Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Thursday, August 19, 2021

Catch-22 at Princeton

One of the most useful things I learned at Princeton University was to turn on the kitchen light in my grad student apartment with my eyes closed, immediately walk away, and return 10 minutes later. That gave the army of cockroaches time to retreat.

I was a bit frightened of the campus exterminator, who laid out poison for the cockroaches and mice with a sinister grin and gleam in his eye as he spoke with obvious relish about his love for killing things.

You might wonder why I even wanted campus housing (especially after I spent a month without a working refrigerator). But the cost of off-campus housing was considerably more than my income. In fact, my NSF Graduate Fellowship stipend was only slightly more than the rent Princeton charged me for graduate student housing.

Before I started grad school, I spent a year at the University of Cambridge. So it could try to pocket the difference between my NSF Fellowship and my Cambridge tuition, Princeton University insisted that I enroll at Princeton in absentia, rather than defer my first year as a Princeton grad student. This caused me no end of trouble.

For example, Princeton's Housing Department informed me that they would count me as a fourth year student in the housing lottery for my third year on campus. That meant that I wouldn't get campus housing in my fourth year on campus, since they would then consider me to be a fifth year student.

I still have some of the correspondence between me and the Assistant Dean. In one letter I wrote, "You state in your letter that I was eligible for graduate housing during my first year of enrollment at Princeton, i.e., while I was enrolled as a full-time student in England." I quoted the relevant passage from my lease that showed that I was not eligible for Princeton housing while in absentia in another country. I continued, quite logically, "To declare that my housing priority was greatest in a year in which it was impossible for me to use it is a Catch-22."

I countered the Assistant Dean's remark that the policy was recently reviewed by a campus committee and found to be fair by pointing out that a member of that committee told me that under the correct interpretation of the policy, my year overseas should not count against me.

I mentioned that another graduate student a year ahead of me had been in the identical situation, but the housing office didn't count his in absentia year against him. As far as I knew, I was the first student to be penalized in this way in the housing lottery.

I naively thought that the facts would sway the Assistant Dean. Isn't a university supposed to care about facts and fairness? But my letter rubbed her the wrong way. Concerning the student in the identical situation, she countered with, "Mr. X was the recipient of an error that was made when he initially came back from in absentia status, and then was carried through last year.  He has been informed that he will be listed as a 5th-year student this year."

My friend "Mr. X" was, understandably, angry with me for messing up his housing priority. I felt awful that I had involved him, and that the Assistant Dean's hostility towards me might hurt him. I pleaded with her not to penalize him.

I lived off campus in my fourth year of grad school. I admit that I was glad to be free of the cockroaches, the mice, and the creepy exterminator guy!