Princeton University enters The Bob Zadek Show in two episodes and in neither of them as the topic. In the earlier episode it is a campus used for comparison; in the later one it is a speaker’s affiliation. The excerpts contain no account of the university’s founding, governance, curriculum, or institutional history, and nothing here should be read as one.
Princeton as a point of comparison (2014)
Alice Goffman, describing the research behind On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, told Bob Zadek that while conducting the study she was simultaneously enrolled in graduate school, and that the school was in Princeton, an hour away from the neighborhood where she was living. She described herself as a commuter student in graduate school, and said this arrangement let her see what the Princeton students were doing and compare it with what was happening to the people in the neighborhood where she lived. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
The comparison she drew was between conduct, not between institutions. Goffman said that on the campuses she saw a lot of drugs, a lot of fighting, rape, and drunk driving, and that many of the crimes for which the young men she came to know were first arrested — the arrests that set them on a path — were the same things young people on those college campuses were doing. The difference she identified was in what followed: the people graduating from Penn and Princeton, she said, did not have felony convictions when they graduated, had never been arrested, had never had their pockets searched by police, had never had their parties raided, and had never had their fights turned into an aggravated assault charge. She called the contrast striking as to how police and courts operate for black people and white people, for poor people and rich people in the country. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Zadek picked up the comparison and restated it as a hypothetical. He said he had never thought of it until Goffman mentioned it, and framed it as a social profile or diary of a privileged white person at Princeton set against that of a non-privileged black person living in the inner city — a diary of their day with a fair amount of similarity between drug use and violence and abuse and bad behavior and bad driving and drunk driving. His point was that while the activities in the two diaries are the same, the degree of punishment, stigmatization and interaction with law enforcement is profoundly different. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
In his introduction to that hour, Zadek described Goffman’s book as the product of almost a decade spent living in an inner-city neighborhood to experience firsthand the effect of surveillance and law enforcement on the lives of inner-city blacks. Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City (2014)
Princeton as a speaker’s affiliation (2020)
Six years later, Princeton appears in the program only in the host’s introduction of a guest. Zadek introduced Keith Whittington as a professor at Princeton University and as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, a frequently published author whose more recent book was Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, and who had just published Repugnant Laws. Reviewing Judicial Review (2020)
The substance of that episode was judicial review, not the university. Zadek described Whittington’s book as examining in detail, with datasets, the history of the Supreme Court upholding or striking down laws enacted by Congress and signed by the president as unconstitutional. He called an independent judiciary one of the most interesting and unique functions among Western democracies, and described nine unelected, serving-for-life judges who need not be attorneys but almost always have been, able with the stroke of a pen to strike down laws enacted by the political branches — 435 members of the House, 100 members of the Senate, and one president. He called that about as undemocratic as government can be and asked whether it is healthy for democracy. Reviewing Judicial Review (2020)
Whittington’s own contribution in the excerpt is a two-word reply to the welcome. Everything else in the segment is Zadek’s framing. Reviewing Judicial Review (2020)
Across episodes
The two episodes do not develop a common question about Princeton. In 2014 the university figures as one term in Goffman’s comparison of campus conduct and its consequences against the policing and courts encountered by the young men she wrote about, a comparison Zadek then restated in his own words; in 2020 it figures only as the institution where Whittington holds a professorship, in an episode about judicial review. The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatment, and no exchange between the two guests on the subject.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Princeton’s founding, its location, its governance, its curriculum, its admissions, its endowment, or its role in any legal or political controversy. They do not state what Speak Freely or Repugnant Laws argue, beyond Zadek’s description of the latter’s subject matter. They do not report any statement by Whittington about Princeton, and Goffman’s remarks about Princeton students are her characterization of conduct she observed or heard about, not an institutional finding. Nothing in these two episodes supports an article about the university itself.