Education | Princeton Magazine

Stuart School and NCGLS Host Women in Business for Virtual Alumnae Career Lunch

On the Monday before winter break, the National Center for Girls’ Leadership (NCGLS) at Stuart hosted a virtual Women in Leadership career lunch featuring four Stuart alums and a current parent with careers in business. Students cycled through Google Meet breakout rooms that were hosted by leadership endorsement candidates and guests shared their career journeys, lessons learned from mistakes, and reflections on their Stuart experience. Virtual panels like these have allowed Stuart Country Day to give current students access to more experts within the alumnae community who would not normally be able to attend in person. more

Rubin Museum’s New AWAKEN Podcast with Laurie Anderson

The Rubin Museum in New York City presents AWAKEN, a podcast hosted by acclaimed musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson about the dynamic path to enlightenment and what it means to “wake up.” In 10 episodes, the audience is led into a “deep dive” through the personal stories of guests who share how they’ve experienced a shift in their awareness, and as a result, their perspectives on life. From deep introspection to curious, yet life-changing subtle inquiries, awakening can take on many forms, from the mundane to the sacred. more

Book by PU Professor Named to “Financial Times” Best Books List

A book authored by local historian Harold James has been named to the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2021: Politics List.

The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization, published by Yale University Press, reveals the origins of key buzzwords and concepts used in contemporary political debate such as “neoliberalism,” “geopolitics,” and “globalization,” while highlighting communication challenges associated with their misuse. more

Give the Gift of a Whitney Membership This Holiday Season

Image Source: www.whitney.org

Delight, inspire, and surprise the art lover and creative talent in your life with a Gift Whitney Membership this holiday season. Members enjoy unlimited free admission, half-priced guest tickets, dedicated viewings, Whitney Gift Store discounts, early admission to new exhibits, and so much more. more

Center for Contemporary Art Offers Winter Courses for Children & Teens with ASD and Other Special Needs

The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster will be offering two winter art courses for children and teens with ASD and other special needs. Both classes will be taught in person.

The art course for children ages 6-10 will be taught on Mondays at 4-4:45 p.m. from January 24-March 7.

The art course for children ages 11-16 with special needs will be taught on Mondays at 5-5:45 p.m. from January 24-March 7. more

Start a New Year Tradition with the Arts Council of Princeton

The new year is coming, and with all the challenges that many of us have endured over the past couple of years, the Arts Council of Princeton has partnered with Miya Table & Home to create a community project that is a refresh, a restart, and a recommitment to our personal goals, hopes, and dreams. This special Daruma workshop will take place on Tuesday, December 28 from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Arts Council of Princeton, located at 102 Witherspoon Street. more

Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing Presents Fall 2021 Student Reading

Part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series at Princeton

Students enrolled in fall creative writing courses in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University will read from their new works of fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and literary translation on Tuesday, December 7 at 5 p.m. in the Chancellor Green Rotunda on the Princeton campus as part of the Program’s Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series. The reading is the culmination of students’ work in the Program in Creative Writing’s fall creative writing workshops. more

PBS’s “Drive by History: Eats” Asks and Answers What Historical Figures May Have Eaten

What would George Washington or Walt Whitman have dined on? The new PBS series Drive by History: Eats answers these questions and more as it dives deep into New Jersey’s culinary past.

In the first episode, New Jersey resident and Blair Academy alum Melissa F. Clark ’05 explores a meal designed to curry George Washington’s favor at The Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. Using ingredients that would have been on hand during the summer of 1778 and employing the food trends popular during the period, Clark dishes up a delectable fried breaded chicken with sorrel sauce and raspberry fool for dessert. more

The Hun School Welcomes Freestyle Love Supreme Academy

Image Source: Hun School Office of Communications

On Wednesday, November 17, The Hun School welcomed Freestyle Love Supreme Academy to campus as part of the School’s Centennial Speaker Series and Her at Hun: Celebrating 50 Years of Girls and Women. The outdoor performance was high-energy, interactive, and carried a message of positivity and inclusivity.

