By Wendy Greenberg
Princeton community residents can explore how to distinguish science from pseudoscience by joining the Princeton University campus community in its Pre-Read program, a 12-year tradition in which all incoming students, and often the greater Princeton community, read and discuss one book.
The selection for the incoming Class of 2029 is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience by Professor Michael D. Gordin, the dean of the College.
While the campus will have several opportunities to discuss the book with Gordin, other faculty, and among themselves, Princeton residents can discuss their common reading experience on Tuesday, September 16 at the Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon Street. Registration for the event opens August 15 at princetonlibrary.org, and those who register will receive a copy of the book while supplies last. For those who want to start now, the book is available through Labyrinth Books in Princeton, a store spokesperson confirmed. At the community event, Gordin will be in conversation with Corina Tarnita, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
“When the author’s schedule permits, we are eager to include the community as part of the University’s Pre-Read tradition,” said Kristin Appleget, assistant vice president for community and regional affairs, in an email. “We were delighted that Dean Gordin was available to do an extra talk this fall during the many Pre-Read gatherings on campus and partnering with the Princeton Public Library — the community’s living room — made a perfect location for the event.” She noted that a similar library gathering was held at the library in 2019 when James Williams’ Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy was “the featured Pre-Read with a sell-out audience and a thoughtful discussion. We are looking forward to this year’s ‘Community Read of the Pre-Read.’”
The Pre-Read program, initiated by University President Christopher L. Eisgruber in 2013, introduces incoming undergraduate students to Princeton’s intellectual life, as members of the incoming class read the same book selected by Eisgruber and sent to them before they arrive on campus. Many times the book has had Princeton connections, for example, the Pre-Read selection for the Class of 2022 was Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech by Keith Whittington, a professor in Princeton’s Department of Politics; the Pre-Read for the Class of 2026 was Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena. Its author, Jordan Salama, is a member of Princeton’s Class of 2019.
A Forbes Magazine 2023 article stated that on many campuses, pre-reading “has been in place long enough to be regarded as a campus rite of passage.” Princeton’s selection that year, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future by Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa was noted in the article.
Gordin’s book explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address the problem of deciding what is pseudoscience, and what is not, arguing that “by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today,” according to the publisher, Oxford University Press.
Continues the publisher: “Everyone has heard of the term ‘pseudoscience,’ typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. . . But defining what makes these fields ‘pseudo’ is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. . . . On the Fringe explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation.”
In a letter to incoming students introducing the book, Eisgruber wrote that he “had many reasons for choosing On the Fringe as this year’s Pre-Read. One is that it is a fun way to acquaint (students) with Princeton’s dean of the College — the senior administrator responsible for our undergraduate academic program.”
Another reason he likes the book, he said in the letter, is that On the Fringe grew out of a class that Gordin taught to Princeton undergraduates. Most importantly, he wrote, it “invites conversation about the purposes of the liberal arts curriculum that awaits you at Princeton. Our admission website says that Princeton’s liberal arts education aims to give you an “expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.”
Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, the director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and the acting chair of the Department of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of modern science in Russia, Europe, and North America, in particular on issues related to the history of fringe science, the early years of the nuclear arms race, Russian and Soviet science, language and science, and Albert Einstein. He is the author of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English, and Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly.