By Josue Giron
Jersey City, NJ
With Election Day three months away, New Jersey Democratic Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker is making his case for reelection by pointing to his opposition to the Trump administration and his background as a scientist.
By Kevin Song
New York City, NY
Based on the real-life experience of actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani, ‘The Big Sick’ tells the story of Kumail’s struggles living as a comedian and part-time Uber driver in Chicago. Kumail meets a girl named Emily at one of his shows, and the two embark on a turbulent relationship.
By Jadyn Vizcaino-Bishock
Jersey City, NJ
To the academic world, Wikipedia is synonymous with unreliable information. But that’s not really the case.
The major problem people have with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit any page on the website. This leads to misconceptions that the site is full of lies and exaggerations. However, these faults are the natural result of democratizing information.
By Briana Jasso
Dallas, TX
On November 18, 2015, Princeton students gathered in University President Christopher Eisgruber’s office in Nassau Hall. They came with a demand to rename campus buildings that commemorate Woodrow Wilson, the former president of the United States and the university.
By Cynthia Guerrero
Chicago, IL
On a spring day in 2016, cries echoed throughout Princeton University’s Alexander Hall as students and faculty members chanted, “What do we want? Divestment. When do we want it? Now.”
Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR) had organized the protest to demand that Princeton divest from private prison companies, a practice which they claim makes the university complicit in one of the greatest civil and human rights violations of our time.
By HanYing Jiang and Williams Mejia
Madison, WI and New Brunswick, NJ
Though President Trump’s approval rating is extremely low, some people interviewed on a recent Friday evening in downtown Princeton grudgingly admitted that he has a few redeeming qualities.
Pranav Bachu, a student at the University of Illinois, said he saw “some rationale” for Trump’s strong anti-immigration views. Although he believes that Trump’s perspective on immigration restriction is too extreme, he did agree that some more vetting is needed, citing claims of Indian students applying for visas through falsified information.
By Grace Fashanu
Spring, TX
Matthew Penza and Jacob Berman consider themselves minorities on Princeton’s majority-liberal campus. Both are conservative students unafraid of promoting their worldviews, but neither feels particularly isolated.
“Statistically, we are definitely a minority,” Penza said. “As far as discrimination or backlash, backlash often. Discrimination, I wouldn’t say so.”
The Brookings Institute has found that 37 percent of millennials consider themselves liberal while 38 percent consider themselves moderate. Penza and Berman belong to the 26 percent who consider themselves conservative, a group that represents a wide diversity of thought.
“Even within the conservative groups, a lot of the people dn’t agree with each other,” said Penza. “We’ve got classical liberals, we have libertarians, we have a few centrists.” Penza is a minority within the minority: He considers himself a monarchist — he believes we should be governed by a king.
Penza, a rising junior majoring in computer science, is a member of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, a conservative debate club; Princeton Pro-Life; and the Anscombe Society, which promotes monogamy and traditional gender roles. He participates every year in the March for Life and has brought anti-abortion and anti-pornography speakers to Princeton. Penza aspires to bring other conservative heroes, including writers Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz, to campus.
Penza says his conservative values stem from his family and his Catholic faith. Those childhood beliefs intensified when he learned about John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers in his history classes — and realized he disagreed with them. “I just started to look at how different political ideologies developed, and conservatism made the most sense to me,” he said.
Penza said he’s only had one real confrontation with someone with opposing views at Princeton, and it wasn’t with a liberal student, but a fellow writer at The Princeton Tory, the conservative newspaper on campus. They disagreed on whether the Republican Party should be a “big tent,” or, as Berman advocates, only cater to traditional conservatives.
Berman, a rising sophomore at Princeton University and the vice president of the College Republicans, grew up in a conservative family in New York and refined his ideas by reading The New York Times to become more knowledgeable about current events. He considers himself fiscally conservative but “culturally libertarian” on issues like same-sex marriage. “I really think that a limited government and free market … would create the most successful government,” Berman said.
Berman said that he finds identity politics distasteful. He argued that policy, not race and gender, should determine whom you vote for. “They should be able to consider these ideas on their own […] without these stereotypes that stick in their heads,” he said.
By Elyse Luecke
St. Louis, MO
Walking into Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert’s office is like walking into a living room: homemade cards, family photos, and various resource books sit on the shelves behind her semi-circle desk, alongside a prominently featured greeting card from the Obama family. A small, light green cactus in a flower pot decorates her work space. The olive green walls are bare.
By Diana Gonzalez-Castillo
Littlerock, CA
It’s not easy for an Ivy League school to make the NCAA tournament. So when Skye Ettin, an assistant head coach of Princeton’s men’s basketball team, led his players onto the NCAA tournament stage this past March, it was a big deal.
This was his first season as a coach and, at only 25, Ettin is still learning “how to run a program,” he said. But he also considers his age to be a positive.
By Delsee Choudhury and Takyra Moore
Atlantic City, NJ and Cary, MS
Princeton University was one of the last Ivy League schools to implement a gender-inclusive housing policy for its students, but starting this fall, students will be allowed to choose roommates regardless of gender.
Gender-inclusive housing allows different genders to share a dorm room. It has become increasingly popular as campuses aim to be more welcoming to transgender students. “It was eye-opening to see how far behind we were,” said Vice President for Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun.
The Princeton Summer Journal 