Freestyle Love Supreme (FLS) was conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, and Anthony Veneziale. The group is currently performing on Broadway and are the subject of a Grammy Award-winning documentary on Hulu. FLS Academy are talented members of the cast who spin cues from the audience into humorous bits, instantaneous songs, and fully realized musical numbers. From singing to rapping to beatboxing with harmonies and freestyle flow, each show is unique to their audience. more

Paul Muldoon Livestream Event, December 1

Labyrinth Books in Princeton will host a hybrid, livestream event with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon on Wednesday, December 1 at 6 p.m. Muldoon will introduce his 14th collection of poetry, entitled Howdie-Skelp: Poems. He will be joined by fellow poet Michael Dickman.

A ‘howdie-skelp’ is the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn. It’s a wake-up call. A call to action. The poems in Howdie-Skelp include a nightmarish remake of The Waste Land, an elegy for his fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson, a crown of sonnets that responds to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a translation from the ninth-century Irish, and a Yeatsian sequence of ekphrastic poems that call into question the very idea of an ‘affront’ to good taste. Muldoon is a poet who continues not only to capture but to hold our attention. more

Fused Glass Ornament Workshop at WWAC

Just in time for the holidays, West Windsor Arts Council (WWAC) is offering a fused glass ornament workshop on Wednesday, November 24 at 3 p.m. at 952 Alexander Road in Princeton Junction.

The class will be two hours long, during which participants will make three of their own inspired keepsake glass ornaments. The class will include hands-on instruction on how to design several ornaments for tack fusing, including cutting small pieces of glass and using a flame to shape glass stringers. The participants will glue their ornaments and fuse them together using a special kiln in the studio. The finished products will be returned to the students in 7-10 days, complete with a silver-plated bail for hanging on their Christmas tree. more

Women Inspiring Women Celebrates its 8th Global Event at Montclair State

The 8th annual Women Entrepreneurship Week (WEW) at Montclair State University was kicked off by cosmetics giant Bobbi Brown in conversation with friend and award-winning WNBC-TV reporter Tracie Strahan.

Brown was one of a dozen speakers who shared their stories of pivoting, as well as of failures and successes along their entrepreneurial journeys with the in-person and virtual audience. WEW is a global event, as students and attendees from 250 universities in 40 countries and 48 states participated this year, said Mimi Feliciano, a Montclair State University Advisory Board member for The Mimi & Edwin Feliciano School of Business and board member of the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (FCE&I), which hosted the event. more

National Geographic Live: “Secrets of the Whales,” Nov. 7

Image Source: https://www.mccarter.org

McCarter Theatre inaugurates its new series of three National Geographic Live Sunday afternoons featuring the world’s leading explorers, adventurers, writers, and photographers, bringing their work from the pages of the iconic magazine to the stage. It kicks off with Brian Skerry’s Secrets of the Whales, based on a Disney + channel TV special featured as part of its Earth Day observances this past April. more

PU Public Lectures Welcomes AI Scholar Kate Crawford

Professor Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social and political implications of artificial intelligence (AI). Her work focuses on understanding large-scale data systems in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. Crawford will deliver a free public lecture at Princeton University’s McCosh 50 on Wednesday, October 27 from 5 to 6:15 p.m. Crawford will also be joined by Wendy Brown, a political theorist who works across the history of political thought, political economy, and critical legal theory. more

Four George School Students Named National Merit Semifinalists

George School has announced that Anjali Amin ’22, Forest Ho-Chen ’22, Christian (Zachary) Kalb ’22, and Arshdeep (Arshi) Nagra ’22 have each been named National Merit Semifinalists in the 67th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

These four students are among 16,000 semifinalists throughout the country, each qualifying for one of the 7,500 available National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $30 million that will be offered in the spring. more

“Secret History of American River People” with Artist/Director Wes Modes

Join Morven Museum for a virtual evening with Wes Modes to reveal “A Secret History of American River People” on Thursday, October 28 beginning at 6:30 p.m. Tickets range from $10-15 and can be purchased online at https://bit.ly/3ETY44D.

