Princeton University

Iowa Wesleyan is the latest. Finlandia University before that. Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences as of January 2024. Many others you have probably not heard of: Stone Academy, Cazenovia College, Bloomfield College. These are colleges and universities that have breathed their last. Most often they are just local stories. A college that has been reduced to a few hundred students and perhaps two dozen faculty members comes to its final, final end.  In most cases, that final end has been dragged out long past the point where there was any realistic hope of saving the institution. As a former college president once told me, “Colleges die hard.” The faculty and administrators rarely have other career options.

The University of Cambridge appointed a new vice-chancellor earlier this month: Deborah Prentice, the current provost of Princeton University. Prentice brings degrees from Yale and Stanford and thirty-four years at Princeton with her across the pond, but no experience of the United Kingdom, let alone of Cambridge. As both a Princetonian and a Cantabrigian, I’m here to tell you that this is not good. On the one hand, Cambridge can, perhaps, benefit from Prentice’s acquaintance with Princeton’s finances. As Malcolm Gladwell recently explained, with its $37.7 billion endowment, Princeton is the world’s first perpetual motion machine. Cambridge has over 500 years on Princeton, yet its endowment is a measly £3.6 billion.

Princeton University’s Board of Trustees voted to fire tenured classics professor Joshua Katz on Monday — and the reason why has Cockburn adjusting his monocle to look a bit closer at the circumstances. Katz first came under scrutiny in 2018 for a consensual sexual relationship he had with a student at least a decade prior. At the time, he was suspended from his job for a year without pay. Then, new allegations arose that Katz had not been fully honest nor had fully cooperated with the previous investigation. Much to the chagrin of any frat guy looking to him for advice on how to score, Princeton gave him the boot.