Category:Famous Princeton Alumni
James Madison enrolled in 1769 at the College of New Jersey, choosing it over the College of William and Mary, the more customary destination for Virginia gentry; the college changed its name to Princeton University long after he had drafted the Constitution and served as fourth President of the United States. The category collects biographical entries on people who studied at Princeton, whether under its colonial name or its modern one, as undergraduates or as doctoral candidates. The roster is unusual in this inventory for its depth on the Supreme Court of the United States and in the national security cabinet, and for a mathematics and physics cohort that arrived through the graduate school rather than the college.
Background
Princeton was chartered as the College of New Jersey and adopted its present name in the late nineteenth century; several of the older members of this category are recorded as attending the earlier institution, which is why the same school appears under two names across their entries. It is a small university by American research standards, with an undergraduate college it has never allowed to be dwarfed by professional schools, no medical school and no law school, and a graduate program concentrated in the sciences, mathematics, economics and public and international affairs. That shape explains the roster. Princeton does not appear in this category as a producer of lawyers, because it does not train them; it appears as the undergraduate college of an unusual number of people who then went to law school somewhere else.
The town also carries institutions that are not the university, and the distinction matters when reading the membership. The Institute for Advanced Study is a separate body in the same town, and several members are associated with it rather than with the university's faculty.
The bench, from the founding era to the present
No other institution in this inventory carries a comparable run of Supreme Court Justices, and the run is continuous rather than clustered. William Paterson, author of the New Jersey Plan and a Founding Father, took his degree at the College of New Jersey, as did Henry Brockholst Livingston, James Moore Wayne and Peter Vivian Daniel, who studied there for a period before returning to Virginia to read law. Smith Thompson, who was also the sixth United States Secretary of the Navy, came to the college from the farmland of Dutchess County. Mahlon Pitney graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1879 and joined the Court in 1912.
The modern bench continues the line. Samuel Alito was raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, and went from Princeton to Yale Law School. Sonia Sotomayor has written about feeling like a visitor in an alien land in her early time on campus, describing the distance between her Bronx upbringing and the university, and served on a disciplinary committee and in Latino student organizations while there. Elena Kagan wrote a senior thesis on the history of socialist politics in New York City before Oxford and Harvard Law. Prosecutorial and law enforcement careers appear alongside them: Robert Mueller arrived from St Paul's School and was moved toward military service in part by the death of a Princeton classmate, First Lieutenant David Hackett, in Vietnam.
Foreign policy, defense and the Cold War state
The category holds an unusually dense group of people who ran American foreign and defense policy. John Foster Dulles graduated with the class of 1908 and studied under Woodrow Wilson, then the university's president, before becoming the 52nd United States Secretary of State. George Shultz enlisted in the Marine Corps on graduating and later held four Cabinet posts; James Baker also went from Princeton into the Marine Corps and then into three administrations. Donald Rumsfeld read political science here before two terms as Secretary of Defense, and Frank Carlucci, a wrestler as an undergraduate, held the same office. James Forrestal, the last cabinet-level Secretary of the Navy and the first Secretary of Defense, is commemorated on campus by the Forrestal Campus and by the papers held in the university's Mudd Manuscript Library. Pete Hegseth read politics here before his own tenure at the Department of Defense. George Kennan, whose analysis of Soviet conduct shaped containment, spent his long scholarly career at the Institute for Advanced Study in the same town.
The pipeline is not exclusively American. Lawrence Wong took a Master of Public Administration at the university's school of public and international affairs before becoming Prime Minister of Singapore. Maria Ressa read English and theatre as an undergraduate before the journalism in the Philippines that brought her a Nobel Peace Prize.
Mathematics, physics and the graduate school
Princeton's doctoral programs, not its college, account for most of the scientists here. John Nash earned his doctorate at twenty-one and returned to academic work at the university decades later after a long illness. John Milnor took his doctorate in 1954 and delivered the lecture series that became several of his books. Edward Witten came to Princeton for graduate study after deciding on physics. Michael Freedman worked under William Browder on the topology that would carry a Fields Medal, and Manjul Bhargava came from a Harvard undergraduate degree to a Princeton doctorate under Andrew Wiles before returning as a professor. Terence Tao completed his doctorate here at twenty, and Akshay Venkatesh took his under Peter Sarnak before joining the Institute for Advanced Study. Charles Fefferman has spent most of his career on the faculty.
The pattern repeats in physics and chemistry: Kip Thorne took both a master's and a doctorate here, James Peebles came from Canada for graduate study and stayed in the area for the rest of his career, Richard Smalley took his doctorate here before the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, and Frances Arnold took her Bachelor of Science here before the directed evolution work. In economics, Joshua Angrist took a master's and a doctorate here after Oberlin, and Michael Spence took his bachelor's degree. Dario Amodei completed a doctorate here in 2011, and Fei-Fei Li read physics as an undergraduate before her work in computer vision.
Business and public office draw on the college rather than the graduate school. Jeff Bezos graduated in 1986 in electrical engineering and computer science and went to Wall Street before founding Amazon; MacKenzie Scott graduated from the same college and had an early role in the company. Eric Schmidt has served as a trustee of his undergraduate alma mater. Michelle Obama followed her brother Craig here and majored in sociology with a minor in African-American studies. Carl Icahn, Jared Polis, Ted Cruz, Mitch Daniels, Adlai Stevenson II, Michael Lewis and Christopher Eisgruber, who has been the university's president since 2013, all took their first degrees here.
See also
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