69 Fun Facts About Princeton University

Under what name was Princeton founded in 1746?

College of New Jersey was the legal name for generations; the school took its town's name only when it was raised to a university in the 1890s.

In which New Jersey town did Princeton hold its first classes in 1747, in Jonathan Dickinson's parsonage?

Elizabeth, then called Elizabethtown, was home for only a few months: Dickinson died that October and the students moved to Aaron Burr's parsonage in Newark.

When Princeton was founded in 1746, no college stood between New Haven and which Virginia town?

Williamsburg, home of William & Mary, was a long trip by horse or stagecoach from New Haven, so the founders saw an urgent need for a college in the colonies between them.

What advantage led the future university to choose the village of Princeton as its permanent home in the 1750s?

A central location decided it: the royal governor backed the village as 'as near the center of the Province as any', and the college moved there from Newark in 1756.

Nassau Hall is named for which monarch?

William III of England got the honor only because the colony's governor refused to let the trustees name the building after him and asked them to honor the late king of the House of Nassau.

Which Princeton president, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, led the college 1768–1794?

John Witherspoon left his parish in Scotland in 1768 to take the job, and he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration.

A 1783 mutiny by unpaid soldiers drove Congress out of which city and into Princeton's Nassau Hall?

Philadelphia was abandoned after troops demanding back pay surrounded the State House and Pennsylvania's government would not protect Congress, which then sat in Nassau Hall for about four months.

A cannonball at the Battle of Princeton reportedly 'decapitated' a Nassau Hall portrait of which king?

George II reportedly lost his head to an American cannonball; in 1783 the trustees had Charles Willson Peale paint Washington and hung the picture in the king's empty frame.

Washington slipped away overnight from which New Jersey town, campfires still burning, to strike Princeton on January 3, 1777?

Trenton was where Cornwallis expected to finish off the Americans at dawn; a token force kept the campfires going while the army marched round him to Princeton.

Which former US president became the first head of Princeton's alumni association in 1826?

James Madison held the post for the rest of his life; the alumni were organised to raise money when the college's own president was close to shutting the struggling school.

Which president's tenure (1868–88) saw Princeton's Glee Club and first eating club founded?

James McCosh, a Scottish minister hired from Belfast, publicly defended Darwin's theory of evolution as no threat to faith.

Which phrase became Princeton's informal motto?

"In the Nation's Service" headlined the 1896 celebration at which the college renamed itself a university; the motto was revised in 2016 to end 'and the service of humanity'.

Which future First Lady majored in sociology at Princeton?

Michelle Obama arrived in 1981, two years after her brother Craig, and wrote her senior thesis on how a Princeton education changed African American alumni's ties to their community.

What teaching innovation did Princeton's 13th president introduce in 1905?

The preceptorial system put students in small groups under young tutors called preceptors; hiring them took an ambitious alumni fundraising drive.

Which tycoon gave Princeton a rowing lake in 1906 and was reportedly told, 'We needed bread and you gave us cake'?

Andrew Carnegie reportedly met a later request for money with "I have already given you a lake"; the bread-and-cake line was the university president's reported reply.

Princeton's Graduate College sits half a mile from campus because Dean West beat whom in a dispute?

Woodrow Wilson wanted graduate students housed at the heart of campus, but the dean held out for a distant hilltop, and a donor's gift came on condition that the college be built off campus.

The tower crowning the Graduate College is a memorial to which former Princeton trustee and US president?

Grover Cleveland retired to Princeton after the White House, joined the board and chaired its graduate school committee, backing the dean in the fight over where the college should stand.

Which physicist, often assumed to have taught at Princeton University, actually worked at the separate Institute for Advanced Study from 1933?

Albert Einstein belonged to the independent Institute, but the mix-up is easy: for its first six years the Institute was housed in the university's own mathematics building.

Which architect, hired in 1907 to enforce Princeton's Collegiate Gothic style, also designed its University Chapel?

Ralph Adams Cram designed the chapel to replace one that burned down in 1920, and also drew the Graduate College.

Which landscape architect shaped Princeton's grounds from 1912 to 1943?

Beatrix Farrand, the only woman among the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, chose plants that bloom in spring or fall, when students are on campus to see them.

Since 1911 the front entrance of Nassau Hall has been flanked by two bronze what?

Tigers replaced a pair of lions: the Class of 1879 had given the lions, then swapped them once the tiger had taken over as the college's symbol.

The students who hauled Princeton's Big Cannon onto campus in the 1830s were led by which British prime minister's grandfather?

Winston Churchill's American grandfather, Leonard Jerome of the Class of 1839, led a crowd of students who carted the stranded gun to campus and dumped it in front of Nassau Hall.

Students from which neighboring university stole Princeton's Little Cannon in 1875?

Rutgers paid for it: Princeton students raided New Brunswick and made off with muskets, the two college presidents exchanged letters, and a joint faculty committee had to arrange the swap back.

Princeton lost the first intercollegiate football game in 1869, played with no carrying or throwing the ball, much like which modern sport?

