Princeton University Archives

"This being Fourth of July Week, and following so closely upon Commencement, the rummies have been very busy in making way with bad rum..."

"It struck some of the old fogies queerly on their visit to Princeton College commencement to find the students arrayed in mortarboards and gowns. It was not so in the ’20’s, when my father was there, nor later when the Whig Society made me an adopted graduate for my father’s sake."

Such a town is inhabited of course by plain people, who are apt to look up to students, and on whom students are apt to look down. As soon as such people become dependent on students for a part of their subsistence, they begin, of course, to accord with their wishes, and soon after, to countenance and aid their vicious pursuits. The Students then corrupt the inhabitants, and the inhabitants corrupt the Students. … If I am not deceived, the College at Princeton has suffered severely from this source.

“Would that our faculty could see the evils of a grading system in any form, and that we might forever be freed from its harmful influence!”

“This style of weather leads to profanity and ice cream.”

"It was a male-female ratio that made finding a seat for dinner in Commons akin to 'a stroll down death row,' as my classmate, Jane Leifer, once described it."

"Most young ladies would rather hurry down with a big trunk in a crowded special train, and go to four teas, meet a score of young men apiece whom they will never see again, dance all night, and then, in a few minutes, arise looking as fresh as they did on Easter Sunday, and smile good-byes at the depot to the breakfastless young men whom they have forsaken and sleepy to try to go on where they left off, while they themselves hurry back to town, and to anther dance the next night."

"None but ordinary business; viz., the reading of Excuses & passing judgement upon them."