A Postcard from Princeton

Dr. V had to give a talk at Princeton, and I tagged along. We expected an elite university (our milieu for the last decade). What we didn’t expect was how stunningly beautiful the town would be.

Everything felt curated: the neoclassical facades, the quiet wealth (it has a Hermes store for Heaven’s sake), the perfectly measured charm of a place that knows exactly what it is.

It made me think of how different America’s internal geography is from the UK or France. In Europe, the capital is the cultural and intellectual heart—London, Paris. In the US, it’s more like Germany or Italy: multiple regional power centers, city-states in all but name.

And Princeton is one of them. Unlike either of the Cambridges:

• Cambridge, Massachusetts is a behemoth, flowing into the urban sprawl of Boston, powered by MIT and Harvard.

• Cambridge, UK is insular, its 31 colleges often more concerned with their individual legacy than the town around them.

But Princeton, somehow, has achieved a kind of graceful middle ground. It’s not sprawling, but it breathes. It doesn’t dominate, but it defines.

Gated Ideas in a Gated Town

That evening, we were invited to an extraordinary dinner party hosted by a Princeton professor. The kind of gathering where you’re surrounded by brilliance, good wine, and the conviction that ideas still matter.

But I couldn’t help noticing something else: college professors in places like Princeton are granted the luxury of their ideals, in large part because the entire ecosystem is so structurally exclusionary.

As of 2024, the median home price in Princeton, NJ is over $1.1 million—nearly five times the U.S. national average. Rental prices are similarly astronomical. It is demographically filtered, spatially curated, and intellectually fortified.

Within that bubble, you’ll hear eloquent defenses of democratic socialism, but it’s hard to ignore that tenure-track positions are harder to land than an Ivy League admit—and perhaps just as arbitrary.

And as much as no one wants to say it aloud:

Numerous studies have shown that Asian Americans are underrepresented in elite faculty positions relative to their qualifications—particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where subjectivity in hiring runs highest.

It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a selection problem, compounded by cultural bias and institutional inertia.

America in Microcosm

Just a few minutes away from this curated idyll are Trenton and New Brunswick—working-class, immigrant-heavy, racially diverse. Princeton, by contrast, is gorgeous, white, and model minority (Tiger Mom’s galore).

The contrast isn’t just economic—it’s institutional.

First at Morven, and since 1982, at Drumthwacket—a colonial mansion tucked into the town’s leafy heart.

Technically, not all governors have lived there. But still—the symbolism writes itself:

Only in America could the aesthetic of governance matter more than proximity to the governed. The wealth gap isn’t subtle—it’s spatial, architectural, and historical.

The U.S. is now the most unequal developed country in the world:

• In 1980, the top 1% held about 10% of national income.

• Today, they hold over 20%, (30% of national wealth) while real wages for the bottom half have stagnated (the bottom 50% own 2.8% of national wealth; it’s a per capital wealth differential of 50x between the top decile and the bottom half).

• By Gini coefficient, the U.S. ranks as the most unequal among G7 nations, and in the top 15 globally.

America in Microcosm (continued)

Princeton, for all its symmetry and charm, is a mirror—reflecting the best of American soft power and the worst of its structural imbalance.

It is a world unto itself. Beautiful. Immaculate. And bordered by realities it doesn’t have to touch.

Questions for the Curious:

• Is elite academic liberalism still credible when it’s practiced from within such enclaves?

• Can tenure-track academia survive as a serious pipeline for ideas if its selection processes remain this opaque?

• And for those excluded—by race, class, or ideology—where do real intellectual alternatives now come from?