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Good-Bye, Princeton

By Robert Stacy McCain on 11.16.08 @ 9:01AM

Princeton University long had a reputation as the most conservative of Ivy League universities. Partly, this was because it was the southernmost Ivy (my great-grandfather's Confederate brigadier, Gen. J.J. Archer, was a Princeton alum) and partly it was the legacy of Princeton's sixth president, John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian of the old school.

Well, kiss that all good-bye, as Princeton alum Ron Coleman explains:

Princeton University announced last month that Shirley M. Tilghman, the University's president, will serve as "one of the founding trustees for King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, a new international, coeducational, graduate-level research university that is being created near Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, Jeddah." . . .

Coleman cites Steven M. Warshawsky:

In Tilghman, the student radicals of the 1960s finally have succeeded in occupying the university president's chair, not just his office. Since becoming Princeton's president in June 2001, Tilghman (who graduated from college in 1968) has pursued an activist feminist agenda to remake Princeton into a liberal paradise that even Kim Gandy would love. Today . . . Princeton is rife with political correctness, multiculturalism, and liberal groupthink.

Coleman notes that Tilghman is "the first non-alumnus president in the school’s recent history" and -- perhaps worst of all -- she's Canadian.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

View all comments (3) | Leave a comment

A to the F| 11.16.08 @ 11:26AM

As a proud alum, I can tell you that this process started with the previous university president, Harold Shapiro. Whether it was mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshman, a extreme liberal as a dean of the students, promotion of leftwing causes while ignoring the other side of the spectrum, this process of dragging Princeton to the Left began under the previous university president, Harold Shapiro (who was only a graduate alumni himself). Shapiro, first, and now Tilghman are doing everything they can to destroy the traditions that made Princeton.

J David| 11.17.08 @ 9:50AM

...And look how Canadian leadership has helped in Michigan!!! How could you such a meanie, Mr McCain?

APM| 11.17.08 @ 11:49AM

The author is incorrect. While Princeton may be the southernmost ivy in social history and viewpoint, it is not the southernmost geopgraphically. According to latitude, Penn is the most southernmost ivy by about 1/4 of a degree.