This film shows some of the only documentation of the 1993 Baccalaureate ceremony to be found in the archives. This is the entire ceremony. (Trudeau’s portion of the ceremony begins at 18:20)

For more about the history of the Princeton Baccalaureate and Commencement Week activities throughout history, see our accompanying blogs:

The history of Princeton University Commencement Ceremonies

Name Dropping: A list of famous Commencement Week speakers at Princeton

Class of 1929 Commencement and a potpourri of student activities

Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Commencement with speaker President Bill Clinton

In 2010 the Princeton University Archives uploaded the following video from C-TEC highlighting the broadcast preceding speech. It includes a number of interviews with faculty and staff.

The golf team is featured at 3:50, polo at 4:54, members of the Daily Princetonian, Bric-a-Brac, student council, Triangle Club and Senior Prom committee featured at 6:16, baseball at 8:56 and finally the P-rade at 10:32.

The footage covers forty years of history of Princeton women, from the admission of Sabra Meservey as the first woman at the Graduate School in 1961 to Shirley Tilghman’s presidency. Subjects covered include the introduction of coeduation, student activism and Sally Frank, and activities of the Women’s Center and SHARE (Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education).

The compilation opens with footage of the Class of 1939′s junior prom in 1938 (taken from its Class film), which was attended by 606 women (all listed by name in the Daily Prince). Women only entered academic life at Princeton in 1961, when Sabra Meservey was admitted at to the Graduate School. The footage at 0:37 shows Meservey’s humorous account of her initial conversation with President Robert Goheen, who ultimately oversaw the introduction of undergraduate coeducation in 1969, and wanted to use Meservey as a “test case” at the Graduate School. (For the full story, see the the blog about the Celebration of Coeducation at the Graduate School.)

The only filmed recollections about the early years of coeducation were found on the documentary Looking Back: Reflections of Black Princeton Alumni (1:32), created on the occasion of Princeton’s 250th anniversary in 1996. The changes on campus did not please everybody. In 1974 Princeton icon Frederick Fox ’39 reached out to disgruntled alumni in the film A Walk in the Springtime, pointing out, perhaps tongue in cheek, that Nassau Hall’s two bronze tigers were male and female (3:19). In the following fragment, taken from the short Academy award winning film Princeton, A Search For Answers (1973), women feature prominently (3:55).

The last fragments feature woman activism and the gains of the women’s movement of the 1970s and the 1980s. Two fragments were taken from the Class of 1986′s Video Yearbook: a speech from Sally Frank ’80, who sued the last three all-male eating clubs (4:18), and a Women’s Center sit-in in May 1, 1986 (4:45). The last two fragments have not been featured yet in The Reel Mudd but will be shortly. The first is a sketch from “Sex on a Saturday Night,” a theater performance for freshmen about sexual harassment, presented by SHARE (5:11), The film ends with the inauguration of Shirley Tilghman (5:11) in 2001, taken from the documentary “Robert F. Goheen ’40, *48; Reflections of a President” (2006).

The exhibit “She Flourishes:” Chapters in the History of Princeton Women may be visited during Mudd Library’s opening hours on weekdays between 9.00 am and 4.45 pm. from now until the end of August 2012.

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.

Prior to winning the Oscar in 1974, Princeton: A Search for Answers had already won awards or citations at the International Film Festival in Florence and in the Atlanta International Film Festival, the Columbus Film Festival and from the Information Film Producers of America. After winning the Oscar it appeared on Channel 13  in the New York area, with a favored “black spot” billing in the TV schedule of the New York Times. Not everybody was in favor of the film, however. “The movie doesn’t focus enough on students. It narrowly emphasizes the strictly academic aspect of Princeton–the classroom experience, the faculty. It also concentrates too heavily on the science-technology fields. In all these ways, the movie presents a distorted view of Princeton,” wrote the Daily Princetonian. Admission officers experienced a problem with this too: when showing the film to students at secondary schools, they found that students were often over-awed and “left feeling they might not measure up to Princeton’s standards.” For this reason officers chose to show the film, which was used throughout the 1970s, only at the end of a general presentation about Princeton.

It is interesting to compare the recruitment film with the staged Orange Key Society film, made for prospective students in 1962 (before the revolutionary years that changed the face of the campus dramatically) and the 1991 recruitment film Princeton University: Conversations that Matter.  The latter film, which also focused on scholarship and the dialogue between students and faculty, followed a similar format, opening and closing with a music professor, and including a fiery class about Shakespeare. Princeton: A Search for Answers, had set a new standard.

This 16mm film is part of the University Archives’ Historical Audiovisual Collection (item no. 1466).

The Class of 1895’s 20th reunion footage is the first of its kind, and would well have been the very oldest film in the University Archives, if not for the newsreel footage of the inauguration of President John Grier Hibben in 1912. The film was made by the Connecticut Film Company, which had two men follow the class around campus on Reunions Saturday, then return the following Monday to show the film at the Class Dinner. As Class Secretary Andrew Imbrie put it in a letter to classmates in advance of Reunions, this would be “a stunt never before attempted at any Princeton reunion.”

