Julia Fitzgerald
May 2016
“The Best Damn Place of All?”: Linguistic Dichotomy at Princeton
After spending some time in the “Orange Bubble,” it becomes apparent that the language that students use to describe Princeton is diverse and, at times, contradictory. I have found over the course of my two years here that students often flicker inexplicably between romanticizing and disparaging Princeton. A senior friend regularly talks about how much she cannot wait to get out of here—how she cried at the end of last summer just thinking about having to come back. Still other times, she speaks of Princeton fondly, telling me that she’s going to miss this place so much.Another classmate of mine posted a photo on Instagram last September of her and a group offriends in front of Nassau Hall. The photo is captioned,“The perfect beginning to our second
year in the best damn place of all ?.” Only a couple weeks later, she posted a photo of the FitzRandolph gates saying, “Back behind bars ?.”
When and why does this dichotomy in the way that students describe Princeton emerge? As I began to think about this question, I developed various theories: perhaps students alternate between positive and negative language when speaking to close friends v. acquaintances, adults v. peers, during stressful academic weeks v. school breaks. However, I decided to focus on the possibility that students describe Princeton differently to Princeton insiders and outsiders. Both to investigate this possibility and to look more closely at the dichotomy I have observed, Ideveloped a survey to send to Princeton students. I received 130 responses, but due to limitations of the survey platform that I used, I only have access to 100 of those responses—still a large enough sample size to draw inferences. Unfortunately, one shortcoming of my survey was that there were substantially more female respondents (n=81) than male respondents (n=19).
The first question on my survey asked participants to list the first five words/phrases that they would use to describe Princeton to a friend from home, in the context of a conversation over a meal with that person. The next question asked them to list the first five words/phrases that they would use to describePrinceton to a friend from Princeton. The survey alsoprompted respondents to rank on a scale of 1 to 5 the prevalence of twenty terms, some positive and some negative, that arecommon around campus. I chose these words, which ranged from “best damn place of all” to “workload,” based on conversations I had with friends and classmates about what key words they thought cropped up most frequently in idealizing or disparaging Princeton. Finally, the last page of the survey asked participants to indicate their genders and class years and to rank their overall Princeton experiences on a scale of 1 to 10.
Once I had collected responses, I began analysis by looking at the most straightforward data: responses to the third question about the prevalence of common Princetonlanguage. Respondents ranked“stress,”“workload,” and “sleep deprivation” as the three most prevalent terms. All of these terms are negative, and all of them seem to be closely related to Princeton’s academic intensity. This finding is interesting, as it suggests thatcampus dialogue about the Princeton experience focuses on the consequences of the academic demands.
The next three most highly ranked terms were“competitive,”“exclusive,”and “work hard, play hard”—terms that are not explicitly negative, but still have negative connotations. They all focus more on the nature of Princeton’s general culture, rather than specifically emphasizing its intense academic demands. Both “competitive” and “exclusive” could apply to academic settings, but they are also often used in a more social sense. The term “work hard, play hard” intrinsically straddles the line between social and academic culture. This finding adds nuance to the insight provided by the first three terms; it suggests that, though students’ most verbalized feelings of negativity are linked to Princeton’s academic intensity, there is also negative dialogue surrounding the nature of Princeton’s overall culture.
Positive terms do not begin to appear on the list until after these first six negative terms, with the most highly ranked positive term as “best damn place of all.” Phrases like “school spirit” and “close student/faculty relationships” are ranked near the bottom. Students’ rankings of negative terms as consistently more prevalent than positive descriptors hint that the narrative about Princeton is not as rosy as might be expected. However, these findings alone do not provide enough evidence to draw broad conclusions about the way that students describe Princeton: in this question, respondents were limited to ranking from a setlist of common terms that may not reflect the way that they would describe Princeton in their own words.
In order to get a better sense of how students actually describe Princeton in their voices, I turned to look at the data from the first two questions. This data was more powerful than the data from the question about ranking common Princeton terms, as it contained any language that came to participants’ minds in describing Princeton to a friend from home or from school.Students’ responses were diverse, and many of them read as remarkably raw and honest. One student wrote, “This place breaks my spirit, but then puts it back together again.” Another said, “This place sucks My department sucks. People suck. People here especially suck. So tired.” A third wrote, “Literally the craziest and most amazing time of my life.”
However, one of the shortcomings of my survey was the difficulty ofanalyzing broad trends in the positivity or negativity of the language that students used,because their responses were qualitative rather than quantitative. Thus, I needed tocode the lists of words/phrases that participants provided into numerical “scores” for their positivity. The way that I did so drew on methods that are often used in the field of psychology. I gaveeach of the words/phrases that participants listed in describing Princeton—first to a friend from home, then to a friend from school—anumbervalue based on whether they were positive, negative, or neutral. Any positive term, such as “idyllic” or “exciting”, was assigned a value of +1. Each negative term, such as “draining” or “lonely”, was assigned a value of -1. Terms such as “suburban” and “small” that could not be interpreted as positive or negative without elaboration were considered neutral and assigned a value of 0. The only exceptions to these three numerical designations were extremely positive or extremely negative terms, such as “BEST FOUR YEARS” or “worst place in the world,” which received a value of +2 or -2, respectively.