The painter and ornithologist Gerard Rutgers Hardenbergh lived and painted in a rustic houseboat along the shores of the Scow Ditch in Bay Head, New Jersey. For more than a century, shantyboat communities sprung up in industrial towns and out-of-the-way rural areas on rivers and lakes all over the continent. more

NJIT Continues Rankings Climb

New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) ranks in the top quarter of U.S. universities and colleges in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings for 2022.

For the second year in a row, NJIT has earned a spot in the top 25 percent of universities, jumping another 16 spots from the 2021 rankings and an impressive 200 places since 2017. Additionally, NJIT is the second highest ranked public university in New Jersey among schools offering degrees in several disciplines, including business, engineering, architecture, and history.

“Since the ranking’s inaugural year, NJIT has steadily climbed the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education U.S. rankings,” said Fadi P. Deek, NJIT provost and senior executive vice president. “Our upward trajectory and improved standing is a testament to focused and strategic improvements we are making in our academic programs and faculty, and the positive feedback provided by our students.” more

Jeff Whetsone Named Director of Princeton University’s Program in Visual Arts

Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has named award-winning photographer Jeff Whetstone as the new director of the University’s Program in Visual Arts. Whetstone has been a member of the visual arts faculty since 2015 and succeeds Martha Friedman, who has directed the program since 2016 and will return to teaching full-time.

Jeff Whetstone’s photographs and films imagine America through lenses of anthropology and mythology. His Post-Pleistocene series illuminates the depths of wild caves in Alabama and Tennessee where layers of human markings reveal millennia of cultural evolution. His ongoing New Wilderness project portrays a human-centric American wilderness and questions how human cultural connection to the wild is revealed in contemporary times. Whetstone’s artwork also investigates the role gender, geography, and heritage play in defining the human position in the natural world. A self-described biologist at heart, he explores the cyclical and evolving narrative of landscapes as a force that compels humans to adapt. His work varies considerably with each project, but always addresses the particularities of a place and explores interplay between geography and human experience. For Whetstone, the natural world is a cultural experience, and the built environment is firmly, yet problematically, situated within the web of nature. more

Lawrenceville School Welcomes First Orion Military Scholars

Lawrenceville is pleased to welcome the first class of Orion Military Scholars to the School, Rachel Deoki ’25 and Ben McCormick ’24. Lawrenceville is among the founding partners of the Orion Military Scholarship Fund (OMSF), teaming with select boarding schools to provide merit-based scholarships to children of active-duty U.S. service members. Deoki and McCormick’s fathers serve in the Army and Navy, respectively.

Lawrenceville’s Dean of Enrollment Management Greg Buckles has worked closely with OMSF, which he called “an incredible resource.… We’re leveraging their expertise to help us find outstanding students we know will be a good match for Lawrenceville,” he said. more

Kathryn Foster

Mapping the Future of TCNJ

By Wendy Greenberg | Portraits by Jeffrey E. Tryon

Dr. Kathryn A. Foster, who launched her own academic career as an undergraduate geography major, has found her place — as president of The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). She feels it was a good spot to land. “Taking this position was the best decision I’ve ever made,” she said.

Foster’s presidency seems to suit the school too. Nestled in a suburban setting in Ewing Township not far from well-known neighbors Princeton University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, it could be easy to overlook TCNJ.

Yet the school formerly known as Trenton State College has amassed accolades. Among them, TCNJ is ranked the No. 1 public institution among regional universities in the North by U.S. News & World Report (fifth overall). Its 2006 awarding of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter by the prestigious national academic honor society cemented its status as a selective college. TCNJ maintains the seventh highest four-year graduation rate among all public colleges and universities, and it is ranked by Money magazine as one of the top 15 public colleges “most likely to pay off financially.” Under Foster, fiscal 2021 was one of TCNJ’s strongest fundraising years.

When visitors walk onto the campus with its landscaped walkways, green quadrants, and mix of stately Georgian red brick buildings (adjacent to a new commercial center with restaurants and a Barnes and Noble bookstore), “their jaws drop,” said Foster, who has updated buildings and infrastructure. more