Back at headquarters at the Bachelor’s Club, we see a crowd of men and children gathered around class member Howard Colby’s “‘sarsaparilla automobile,’ built, decorated and provisioned with thoughtful consideration for the small army of sons and daughters” of class members (2:23). As the film winds down, the camera pans over the 136 class members who returned for 1895’s 20th along with their sons (3:53). The D.Q. Brown Long Distance Cup is presented by Dickinson Brown to his classmate Henry “Spider” McNulty, who traveled the farthest, from China, to attend the reunion.

The Class of 1944’s “Greatest Generation” 65th Reunion honored the members of the class (89%) who served in World War II. The film (a gift of Herbert Hobler ’44) includes the Memorial Service the class held in Trinity Church, a special portion of which recognized the 22 members of the class who lost their lives in the war. The U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own” led the class in the P-rade.

–Christie Lutz and Helene van Rossum

The films featured here are part of the Princeton University Class Records (Class of 1895 and Class of 1944) and the University Archives’ Historical Audiovisual Collection (item no. 0043).

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 25^th 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 250^th 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’ 50^th anniversary reunion in 2008. Wu is currently serving as a Trustee of Princeton University, with a term ending in 2012.

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.

The Architecture of Robert Venturi ’47, *50

Wu Hall was a critical and artistic success, winning eight different awards for its architecture and interior design. As noted by Princeton University Interactive Campus History, “This critical acclaim was something new for the University, which had been castigated for years for the stylistic timidity of its modern buildings — especially when compared to the architectural daring of its peers in New Haven and Cambridge.” A preliminary study for the entrance and elevation, and a preliminary study of the entrance and windows now reside in The Museum of Modern Art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was set at Princeton and reflected the atmosphere of the eating clubs and of the university itself, which (not to Princeton’s liking) he described as “the pleasantest country club in America.” Fitzgerald wrote his book at a time when some northeastern colleges and universities, particularly in urban areas where many Eastern European Jewish immigrants had settled, perceived they had a “Jewish problem” in that if they admitted too many Jewish students, Protestant middle and upper class students would be driven away. Columbia, which had the largest Jewish enrollment at 40%, was the first to impose a quota in 1921. Princeton, however, always claimed not to use quotas. As late as 1948 Radcliffe Heermance, Princeton’s first director of admissions from 1922 to 1950, vehemently denied a claim that Princeton used a quota to keep Jewish students under 4%. “We’ve never had a quota system, we don’t have a quota system, we will never have a quota system” he told the Daily Princetonian.

A letter from former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, who visited Princeton President John Grier Hibben in the early 1930s, indicated otherwise. Hutchins wrote Princeton senior Steven L. Buenning ’71 In December 1970, as Buenning was seeking information for his senior thesis, a biography about Hibben. In the letter Hutchins recalls how he had asked Hibben about the number of Jewish students at Princeton. According to Hutchins, Hibben claimed that the number just happened, whereupon his wife exclaimed: “Jack Hibben, I don’t see how you can sit there and lie to this young man. You know very well that you and Dean Eisenhart get together every year and fix the quota.”

Heermance limited Jewish enrollment by developing an admission policy that put an emphasis on “character,” which, however subjective, was still regarded as defensible in public. Criteria like “manhood,” “leadership” “participation in athletics” and “home environment and companions” were assessed by using interviews, letters of recommendation, and a social ranking system. A powerful disincentive to even apply was the anti-Semitic reputation of Princeton’s eating clubs, which considered most Jews “unclubbable.”

After World War II, greater social forces forced the University to begin to change.  In 1947, the Student Hebrew Association was founded and held the first Jewish service on campus, which was attended by Albert Einstein (right). A year later the student organization joined the Hillel Foundation, the national Jewish campus organization founded in 1923 and sponsored by the New York Jewish service organization B’nai B’rith. On October 1, 1948 Rabbi Irving Levey, the new director of Hillel on campus, directed his first Friday evening service.  The Prince wrote: “The establishment of Hillel at Princeton marks the recognition that members of all religious faiths shall have the opportunity to worship on the campus. The importance of Judaic thought and the spiritual needs of her Jewish students have at last received the recognition and constructive leadership they deserve.”

When Cliff Stein, president of Hillel, was interviewed for an article in the Nassau Weekly on May 1, 1986, shortly after Princeton’s announcement to establish the CJL, he told the paper that he still met prospective Jewish students who chose “less academically inviting colleges” than Princeton, because of Princeton’s anti-Semitic reputation. “This building will go a long way to break down that image,” he said. The above promotional film, produced three years after the opening of CJL and aimed at prospective Jewish students, should be viewed with this same history in mind.