Once I had coded each individual term that a participant listed, I used that information to give him/her three different scores. The first score was his/her overall positivity in describing Princeton to a friend from home; for the sake of simplicity, I call this the “outsider positivity score.” This score was generated by adding the values assigned to each of the five terms that the participants listed for the first question. For example, one participant answered the first question with the terms “grueling,” “stressful,” “exciting,” “stimulating,” and “amazing.” “Grueling” and “stressful” were both negative, and therefore assigned values of -1; “exciting,” “stimulating,” and “amazing” were all positive, so each received a value of +1. The sum of these values is +1, so this participant received an outsider positivity score of +1.
The second score that I calculated was each participant’s positivity in describing Princeton to a friend from school, or their “insider positivity score.” This score was produced in the same way as the outsider positivity score, except using the data from the second question rather than the first question. Finally, I subtracted each participant’s insider score from his/her outsider score to produce a “difference” score. This difference score depicted how much more positive a participant was in describing Princeton to a friend from home than a Princeton friend; if they were more positive to a Princeton friend (which was uncommon, but did occur several times), then the difference score was negative.
My findings from this data were intriguing. I found that participants had a mean outsider score of 0.94. In other words, students were mildly more positive than negative in describing Princeton to friends from home. On the contrary, participants had a mean insider score of -0.91, suggesting that theywere mildly more negative than positive describing Princeton to college friends. This makes for a difference score of 1.85: students were 1.85 “points” more positive in describing Princeton to outsiders than insiders. This difference is highly statistically significant, with a p-value of 4.15 x 10-19. In other words, there is a near 0% chance that this difference was due to chance. Thus, I can be confident in concluding that there is a real difference in the way that students describe Princeton when speaking to friends from home v. Princeton friends. This difference is encapsulated in one senior girl’s response. The language she used when asked how she would describe Princeton a friend from home was consistently positive: “Good,” “I like it,” “I have enjoyed it,” “I like my classes,” and “It’s fine.” In contrast, to a friend from Princeton, she described Princeton as “exhausting,” “draining,” “competitive,” “sucky,” and “tiring.”
Though these findings are interesting, without a control condition with which to compare them, they are hard to interpret: it is possible that people are always more positive in describing
an experience to outsiders than insiders, or at least that college students are always more positive in describing their schools to friends from home than fellow students. With this in mind, I decided to send a survey to friends that attend other colleges.This survey was identical to the one I sent to Princeton students, except that it excluded the third question (ranking the prevalence of Princeton-specific terms) and also asked respondentswhat college that they attend.
I received 42 responses from students at Claremont McKenna, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, University of Michigan, Oberlin, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, and Washington University in St. Louis. Coding theirresponses to the first two questions in the same way I had for Princeton students, I found that non-Princeton students had a mean outsider score of 1.19 and a mean insider score of 0.52. This difference of 0.62 is not statistically significant (p-value=0.097). In other words, there is a 9.7% chance that the difference is random. This is partly due to the small size of the difference, but also partly due to the small sample.
For the sake of comparison between non-Princeton and Princeton students, I will briefly treat this difference as though it’s statistically significant. This value suggests that non-Princeton students are slightly more positive in describing their schools to outsiders than insiders. However, the difference of 1.85 found in Princeton students’ descriptions is three times as large as the difference of 0.62 found in non-Princeton respondents’ descriptions of their schools. Furthermore, the Princeton difference straddles the neutrality line of 0: Princeton students are, on average, somewhat positive in describing Princeton to outsiders (outsider score=0.94), while they are more negative than positive in describing it to fellow Princetonians (insider score=-0.91). Incontrast, non-Princeton students are mildly more positive than negative in describing their schools to both outsiders and insiders, as indicated by the fact that both their mean outsider score (1.19) and mean insider score (0.52) are positive.
However, thecontrast between Princeton and non-Princeton respondents may be even stronger than the data originally suggests. On closer examination, I discovered that there was a strong outlier within my pool of data: the nine respondents from Washington University had a very large average difference score of 2.7, a score even larger than Princeton respondents’ difference score. In fact, it is so large that it is statistically significant (p=0.024) despite the very small sample size. When I ran analyses excluding Wash U, the non-Princeton difference score fell from 0.62 to 0.16. This discovery suggests that students at most colleges display almost no difference in positivitydescribing their schools to outsiders v. insiders. The Princeton difference value is twelve times greater than the non-Princeton difference value when Wash U is excluded.