Soccer is the closer match, with 25 players a side kicking for goal. Each host set the rules: Princeton lost six goals to four away, then won the return game at home 8–0 a week later.

Which Princeton back won the 1951 Heisman Trophy?

Dick Kazmaier was then drafted by the Chicago Bears but turned down pro football altogether, heading to Harvard Business School instead.

Which coach led Princeton men's basketball from 1967 to 1996 and perfected the 'Princeton offense'?

Pete Carril went out on an upset: in the 1996 NCAA tournament his patient, back-door-cutting side beat defending champion UCLA 43–41, his last college win.

Which future US senator was named Most Outstanding Player when Princeton reached the 1965 Final Four?

Bill Bradley then kept the NBA waiting: he put off a New York Knicks contract for two years to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, joining the team in 1967.

What are Princeton's colors?

Orange and black were never planned as a pair: students chose orange for their badges in the 1860s, printed them in black ink, and the pairing stuck by repetition.

Coach Fritz Crisler carried Princeton's helmet design to which school, where it became the famous winged helmet?

Michigan got the design in 1938, repainted in maize and blue; one of his reasons was practical, since bold markings would help passers pick out their receivers downfield.

Which men's team won Princeton six national championships between 1992 and 2001?

Lacrosse was a turnaround story: when coach Bill Tierney arrived in 1988, Princeton had gone more than twenty years without even a league title.

Princeton's Cannon Green bonfire is held only when it beats which two rivals at football in the same season?

Harvard and Yale make up the 'Big Three' with Princeton, so beating both takes that informal title; the earliest bonfires, though, marked wins at baseball.

By campus legend, what happens to a Princeton student who exits the FitzRandolph Gates before Commencement?

They will not graduate, the legend says, yet the superstition is a young one: the gates were kept locked for generations and only opened for good in 1970.

The Princeton tradition of attempting 24 beers in 24 hours is named after which actor, who opposed it?

Paul Newman's line about 24 beers in a case and 24 hours in a day, which gave the April 24 event its name, is apocryphal, and in 2004 his lawyer wrote asking Princeton to end it.

Until trustees banned it in 1999, Princeton students ran naked around a courtyard each winter on the night of what?

The first snowfall set off the Nude Olympics, which the administration never sanctioned; after a rowdy 1999 edition it was banned, and taking part now means a year's suspension.

Freshmen once climbed Nassau Hall each fall to steal what?

The bell's clapper rang in the first classes, so stealing it was meant to stop them; it never did, and after injuries to climbers the university removed it for good.

Princeton's fall Cane Spree contest grew out of a 19th-century feud between which two classes?

Freshmen and sophomores brawled in the street when second-years tried to wrestle fashionable walking sticks off the newcomers; in the mid-1870s the college tamed it into an organized contest between picked pairs.

On which street do ten of Princeton's eleven eating clubs stand?

Prospect Avenue's clubs outlasted a university president who tried in 1907 to fold them into residential quadrangles and was beaten by alumni opposition; only Terrace Club sits off the avenue.

What is the selective admission process used by some of Princeton's eating clubs called?

Bicker fills the gap fraternity rush would: Princeton banned fraternities in 1855, so the eating clubs took over student social life, the selective ones choosing members in private.

Which was the first of Princeton's permanent eating clubs?

Ivy Club took its name from Ivy Hall, the rented first home where it began in 1879, a building put up decades earlier for the college's short-lived law school.

In 2020 Princeton took a US president's name off its oldest residential college and renamed it what?

First College marked its standing as the first of Princeton's residential colleges; trustees cited the president's segregation of the federal civil service, and the college closed in 2022.

Princeton's faculty voted in 2026 to bring what back to exam rooms after 133 years?

Proctors left in 1893 at the students' own urging; the faculty voted them back in May 2026, citing cheating with AI and phones, though a student-run committee still hears the cases.

Princeton's 2004 'grade deflation' policy asked departments to hold A-range course grades to about what share?

The target was 35 percent; the faculty dropped the numbers in 2014 after a committee found they were too often misread as quotas and left students feeling they were competing for a limited supply.

Before coeducation, all-male Princeton carried which nickname?

The monastery fit a college with no sister school; when a handful of women entered the graduate school in the early 1960s, the student paper declared 'the end of a monastery'.

Who became Princeton's first female president in 2001?

Shirley M. Tilghman, a Canadian molecular biologist, had spent 15 years on Princeton's faculty; after college she taught high-school chemistry in Sierra Leone for two years.

Who became Princeton's 20th president in 2013?

Christopher Eisgruber was an insider twice over: a 1983 Princeton physics graduate who turned to constitutional law, he had served as the university's provost for nine years.

Betsey Stockton, honored with a Princeton campus garden in 2018, was once enslaved in the household of which official?

The college's president, Ashbel Green, held her in his household; once free she sailed to Hawaii as a missionary in 1822 and later taught for nearly three decades in Princeton's only public school for Black children.

Dating to about 1765, which Princeton student group is the oldest of its kind at any US college?

