Part of being a student — even an old one, like me — is spending time in the library. As I write this, I am sitting in the Firestone Library at Princeton University , looking up at a wall festooned with names of honored, illustrious alumni and super-rich donors , two categories that do not always, or even mostly, intersect.

On the wall directly in front of me are the names Donald Rumsfeld , George Will, and Paul Sarbanes (that last one might need a memory jolt: He was a senator from Maryland for roughly 800 years). And while those names carry a lot of associations, they’re basically normal-sounding modern American names, unlike, say, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who was an English professor at Yale in the last century, and whose name was on a few walls there.

Recommended Stories

Go

See Full Page