第1个回答 2010-03-22
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution.
Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering.Princeton does not offer professional schooling generally, but it does offer professional master's degrees (mostly through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) and doctoral programs.
Founded in 1746 at Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the College of New Jersey, it was moved to Newark in 1747, then to Princeton in 1756 and renamed Princeton University in 1896.(The present-day The College of New Jersey in nearby Ewing, New Jersey, is an unrelated institution.)
Princeton was the fourth institution of higher education in the U.S. to conduct classes. The university, unlike most American universities that were founded at the same time, did not have an official religious affiliation. At one time, it had close ties to the Presbyterian Church, but today it is nonsectarian and makes no spiritual demands of its students.[The university has ties with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Westminster Choir College of Rider University.
History
New Light Presbyterians founded the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, in 1746 in order to train ministers dedicated to their views. The college was the educational and religious capital of Scotch-Irish America. In 1756, the college moved to Princeton, New Jersey.
Following the untimely deaths of its first five presidents, the college enjoyed a long period of stability during 1768-94 under Reverend John Witherspoon. Military occupation and the Battle of Princeton severely damaged the college during the war. In another disaster, fire destroyed Nassau Hall in March 1802. Student unrest led to an explosion at the Nassau Hall front door and several other incidents in 1814. Witherspoon was a prominent religious and political leader; and an original signer of the Declaration of independence and the Articles of Confederation.
Before the construction of Stanhope Hall in 1803, the college's sole building was Nassau Hall[11]. The college also adopted orange as its school color from William III. During the summer of 1783, the Continental Congress met in Nassau Hall, making Princeton the country's capital for four months. The much-abused landmark survived bombardment with cannonballs in the Revolutionary War when General Washington struggled to wrest the building from British control, as well as later fires in 1802 and 1855 that left only its walls standing. Rebuilt by Joseph Henry Latrobe, John Notman and John Witherspoon, the modern Nassau Hall has been much revised and expanded from the original one that was designed by Robert Smith. Over the centuries, its role shifted from an all-purpose building, comprising office, dormitory, library, and classroom space, to classroom space exclusively, to its present role as the administrative center of the university. Originally, the sculptures in front of the building were lions, as a gift in 1879. These were later replaced with tigers in 1911.
James McCosh took office as the college's president in 1868 and lifted the institution out of a low period that had been brought about by the Civil War. During his two decades of service, he overhauled the curriculum, oversaw an expansion of inquiry into the sciences, and supervised the addition of a number of buildings in the High Victorian Gothic style to the campus. McCosh Hall is named in his honor.
In 1896, the college officially changed its name from the College of New Jersey to Princeton University to honor the town in which it resides. During this year, the college also underwent large expansion and officially became a university. Under Woodrow Wilson, Princeton introduced the preceptorial system in 1905, a then-unique concept that augmented the standard lecture method of teaching with a more personal form in which small groups of students, or precepts, could interact with a single instructor, or preceptor, in their field of interest.
In 1969, Princeton University first admitted women as undergraduates. In 1887, the university had actually maintained and staffed a sister college, Evelyn College for Women, in the town of Princeton on Evelyn and Nassau streets. It was closed after roughly a decade of operation. Instead, Bryn Mawr College, a member of the Seven Sisters, was traditionally recognized as Princeton's sister school. After abortive discussions with Sarah Lawrence College to relocate the women's college to Princeton and merge it with the University in 1967, the administration decided to admit women and turned to the issue of transforming the school's operations and facilities into a female-friendly campus. The administration had barely finished these plans in April 1969 when the admission's office began mailing out its acceptance letters. Its five-year coeducation plan provided $7.8 million for the development of new facilities that would eventually house and educate 650 women students at Princeton by 1974. Ultimately, 148 women, consisting of 100 freshwomen and transfer students of other years, entered Princeton on September 6, 1969 amidst much media attention. (Princeton enrolled its first female graduate student, Sabra Follett Meserve, as a Ph.D. candidate in Turkish history in 1961. A handful of undergraduate women had studied at Princeton from 1963 on, spending their junior year there to study "critical languages" in which Princeton's offerings surpassed those of their home institutions. They were considered regular students for their year on campus, but were not candidates for a Princeton degree.)
As a result of a 1979 lawsuit by Sally Frank, Princeton's eating clubs were required to go coeducational in 1991, after Tiger Inn's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.本回答被提问者采纳