In the summer of 2020, the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society was planning to hold its annual conference in Princeton, New Jersey. I was delighted because 2020 happened to be the 60th anniversary of my 1960 graduation from Princeton University with my PhD degree. A small celebration had been organised to mark the occasion at the conference, and my small family, who had never been to Princeton, were planning to be there too. So we were all bitterly disappointed by the COVID-19 cancellation that soon followed. The following account of the difference between my Princeton of the 1950s and today’s, is a gesture towards a substitute for the visit that never happened.
How had I got to Princeton University in the first place? Having graduated from Edinburgh University with an excellent English degree in 1954, and having completed National Service in 1954-56, I took up the Vans Dunlop postgraduate scholarship I’d been awarded, and proceeded to the recently established American Studies Department of Manchester University. Why? Because I’d decided that if I was to pursue an academic career, it was going to be in the field of American literature. That literary area was just beginning to be taken seriously in the UK.
The Manchester department was run by Marcus Cunliffe and Geoffrey Moore who were most encouraging over my decision, but it soon became clear that if I was to make a success of it, I had to get myself across the Atlantic and into a doctoral programme in an American university.
As a result, I wrote to a range of state universities about possible enrolment and quickly received several positive responses. It became clear that universities such as Minnesota or Wisconsin were willing to admit me to their doctoral programmes and that the fees would be met by my agreeing to teach Freshman English courses. On the other hand, I discovered that each year two postgraduate fellowships were available at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, involving no teaching requirement. I applied and was pleased to be invited to an interview in London.
It was quite a daunting experience. The interviewing committee was around a dozen strong. The chairman began by expressing surprise that I had grown up in so remote a place as Wick! Then it soon became clear that the committee was not exactly knowledgeable on the topic of American literature. (These awards were available in any humanities subject.) An elderly committee member asked me about an American author I’d never heard of – years later, I discovered that Joseph Hergesheimer had a brief moment of fame in the 1920s. Someone else mentioned T S Stribling – a Southern writer whose name and work I knew though I’d read none of it – which allowed me to ramble on about how American literature was no longer only being produced by writers from New England.
Weeks passed and I heard nothing. I was just about to commit myself to Minnesota when a letter arrived informing me I was being offered the Jane Eliza Procter Fellowship at Princeton University. A moment that would prove crucial to my academic career.
Having arrived in Princeton, thanks to a Fulbright Travel Grant, I quickly discovered that postgraduate study in the US differed from that at home. In the UK, after an initial term meeting with a supervisor, sorting out a research topic, creating a bibliography, and learning about the technical aspects of library-based research, a student was left to get on with it. An American PhD programme was quite different. The first two years involved a series of seminar-based courses. At their conclusion, a general examination had to be passed. Only then did research leading to the writing of a dissertation begin. Five years in all were usually required. However, some flexibility was possible.
Having met Willard Thorp, head of the Princeton English Department, and having discussed financial arrangements, a slightly different course of study was agreed. Influenced by a perhaps over-respectful rating of a British undergraduate degree – the fact, for example, that at Edinburgh I had already covered the study of Anglo-Saxon – and even more by my having an MA degree, only one year of course work would be required.
More than once I carefully explained that while in English universities the BA was the traditional, three-year, undergraduate degree, the Scottish universities awarded an Honours MA after four years of study. In the US, of course, the MA was purely a postgraduate degree. The explanation of this difference never seemed to register and in the end I gave up trying – simply agreeing I had an MA degree. So one year it was.
In fact, the Princeton seminar courses were extremely good. Admission to the university’s graduate school was highly competitive. Hence all the dozen or so students in English literature were both highly committed and very well- qualified. The atmosphere and approach were much more professional than anything I’d previously experienced. I worked hard to keep up with all these bright young men. (I should have said that in the 1950s, Princeton, like the rest of the Ivy League, admitted only men – it would be only in the 1970s that women began to be admitted.) But after the initial shock I did find my feet – and from the start I think my status as a UK visiting student did me no harm.
Post the general exam, the next issue was my research topic. Thorp I knew as one of the authors with Spiller, Johnson, and Canby, of what was then the standard Literary History of the United States . Hence, I expected him to agree that I should work on the period which had first attracted me to American literature – the 1920s of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dos Passos.
But I was entirely wrong. He had something quite different in mind.
He said he had been waiting for years for a student like me. The Princeton library contained the Witherspoon Collection. Witherspoon was the Scot who had saved what was then the College of New Jersey in Princeton from near collapse in the 1770s. He also went on to become a leading spokesman for American independence. According to Willard, there was much work to be done on his career – and on the work of other Scots who had contributed so much to 18th-century America’s literary and intellectual life. Now here I was from Edinburgh – the ideal person to take up the challenge. What could I do but agree?
The result was a successful dissertation which almost seemed to write itself. In due course, it became my first book Scotland and America, A study of Cultural Relations 1750-1835 . However, I have an admission to make – and in a way it sums up the importance of my initial Princeton years. Willard Thorp took it for granted that I was well-informed on the history of Scottish literature. In fact, I was nothing of the kind. My Edinburgh English degree had scarcely touched on Scottish literature. Working on Scotland and America at Princeton changed everything and shaped my future academic career. It is fair to say that Princeton then made me.
What of Princeton now? Deprived of the opportunity to be back in 2020, I chanced to make contact with a recently-retired member of the current English Department with whom I had developed a close friendship back in Graduate College days. Uli Knoepflmacher had spent the first half of his very successful academic career at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. The Berkeley English Department was one of the most high-flying in America. Uli told me that the Princeton Department struck him then as deeply conservative, out of touch with how the subject was developing. However, a change in his personal circumstances led him to accept an opportunity to return to Princeton. In the following 20 years, he says he helped in the transformation of the English Department in a range of ways. He tells me that diversity, in terms of faculty membership, student intake and subject teaching, has brought Princeton back into the mainstream.
As an alumnus, I have always received Princeton’s Alumni Weekly and so have been able to keep up with similar changes across the university as a whole. Each issue contains a ‘President’s Page’ which takes the form of a letter from Princeton’s current president Christopher L Eisgruber discussing recent campus issues or developments.
President Eisgruber comes across as highly impressive. In the current issue, he debates the pluses and minuses of the online teaching now in place at Princeton as elsewhere. The majority of students will be returning to the campus in the spring term despite all the limitations and absences that they will necessarily discover. As the president puts it, ‘students’ attachment to the residential experience is proving even deeper than I would have expected’. Yet he also outlines how expanded use of online technology will become part of the ‘new normal’ in a variety of ways.
His conclusion is to ‘look forward to a day when we can consider how best to integrate the tools and experience from the pandemic with the strengths of residential liberal arts and graduate education that Princeton students and alumni so cherish’.
Only a few days earlier, I, like all students and alumni, received the president’s annual letter surveying the past year. The letter amounted to a brilliant setting out of what the democratic aims and values of a university’s teaching and research should be. He was making this case in the context of a Trump administration’s threat to challenge the university’s trustees’ decision to address the effects of systemic racism on the campus. The future of Princeton is clearly in safe hands.
Nassau Hall, the university’s original building and still at the heart of the campus, was paid for by money raised by the Church of Scotland through a single Sunday collection across the whole country which took place around the middle of the 18th century. I have good reason for thinking now it was money well spent.
Andrew Hook is Emeritus Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow
By Andrew Hook | 10 March 2021