Welcome to the 2016- 2017 Academic Year

September 29, 2016

Dear Princeton Students,

We write to welcome you to the 2016- 2017 academic year.  This fall, 1,306 new undergraduates and 647 new graduate students join us at Princeton.  We’re delighted to welcome them to campus, along with all of our returning students.

We began this letter with a quote from President Eisgruber’s opening address to the class of 2020, to invoke our interdependence and our collective commitment to creating an environment in which all members of our community can thrive.  “We’re all in it together” is a deceptively simple statement, since it embodies both our reality and our aspiration as a campus community.

You may recall that this summer, we wrote to you on two occasions about the distress and violence that plagues communities in our nation and around the world.  Since then, the number of violent acts against humanity increased.

Even now, as we watch events unfold around the world, in our local communities, and (already) on this campus, it becomes clearer and clearer that our lives are linked in meaningful ways.  On campus, we are linked by the intellectual and emotional resources that we can harness together to address bias, social injustice and hatred.

To this end, many offices across Princeton have come together to discuss ways to focus our collective attention on how to create change locally and globally.  Those fruitful conversations, in addition to the progress we made last spring, have reinvigorated our commitment to provide many and varied opportunities for members of the Princeton community to:

• Engage in and be educated about the issues of injustice that continue to plague our campus, our country, and the world;
• Learn about ourselves and others, and to see ourselves as active allies in building mutual respect and knowledge, coalition and understanding;
• Work collectively to create change at Princeton and in society;
• And to “actively care for self and others.”

To explore the many opportunities our colleagues have organized to help us to fulfill our collective goals, please be a frequent visitor to the following event websites:

• Office of Career Services
• Carl A Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding
• Office of the Dean of the Graduate School
• LGBT Center
• McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning
• Princeton University Public Lecture Series
• Office of Religious Life
• Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity
• Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs
• Women’s Center

In President Eisgruber’s opening address, he also said that we “move through the course of human events together.  We can learn from one another, if we listen.  We will do better if we look out for one another—if we remember, in other words, that even if things seem to be going fine for us personally, they may be going badly for someone else near to us—and, if so, we owe that person our help and support.”

We owe it to ourselves and to our community to be engaged, educated, activist allies, who are attentive to our individual and collective well-being.  In so doing, we might realize the aspirational goal of being in it together.

We wish you all the best for a productive semester,

Rochelle Calhoun, Vice President for Campus Life

Jill Dolan, Dean of the College

Sanjeev Kulkarni, Dean of the Graduate School

Princeton University strives to be an intellectual and residential community in which all members can participate fully and equally, in an atmosphere free from all manifestations of bias and from all forms of discrimination, harassment, exploitation, or intimidation. As an intellectual community, it attaches great value to freedom of expression and vigorous debate, but it also attaches great importance to mutual respect, and it deplores expressions of hatred directed against any individual or group. The University seeks to promote the full inclusion of all members and groups in every aspect of University life.

–Princeton University, Rights, Rules, Responsibilities