It would be easy to interpret this finding as an indication that students here feel they need to romanticize Princeton when talking to friends from home. However, in speaking to friends and classmates, I asked whether they felt that they were being dishonest in describing Princeton in one context or the other (to home or college friends). Interestingly, most people did not feel that this was the case. One friend did say that she “felt obligated to love Princeton, because it’s Princeton,” but she specified that she only felt that way when talking to people from outside of Princeton that she did not know well—not real friends. Conversely, another student mentioned that he actually felt a degree of pressure to complain about Princeton in order to fit in. He said, “It’s hard to be relatable at Princeton if you’re chipper all the time.” However, overwhelmingly, even those who openly identified a difference in the dialogue they use to describe Princeton to outsiders and insiders had difficulty putting a finger on why that difference exists.
The fact that many students had difficulty identifying the reason for the difference in their descriptions of Princeton suggests to me that this difference is likely driven by an unconscious mental process. One theory that could help explain this difference is called construal level theory (Fujita et. al., 2005). According to construal level theory, a person’s psychological distance from an object affects whether they think about it in abstract (“high level”) or concrete (“low level”) terms. For example, thinking about taking a very hard class on a high level might involve “challenging oneself” or “furthering one’s education”; thinking about it on a low level would look more like “spending hours in the library.”
When students describetheir college to a friend from home, they experience a considerable degree of psychological distance, because they are spatially and temporally distant from Princeton. The language of my survey ensured that this condition was true for all respondents, because it told them to imagine they were having a meal with a friend from home—they could not have envisioned talking on the phone with that friend. This psychological distance made it easier for respondentsto think about Princeton in broad brushstrokes.
Often, the positive language that respondents used to describe Princeton—both to outsiders and insiders, but more often to outsiders—did seem to reflect high level thinking. Variations of the phrases “rewarding,” “fulfilling,” and “worthwhile” appeared 49 times in the Princeton survey responses. All of these terms are positive, but they have an abstract quality: they focus more on outcomes than on the actual nature of the Princeton experience. Negative language that participants used was often more concrete, such as “homework homeworkhomework” and “perpetually sleep-deprived.” This was not universally true, as there were also abstract negative descriptors and concrete positive descriptors, but it did seem to be a pattern.
Non-Princeton respondents also experienced a difference in psychological distance when talking to a friend from home as opposed to a friend from school. However, it did not result in a significant difference in the positivity of their language, becausethere does not seem to be as great a difference in the way that they thought about their schools concretely v. abstractly. One respondent described UPenn to a home friend as “fun,” and to a college friend as “has great parties.” Another described WashU to a home friend as “homogeneous” and to a college friend “nerdy” and “not very diverse.” Both of these respondents’ concrete descriptions to college friends elaborate on their abstract descriptions to home friends, but they do not fundamentally conflict.
Though looking at the data from the first two questions quantitatively provides a lot of information, it actually washes out other information—especially in the Princeton survey. In particular, turning the 5 words/phrases that participants listed for each question into a “sum” has the potential to neutralize extremes within that list. One participant described Princeton to a friend from school using the following five phrases: “stressful,” “the worst,” “the best,” “love it here,” “hate it here.” This language embodies positive and negative emotions so extreme that they seem inconsistent. However, these positives and negatives work to cancel each other out: this response received a coded score of -1, a value near zero that does not reflect the range of emotion expressed in the response. Evidently, looking only at the contrast between the language students use with insiders and outsiders can mask contrasts within both of those categories.
There were countless examples like this one, in which extreme positive and negative emotions summed up to “near-neutral” scores, in the Princeton survey results. However, there were almost no similarly extreme examples in the non-Princeton survey results: though non-Princetonians used positive language alongside negative language, these sentiments seemed to be more compatible. For example, one respondent described UPenn as “exciting,” “scary,” “rushed,” “different,” and “fun.” Though “exciting” has a positive connotation while “scary” reads as more negative, excitement and fear seem to come hand-in-hand in a natural way.
One of the most fascinating trends that I found in analyzing the survey emerged from comparing the language that students used to describe Princeton with how they ranked their overall Princeton experiences. Averagingrespondents’ outsider and insider scores produced a near-neutral value of 0.015, which suggeststhat they use about as much positive and negative language in describing Princeton to outsiders and insiders.However, students ranked their overall Princeton experiences very positively: the mean score on a scale of one to ten (from terrible to amazing) was 7.7. For many individual respondents, this dichotomy was even more pronounced. One respondent described Princeton to both a friend from home and from school in stronglynegative terms, including “sucks,” “GPA TOILET,” “I regret not going to Harvard,” and “Let’s drop out and become strippers in Alaska.” In spite of this extreme negativity, she ranked her overall Princeton 8 out of 10. This trend was similar, though less pronounced, for non-Princeton students: their language describing their colleges was mildly more positive than negative, but the mean of their rankings of their overall college experiences was 7.9.