956), a fund rais­ing firm, and ulti­mately almost 5,000 vol­un­teers, coor­di­nated by eight regional offices from coast to coast. The finan­cial goal was of his­tor­i­cal pro­por­tions too, and so was the list of projects to be funded, includ­ing $30 mil­lion for new build­ings on cam­pus, includ­ing the Engi­neer­ing Quad, the New Quad, the Wool­worth Music build­ing, and the School of Archi­tec­ture. Thus, the $60.7 mil­lion raised by the end of the cam­paign, pledged by 17,925 donors, enabled the growth and change with which the pres­i­dency of Robert F. Goheen (1957–1972) has come to be associated.

The film, pre­sented as a news­reel for alumni, opens with excerpts of speeches by Jim Oates (0:54 and 4:05), Harold Med­ina (2:09) and Robert Goheen (6:04). It ends with footage of Jim Oates at the open­ing of a foot­ball match later that day, where he announces the launch of the cam­paign and receives a spe­cial shirt as ‘quar­ter­back’ of the cam­paign (8:56).
This 16mm film is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0125). For more infor­ma­tion about the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, see Gregg Lange’s arti­cle in the Prince­ton Alumni Weekly (Novem­ber 4, 2009).

The 1962 Orange Key Society film: please tell us more!

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Since it was posted on Princeton’s Cam­pus Life chan­nel, “An Under­grad­u­ate View of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity,” pro­duced by the Orange Key Soci­ety in 1962, has received unex­pected atten­tion. In the film, which is staged as an instruc­tional meet­ing for Orange Key guides, Charles W. Green­leaf ’63, vice-president of the Key­cept Pro­gram, dis­cusses what dis­tin­guishes Prince­ton from other uni­ver­si­ties, with empha­sis on teacher-student rela­tion­ships and oppor­tu­ni­ties for indi­vid­ual growth. Cre­ated sev­eral years before rebel­lion and reforms swept the cam­pus, the well-scripted film is an inter­est­ing artifact.

The film includes exten­sive footage of fac­ulty and cam­pus. Sub­jects dis­cussed are: fac­ulty and the pre­cep­to­r­ial sys­tem (with pro­fes­sors John Turke­vich (chem­istry) and Eric Gold­man (his­tory) 3:30); inde­pen­dent research projects (with Pro­fes­sor D.C. Hazen (aero­nau­ti­cal engi­neer­ing) 6:52); research at Fire­stone Library (9:13); fresh­man advis­ers (11:29 and 13:44); the honor sys­tem (15:33); finan­cial aid (17:23); dor­mi­to­ries (18:02); extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties and sports (19:30).

Doc­u­ments within the Uni­ver­sity Archives reveal very lit­tle about the con­text in which the film was pro­duced. We there­fore are call­ing on alumni who par­tic­i­pated. Can you tell us any­thing about the mak­ing of the film? Who wrote the script? What was the audi­ence, and how long was the film in use? We look for­ward to your comments!

This 16mm film is part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion (item no. 0091).