American Whig-Cliosophic Society is the country's oldest college debating society; its two parent clubs feuded so fiercely that the college shut them down in 1769, and their successors merged in 1928.

Which former Daily Princetonian editorial chairman was named to the Supreme Court in 2010?

Elena Kagan, of the Class of 1981, had never been a judge when she was named; she followed Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor as the third Princeton graduate in a row to reach the Court.

The Princeton Triangle Club is famous for what signature routine?

A kickline in drag dates from the club's all-male days, when men played the women's parts; after coeducation in 1969 women took those roles, yet men in drag still turned up in the chorus line.

What is Princeton's oldest a cappella group, formed in 1941?

Nassoons have by long tradition shared a concert with Yale's Whiffenpoofs on the weekend of the Princeton–Yale game, a custom the group dates to its earliest years.

Princeton's main library, opened in 1948, carries the name of a family that made its fortune in what?

Tires built the fortune of Harvey Firestone, in whose memory Firestone Library is named; it was designed with open stacks, so students could roam the shelves and fetch books for themselves.

Which Princeton institution reopened on Halloween 2025 with a 24-hour open house in a brand-new building?

Princeton University Art Museum tore down its old home to build a larger one on the same spot, designed by David Adjaye; favorites such as Andy Warhol's Blue Marilyn returned with it.

Which sculptor made 'The Hedgehog and the Fox', three curving walls of rusted steel on the Princeton campus?

Richard Serra paid his way through college by working in steel mills, and the metal became his medium; here its three ribbons stand about 15 feet high.

Which future US president enrolled at Princeton in 1935 but withdrew within months because of illness?

John F. Kennedy arrived late in the fall term and soon withdrew in poor health; he later started over at Harvard, graduating there in 1940.

Which tech founder holds a Princeton degree in electrical engineering and computer science?

Jeff Bezos arrived set on becoming a theoretical physicist, decided a few classmates were far better at it than he was, and switched; he graduated with highest honours in 1986.

Which of these famous writers attended Princeton but did not graduate?

F. Scott Fitzgerald gave more of himself to writing for the Triangle Club than to his classes and left in 1917 to join the army; his first novel, This Side of Paradise, is set at Princeton.

Which 2001 film follows mathematician John Nash as a Princeton PhD student?

A Beautiful Mind was shot partly on the Princeton campus itself, with Russell Crowe as Nash, who recovered after decades of mental illness to win a Nobel Prize.

Which of these Nobel-winning novelists was a member of the Princeton faculty?

Toni Morrison joined the faculty in 1989 and won the Nobel Prize four years later while teaching there; in 2017 Princeton renamed its West College building Morrison Hall.

The first Black students to earn Princeton bachelor's degrees arrived in 1945 through what route?

A wartime Navy training program, the V-12, placed four Black students at Princeton in 1945, so the colour line fell by the Navy's doing, not the university's; their first degrees followed within three years.

Which TV medical drama used aerial shots of Princeton's Frist Campus Center as its fictional teaching hospital?

House set its fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital on the real campus; the building on screen is a student centre made from an old physics laboratory.

In which Tom Cruise film does a Princeton admissions interviewer arrive in the middle of a wild house party?

Risky Business ends with a twist: the interviewer is so taken with Joel's one-night enterprise that he recommends him for admission.

What is the nickname of the commuter train that links campus to Princeton Junction station?

The Dinky was held up in 1963 by four students on horseback, dressed as cowboys and firing blanks, who rode off with four women passengers.

What do Princetonians call the costumed alumni procession that caps Reunions weekend?

The P-rade is led by the oldest returning alumnus, who carries a silver-tipped cane given by the Class of 1923; one bearer walked the whole route at 101.

Which No. 1 seed did 16th-seeded Princeton come within a point of beating in the 1989 NCAA tournament?

Georgetown, with future NBA stars Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo, escaped 50-49 in what reporters later called the game that saved March Madness.

Which model and film star slowed her career to enrol at Princeton in 1983?

Brooke Shields studied Romance languages, graduated in 1987 and came back in 2011 as Class Day speaker, wearing her old class jacket.

What was the code name of the top-secret fusion project Lyman Spitzer launched at Princeton in 1951?

Matterhorn had a mountaineer in charge: Spitzer, a keen climber and skier, hit on his fusion machine during a ski trip to Aspen, and the secret work began that year in a former rabbit hutch.

Which future queen was among Princeton's first female undergraduates?

Noor of Jordan arrived as Lisa Halaby with the first coeducational class, played on Princeton's first women's ice hockey team and left with an architecture degree; she married King Hussein in 1978.

Which Apollo 12 commander is a graduate of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science?

Pete Conrad stepped onto the Moon joking that Neil's small step was a long one for him, a line he chose to win a bet that NASA did not script its astronauts.

Whom did President Samuel Stanhope Smith blame for the 1802 fire that gutted Nassau Hall?

Rebellious students denied setting it, but the blaze left only the outer walls standing, and architect Benjamin Latrobe rebuilt the hall inside them.