Although, or perhaps because, the place was far from meddling distraction, it was an environment ideally suited to forging the affairs of a new nation. This hall from which I speak, Nassau Hall, with its original occupants, its site as the meeting place of the first state legislature of New Jersey, as well as the Continental Congress of 1783, bears witness to the stamina, the prescience of the originating idea taking root in hospitable soil. I have a personal interest in the translation of tradition, of history, into a livable present and a civilized future. I have personal interests in methods by which histories are disrupted, how intervention can extinguish cultural memory or drive it underground to avoid eclipse. There are in this country parallel histories of the same nativity, with the same agenda of freedom, with other landscapes struggling for preservation and for new life.
Universities play a powerful mnemonic role.
So while Princeton remains legitimately enthralled with the place of the idea, it must continue to be equally faithful to the idea of the place. The idea of the place is visionary, is change, throbs with life and leans toward the edge. The idea of the place is burrowing into the heart of a theory, of a concept, casting its gaze toward the limitlessness of the universe, not merely moving toward the future but in certain instances driving it. The idea of the place despises those forces in academic institutions so fearful of independent thought, so alarmed by challenge they prefer oblivion, irrelevance rather than shoulder the hard responsibilities of change. Negotiating those two ideas, conservation and change, is no small matter.