during her remaining years in college, in law school, and then as a law professor, argued that the university and the clubs were inextricably bound. There were no members who were not students. The university relied on the clubs to provide services it could not offer. Thus the clubs should be held accountable under the same rules barring discrimination among public accommodations. The case cranked on for fourteen years, until it reached the New Jersey Supreme Court. The court agreed with Frank and ordered the all-male clubs to admit women.
The CURL process also took decades and continued through three university presidents. Eventually the committee issued a report calling for Princeton to institute a college system. The trustees accepted it, and the university raised hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for these new internal entities.
Today Princeton has six residential colleges. Some of the clubs remain selective, but all admit women. It took nearlythirty years, but through the hard work of hundreds of people, it is a less discriminatory campus.
“Do you think thirty years is a long time or a short time for major institutional change?” I asked a classmate over dinner about a year ago.
He paused and thought for a moment. “Of course in some ways it should have happened much faster,” he said. “But then again, there is always the chance that it might never have happened at all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Faith
AND
Fortune
When was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?
MATTHEW 25: 38–39
W hile we were still in France, we visited the great cathedrals and monasteries—Notre Dame, Beauvais, Sainte-Chapelle, Mont Saint Michel—and each time I found myself deeply moved. The soaring stone, the stunning stained glass windows, and the cool, peaceful interiors flickering with thousands of candles quelled me into silence whenever I stepped inside. On the site of the magnificent cathedral of Chartres, fifty miles outside Paris, five churches had risen in sequence before the final building began to take shape nearly a thousand years ago. The idea that more than fifty generations of men and women had devoted themselves to the building, protection, and improvement of this place of worship astonished me.
I had grown up as a nominal Christian; our family attendedchurch at Christmas and Easter and a few other times a year. I had enjoyed my engagement with a church youth group in Paris, but I did not feel I understood the world’s religions, or my own supposed faith. I wanted to remedy this, so over the years I occasionally dipped into the Bible, particularly the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, trying to read these unusual stories for myself.
I discovered, to my surprise, that most of my early impressions about Jesus of Nazareth had been false. Throughout my childhood Jesus had appeared to me as a benevolent authority figure, friendly in an abstract way, a distant leader venerated in stone and stained glass and in the tedious words of centuries-old prayers. As a teenager I thought that the whole enterprise of church reeked of hypocrisy, which in my calculus was perhaps the greatest of all sins. Through my youthful eyes the world was a mess, and much of the responsibility lay with the unwillingness of religious people to live up to the beautiful and challenging words of their own faiths.
To my surprise, I learned when I opened up the New Testament that Jesus had agreed with this critique. Instead of appearing as a kind of super-parent, handing out exhortations to people who were bad to be good, Jesus reserved his most acute, and in some cases blistering, criticism for those who took on the trappings and practice of religion but then used their piety as an excuse to judge and condemn others. He explicitly confronted those who were preoccupied with superficial forms of public behavior while they neglected the
The CURL process also took decades and continued through three university presidents. Eventually the committee issued a report calling for Princeton to institute a college system. The trustees accepted it, and the university raised hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for these new internal entities.
Today Princeton has six residential colleges. Some of the clubs remain selective, but all admit women. It took nearlythirty years, but through the hard work of hundreds of people, it is a less discriminatory campus.
“Do you think thirty years is a long time or a short time for major institutional change?” I asked a classmate over dinner about a year ago.
He paused and thought for a moment. “Of course in some ways it should have happened much faster,” he said. “But then again, there is always the chance that it might never have happened at all.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Faith
AND
Fortune
When was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?
MATTHEW 25: 38–39
W hile we were still in France, we visited the great cathedrals and monasteries—Notre Dame, Beauvais, Sainte-Chapelle, Mont Saint Michel—and each time I found myself deeply moved. The soaring stone, the stunning stained glass windows, and the cool, peaceful interiors flickering with thousands of candles quelled me into silence whenever I stepped inside. On the site of the magnificent cathedral of Chartres, fifty miles outside Paris, five churches had risen in sequence before the final building began to take shape nearly a thousand years ago. The idea that more than fifty generations of men and women had devoted themselves to the building, protection, and improvement of this place of worship astonished me.
I had grown up as a nominal Christian; our family attendedchurch at Christmas and Easter and a few other times a year. I had enjoyed my engagement with a church youth group in Paris, but I did not feel I understood the world’s religions, or my own supposed faith. I wanted to remedy this, so over the years I occasionally dipped into the Bible, particularly the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, trying to read these unusual stories for myself.
I discovered, to my surprise, that most of my early impressions about Jesus of Nazareth had been false. Throughout my childhood Jesus had appeared to me as a benevolent authority figure, friendly in an abstract way, a distant leader venerated in stone and stained glass and in the tedious words of centuries-old prayers. As a teenager I thought that the whole enterprise of church reeked of hypocrisy, which in my calculus was perhaps the greatest of all sins. Through my youthful eyes the world was a mess, and much of the responsibility lay with the unwillingness of religious people to live up to the beautiful and challenging words of their own faiths.
To my surprise, I learned when I opened up the New Testament that Jesus had agreed with this critique. Instead of appearing as a kind of super-parent, handing out exhortations to people who were bad to be good, Jesus reserved his most acute, and in some cases blistering, criticism for those who took on the trappings and practice of religion but then used their piety as an excuse to judge and condemn others. He explicitly confronted those who were preoccupied with superficial forms of public behavior while they neglected the
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