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Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution.

Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. Princeton does not offer professional schooling generally, but it does offer professional master's degrees (mostly through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) and doctoral programs.

Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the College of New Jersey, the university moved to Newark in 1747, then to Princeton in 1756 and was renamed Princeton University in 1896. (The present-day The College of New Jersey in nearby Ewing, New Jersey, is an unrelated institution.)

Princeton was the fourth institution of higher education in the U.S. to conduct classes. Princeton’s crest states “Dei sub numine viget,” which is Latin for “Under God she flourishes.”^[8] While it once had close ties to the Presbyterian Church, it makes no spiritual demands of its students. The university has ties with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Westminster Choir College of Rider University.

The main campus is located within the boundaries of three municipalities: Borough of Princeton, Princeton Township, and West Windsor Township. The James Forrestal Campus is in nearby Plainsboro Township. The campuses are situated about one hour from both New York City and Philadelphia.

The oldest building on campus is Nassau Hall, built in 1754, and situated on the northern edge of campus facing Nassau Street. Designed originally by Robert Smith, the building was subsequently remodeled by notable American architects Benjamin Latrobe and John Notman. Stanhope Hall (once a library, now home of the University's Center for African-American Studies) and East and West College, both dormitories, followed. Major buildings in the late 19th Century were built in brownish stone in a Victorian Gothic style influenced by the Richardsonian Romanesque, many designed by William Appleton Potter, including the Chancellor Green Library and Alexander Hall.

Beginning at the very end of the 19th century, the University adopted a consistent Collegiate Gothic style, executed in gray stone. This standard continued up to World War II, and includes most buildings in the northern third of campus except the 19th-century core. The renowned Philadelphia firm Cope & Stewardson designed Blair Hall and Little Hall in the Collegiate Gothic style. McKim, Mead & White designed the FitzRandolph Gateway in front of Nassau Hall. The early 20th century also saw the first master plan for the campus, executed by the university's first master architect, Ralph Adams Cram, who designed several buildings on campus.

Modern buildings dominate the southern and eastern ends of campus. Fine Hall, the Math Department's home, designed by Warner, Burns, Toan and Lunde and completed in 1970, is the tallest building on campus at fourteen stories. Contemporary additions feature a number of big-name architects, including IM Pei's Spelman Halls, Robert Venturi's Frist Campus Center, Rafael Vinoly's Carl Icahn Laboratory, the Hillier Group's Bowen Hall, and Demetri Porphyrios' Whitman College. Lewis Library, designed by Frank Gehry, opened to students in the Fall of 2008.

A variety of sculptures adorn the campus. They include pieces by Henry Moore (Oval with Points, also nicknamed "Nixon's Nose"), Clement Meadmore (Upstart II), and Alexander Calder (Five Disks: One Empty).

At the southern edge of the campus is Lake Carnegie, a man-made lake donated by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and used for crew (rowing). It forms the boundary between Princeton Township and West Windsor Township. Beyond the lake and the adjacent Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park, are intramural fields.

Princeton has six undergraduate residential colleges, each housing approximately 500 freshmen, sophomores, some juniors and seniors, and a handful of junior and senior resident advisers. Each college consists of a set of dormitories, a dining hall, a variety of other amenities—such as study spaces, libraries, performance spaces, and darkrooms—and a collection of administrators and associated faculty. Two colleges, Wilson College and Forbes College (formerly Princeton Inn College), date to the 1970s; three others, Rockefeller, Mathey, and Butler Colleges, were created in 1983 following the Committee on Undergraduate Residential Life (CURL) report, which suggested the institution of residential colleges as a solution to an allegedly fragmented campus social life. The construction of Whitman College, the university's sixth residential college, was completed in 2007.

[edit] List of residential colleges

1. Butler College
2. Forbes College
3. Mathey College
4. Rockefeller College
5. Whitman College
6. Wilson College

Rockefeller College and Mathey College are located in the northwest corner of the campus; Princeton brochures often feature their Collegiate Gothic architecture. Like most of Princeton's Gothic buildings, they predate the residential college system and were fashioned into colleges from individual dormitories.

Wilson College and Butler College, located south of the center of the campus, were built in the 1960s. Wilson served as an early experiment in the establishment of the residential college system. Butler, like Rockefeller and Mathey, consisted of a collection of ordinary dorms (called the "New New Quad") before the addition of a dining hall made it a residential college. Widely disliked for their edgy modernist design, the dormitories on the Butler Quad were demolished in 2007. Butler is now reopened as a four year residential college, housing both under- and upperclassmen.

Forbes is located on the site of the historic Princeton Inn, a gracious hotel overlooking the Princeton golf course. The Princeton Inn, originally constructed in 1924, played regular host to important symposia and gatherings of renowned scholars from both the university and the nearby Institute for Advanced Studies for many years. Forbes currently houses over 400 undergraduates and a number of resident graduate students in its residential halls. Butler and most of Forbes are in a different municipality, Princeton Township, from the rest of the main campus, which is in Princeton Borough.

In 2003, Princeton broke ground for a sixth college that is named Whitman College after its principal sponsor, Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay and a member of the Princeton Class of 1977. The new dormitories were constructed in the Collegiate Gothic architectural style and were designed by architect Demetri Porphyrios. Construction finished in 2007, and Whitman College was inaugurated as Princeton's sixth residential college that same year.

The precursor of the present college system in America was originally proposed by university president Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century. For over 800 years, however, the collegiate system had already existed in Britain at Oxford University and Cambridge University. Wilson's model was much closer to Yale's present system, which features four-year colleges. Lacking the support of the trustees, the plan languished until 1968. That year, Wilson College was established to cap a series of alternatives to the eating clubs. Fierce debates raged before the present residential college system emerged. The plan was first attempted at Yale, but the administration was initially uninterested; an exasperated alum, Edward Harkness, finally paid to have the college system implemented at Harvard in the 1920s, leading to the oft-quoted aphorism that the college system is a Princeton idea that was executed at Harvard with funding from Yale.

Princeton has one graduate residential college, known simply as the Graduate College, located beyond Forbes College at the outskirts of campus. The far-flung location of the G.C. was the spoil of a squabble between Woodrow Wilson and then-Graduate School Dean Andrew Fleming West. Wilson preferred a central location for the College; West wanted the graduate students as far as possible from the campus. Ultimately, West prevailed. The Graduate College is composed of a large Collegiate Gothic section crowned by Cleveland Tower, a local landmark that also houses a world-class carillon. The attached New Graduate College departs in its design from Collegiate Gothic; it is reminiscent of the former dormitories of Butler College, the newest of the five pre-Whitman residential colleges.

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