A Growing Silence Creeps Into A University Town...But Who's to Blame?

Princeton is a college town, and proudly so. As any of its residents and frequent visitors will tell you, the town-gown connection is strong and reflected in brick and mortar. Just a walk along the town’s main drag, Nassau Street, reveals a variety of cosmopolitan and quirky establishments, from coffeehouses to bookstores to our small movie theater that runs both the latest movies and specialty films aimed at a smaller, though intellectually aware, audience. Nearing Palmer Square, one can visit a small newspaper/smoke shop that stocks daily publications from around the globe. And perhaps the greatest point of pride is the town’s public library, adorned with columns and glass with a huge “glass book” that spreads its wings from the roof, inviting in the curious and scholarly alike.

Perhaps the “trademark” site (actually, I think there are two of them) that visually defines the town as an intellectually active community isn’t even a business. It’s a kiosk, located in front of our movie theater on Nassau Street, directly across from Princeton’s massive Firestone Library. It is on this kiosk that student organizations, potential employers, local cultural institutions and university departments post their announcements. On any given day, the eight foot tall structure is completely covered with hundreds of flyers announcing all sorts of events and services. Last month I took a good look at it. One bright blue flyer announced an upcoming lecture by a former Israeli Ambassador on campus, while another yellow one – posted on all sides of the kiosk – advertised “resume building” services, complete with perforated, tear-off numbers at the bottom. Atop both of these flyers was a well-made, small poster presenting the schedule of upcoming Princeton Tiger basketball games. Peppered in between these flyers were purely political messages, with some calling attention to recent war crimes of the Assad regime in Syria, with others demanding an end to the “War on Food Stamps.”

All in all, it’s a very lively kiosk, and a visible trademark of a cultured, connected community concerned with local and distant issues, as well as, of course, making money. It’s the manifestation of the university town as a free marketplace of ideas.

And let us not forget Princeton’s stately academic structures, stone edifices that remind us that the world of learning is an old, important and ongoing one. Literally lording over the main quad is the university’s pride, Nassau Hall, which over four centuries has hosted classes, a fierce Revolutionary War Battle, Congressional gatherings, contentious protests, and formal university events (the latest being, of course, the moving investiture of the university’s newest president).

Just a twenty-minute drive up Nassau Street, or as locals know it, Route 27, is Rutgers University’s main campus in New Brunswick. Again, from a physical standpoint, we see much of the same. Dignified academic buildings, small businesses catering to an educated population, exotic and cheap eateries, and of course, kiosks obscured in leaflets, brochures and other papers.

But this physical geography of the college town has changed dramatically over the past two decades, and if you visit either Princeton or New Brunswick on the sunniest or rainiest of working days, when the universities are in session with tens of thousands of students present, you cannot escape it. It’s so visible, so obvious, that when I stop to think about it, it more or less takes my breath away and stops me in my tracks.

If first noticed it a few years ago, but now it’s getting more extreme, and please reply to this blog if you think I’m crazy, or being over-reactive, because that’s not beyond me. But I think I’m more or less “right on” here, because its a phenomena that you can test for and witness day after day after day, whether classes are in session or not, regardless of the weather. It can best be summed up by these two simple questions:

Where is everybody? Where did everybody go?

Really! Was there a zombie apocalypse that I didn’t hear about? Has most of the population been vaporized by a sudden alien attack right out of War of the Worlds? Did the much-prophesized Rapture of the New Testament occur overnight, whisking millions of believers to some Eternal Destination?

Now don’t be alarmed. On any given day in Princeton there are some people walking out and about, but from my perspective they’re all tourists, out-of-towners. In fact, one outgoing group of 15 people I had the pleasure to meet last week in front of Starbucks had traveled all the way from Shanghai to see one of America’s finest schools. None, as far as I saw, were knapsack-toting, overwhelmed and overworked students. Not a one.

On any given day, when classes are in session, there are over 8,000 members of the academic community present on Princeton campus. Students, administrators, professors, workers…this population is a large one for such a relatively small space (about a square mile). New Brunswick’s academic population is even larger, over 10,000.

I went to college in the 1990’s, earning my B.A. and M.A. degrees at Rutgers, though I was a frequent Princeton visitor as my university I.D. allowed me to use the Firestone Library. I remember both campuses on most working days resembling something close to Times Square. I remember students by the hundreds loitering around town and campus, debating, chatting, enjoying some coffee, reading books, conversing with professors. I remember visiting the Frist Student Center on a late January day in 1992 and feeling absolutely sandwiched between the crowds, waiting on long lines to grab a Coke and a sandwich, then scurrying to find a table to sit at amongst the multitudes.

Those crowds, that physical vibrancy, are gone. The students and community are still there, of course, somewhere, but their presence, is almost altogether missing. Again, it’s the same in New Brunswick. What happened?

It’s not difficult to figure out, and the proof is in the silence. Everyone, lock, stock and barrel, has folded up operations and altogether moved to the Web; to the Internet. Everything, from group work to lecture review, to shopping to socializing has gone online. The kiosks are still there, coated in a zillion flyers angrily flapping in the wind for attention, but nobody is reading them…at least, not in the physical world.

Don’t mistake my sentiments; I’m a huge believer in the Internet. I regard it as solely responsible for reinvigorating civil and social discourse in this country, and it ha brought a new sense of community to people who have long been cut out of the national conversation. The Web is amazing in its power to bring an unprecedented level of connectivity to the masses. But it’s impact on the physical world, and especially on working intellectual communities such as Princeton and New Brunswick, is unmistakable. Its impact is beyond evident, and from an observable standpoint, devastating.

Am I sounding zany here, or am I on to something?