Princeton: It's Still in New Jersey

Never thought that much about Princeton, actually. When I was applying to college, it was all men.  It was also in New Jersey, a nice part of New Jersey, but really. New Jersey?  
I wanted New England. Somewhere different. Somewhere quaint. Somewhere which felt like college. 
I didn't know what I wanted. 
As is so often the case, I judged the place by the kids who went to it from my high school. 
 I didn't like them, as a rule.

They were very bright, mostly, and very competitive, but more competitive than bright, as a rule.  They seemed jaded, self absorbed, smug, focused on success and winning the game. 

One of my friends who went there was the exception. He was brighter than he was competitive and he seemed to value people for the right reasons. He tried out for the football team but, as he unabashedly admitted, he was simply not physically tough enough. Nor mentally tough enough. 

He came to wrestling matches and marveled at the courage and toughness and grace under fire visible in the  varsity wrestlers. 

But for the most part, I had to agree with my brother and his college friends at Cornell:  They all said they wouldn't send their worst enemies to Princeton, but most of those worst types were already there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, made a great deal about his time at Princeton. 
Somehow, F. Scott always seemed just silly to me. 

I did meet an editor in Washington, from Mississippi, who is a genuinely fine person, and he had gone to Princeton and graduated, ostensibly unscathed. 

But a classmate of my son in medical school articulated something which crystallized in my own mind one thing about Princeton which seems relevant.

She was at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, a place with a reasonably select group of students, endowed with a wide spectrum of abilities, but in one boozy moment, when she spoke in vino veritas, she let slip to some of her suite mates why she really wasn't interested in marrying any of the men at P&S--she just could not see marrying a man who had not gone to Princeton. It would feel like marrying down, or maybe not down, but out of the tribe.

In days of yore, you'd hear a woman say something to the effect of how she just couldn't marry a gentile if she were a Jew. Clannishness, that was called, when it wasn't called foolishness.

Now this young woman was confiding to her suite mates, who were graduates of Yale and M.I.T. respectively,  and they laughed, but then they realized she was serious.

Now, Susan Patton, Princeton, class of '77,  is hitting the talk shows saying that women of Princeton should marry their male classmates because they'll never find better, and they better strike while the iron is hot, while the ovaries are full of fresh eggs and before they lose their dewy eyed allure.  When you leave Princeton, you'll never again have that concentration of able manhood so available, so thoroughly vetted and so ripe for the picking, as if men were avocados.

It's a very old world sort of notion, really. Hard headed, unsentimental. Matchmaker, find me a man with the right prospects. Love will come later.

Not that the Phantom believes in "love."

And when you think about it, is this not what those computer dating services are not all about?  Match traits, objective criteria,  to what you want.

Apart from the idea of people choosing their mates in their 20's, before they really know themselves, the idea of choosing from a pre selected population sounds a little like those camps they set up in the Third Reich, to breed beautiful blonde girls with beautiful blonde boys and produce a Master Race. They had selected for traits, as if they were breeding cattle. 

The idea that college is so important it ought to be the breeding ground of the next generation is a little hair raising. As if the selection process for the Princeton class is so refined it can produce a Master Class, if not a Master Race.

What do you think a dinner party at Ms. Patton's house would be like? Not quite Downton Abbey, I would think. No stories of Perseus and the Sea Monster. 

Money, I would think. That would be the major topic. How to make it and how to spend it. I don't know why, but that's what I think, when I think of Princeton. 

What a bore.