By Wendy Greenberg
Some lesser known Princeton University faculty, alumni, and others were acknowledged last month as the university dedicated a dozen Prospect House spaces, recognizing how the individuals shaped the University and beyond, many in the face of adversity.
The honorees ranged across time from Daniel Wallace Culp, a former enslaved man who became an influential pastor and author, to Class of 1944 graduate John Doar, a prominent figure in the civil rights movement and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, to Class of 1980 graduate Sally Frank, who as a student successfully filed a suit that opened the last all-male eating clubs to women, according to a University press release.
“Whether they were breaking the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War II, helping to vindicate civil rights and achieve equality, or blazing trails for women on campus and beyond, these 12 individuals displayed tenacity,” President Christopher L. Eisgruber said in the release. “Their tenacity enabled them to excel. To persevere. To lead. To pursue their passions. To forge new paths. To fight injustices.”
Frank — the only living honoree — attended the event. “This means the world to me. I could have never imagined this when I was a student here,” she said, through the University.
Other families of honorees were present, including the family of Chien-Shiung Wu, an experimental physicist who taught at Princeton in the 1940s. Linda Colon, Class of 1975, said about her late husband Charles Hey-Maestre, Class of 1977, who fought for underserved people in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, “Charlie would just be so pleased. Princeton meant a lot to him.”
The honorees and the Prospect House spaces named for them, as noted on the press release, are as follows:
Daniel Wallace Culp (Daniel Wallace Culp Parlor) was born in 1852 as an enslaved person in South Carolina. He attended the Princeton Theological Seminary after the Civil War and earned his degree in 1879. He attended Princeton University classes with the support of then-President James McCosh, despite objections from students, and became a minister, physician, lecturer, and essayist who fought to raise awareness of Black intellectuals and their work.
John Doar ’44 (John Doar Dining Room) was a prominent figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He completed his law degree at the University of California-Berkeley, and from 1960 to 1967, as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, he played a key role in the drafting and enforcement of federal civil rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his role representing the federal government, Doar accompanied James Meredith as he became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962. Doar received an honorary degree from Princeton in 1968 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and served as a University trustee from 1969 to 1979.
Sally Frank ’80 (Sally Frank Café) is a trailblazing figure in the history of women at Princeton who in 1979, filed a lawsuit challenging the exclusion of women from the three undergraduate eating clubs that remained all male after the University’s 1969 implementation of coeducation. All three clubs began admitting women by 1991 and Frank officially won her lawsuit in 1992. Frank earned a master’s degree from Antioch University and her law degree from New York University School of Law. She is currently a professor of law at Drake University.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould (Katharine Fullerton Gerould Room), born in 1879, was a prolific writer and novelist whose work was published in national magazines. She taught English and writing at Bryn Mawr College until she moved to Princeton following her 1910 marriage to a Princeton professor. Although she often found herself excluded from the University’s intellectual community, she continued to write and received national recognition for her work. She also supported student literary and news organizations.
Charles Hey-Maestre ’77 (Charles Hey-Maestre Room) spent his legal career fighting for the rights of underserved and marginalized people in Puerto Rico. He was executive director of Puerto Rico Legal Services and was a staff attorney and administrator at the Puerto Rican Civil Rights Institute, and in private practice argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico. As an undergraduate, Hey-Maestre helped establish the student organization Acción Puertorriqueña. He earned his law degree from the New York University School of Law.
John Nash, Ph.D. ’50 (John Nash Library) received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 for his breakthrough work in game theory., and the 2015 Abel Prize in mathematics from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Nash joined the faculty of MIT in 1951 and returned to Princeton as a senior research mathematician in 1995. His genius at math and his schizophrenia were the subject of the award-winning book and movie A Beautiful Mind.
Franklin S. Odo ’61 Ph.D. ’75 (Franklin S. Odo Room) was an internationally recognized scholar and historian in the field of Asian American studies, and was the founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. A third-generation Japanese American born in Honolulu, Odo was also the founding director of the University of Hawaii’s Ethnic Studies program. He was a visiting professor at Princeton and taught one of the University’s first courses on Asian American studies. He also served on the faculty of Amherst College as the John J. McCloy ’16 Visiting Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy and as the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer in American Studies.
Alan Turing Ph.D. ’38 (Alan Turing Garden Room), considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing played a key role in the British government’s decoding of the Nazi’s Enigma codes during World War II. In 1952, Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” and barred from continuing his cryptography work with the British government. He was posthumously granted a royal pardon in 2013. The University honored Turing with a commissioned portrait in 2019.
Oswald Veblen (Oswald Veblen Terrace) was an internationally recognized mathematician who taught at Princeton for 27 years starting in 1905. He played a central role in building Princeton mathematics into a world-renowned department and was instrumental in establishing the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), where he also served on the faculty. Veblen made important contributions to differential geometry and the early development of topology, and was also known for his humanitarian work during the rise of Nazism in Germany, helping bring Albert Einstein and other top scholars to U.S. academic institutions.
Alexander Dumas Watkins (Alexander Dumas Watkins Room) was a self-educated biologist who conducted scientific research alongside Princeton faculty in the 1880s. He is remembered as the University’s first Black instructor although he was never given a formal academic title. At Princeton, Watkins worked in what was called the histological laboratory, and made contributions to early malaria research. His work was discussed in academic journals, including Scientific American and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Bruce Wright (Bruce Wright Room), was a judge in New York for 25 years and served as a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. During his time on the bench, he spoke out against racial injustices in the legal system. He also wrote poetry and co-edited a 1954 anthology of poems with Langston Hughes. He was admitted to the University with a full scholarship in 1939, however, upon learning that Wright was Black, was prevented by administrators from registering for classes. Wright earned his bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University and his law degree from New York Law School. Princeton’s Class of 2001 named Wright an honorary class member.
Chien-Shiung Wu (Chien-Shiung Wu Room) was known as a foremost experimental physicist, who played a crucial role in the advancement of atomic science. In the early 1940s, she became the first woman hired as a faculty member in Princeton’s Department of Physics. In 1944, she went to Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project. Wu was the first woman named president of the American Physical Society and the seventh woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Wu earned her undergraduate degree from what is now Nanjing University in China, her doctoral degree in physics from the University of California-Berkeley and an honorary doctorate of science from Princeton.