Princeton University in popular culture

Princeton University, one of the oldest universities in the United States, has been the subject of numerous aspects of popular culture. The trend accelerated after Princeton was ranked #1 by U.S. News & World Report at the start of the 21st century.

Literature

• F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary debut, This Side of Paradise, is a loosely autobiographical story of his years at Princeton. A Princeton Alumni Weekly on Princeton fiction called it the "novel of Princeton life."
• Geoffrey Wolff's The Final Club is a coming-of-age book about Nathaniel Auerbach Clay, a fictional member of the Princeton Class of 1960 (Wolff was an actual member of this class). The Final Club is written as homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.
• Princeton plays a large part in the second half of Stephen Fry's Making History, in which the protagonist, Michael Young, attends Princeton.
• Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is partly set at Princeton and the characters Changez and Erica are fictional members of the Princeton Class of 2001. (Hamid was an actual member of the Princeton Class of 1993).
• The book The Rule of Four is set on Princeton's campus and the campus of neighboring Princeton Theological Seminary.
• In Her Shoes, a novel by Jennifer Weiner '91: Rose Feller is a Princeton grad. Her younger sister Maggie camps out in a Princeton library.
• Admission, a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, is largely set at Princeton and features as its protagonist 38-year-old Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton University. Korelitz worked as a part-time reader for Princeton's Office of Admission in 2006 and 2007 and is married to Princeton professor Paul Muldoon.
• Humboldt's Gift (winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) features Von Humboldt Fleisher who briefly achieves the position of "Chair in Modern Literature"
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – The first word of the book is “Princeton” and the novel is set in Princeton where the main character has a fellowship. The book explores race in America.

Film

• The beginning of the 1944 film Wilson is set there.
• In A Beautiful Mind, the Academy Award–winning film about the famous mathematician John Forbes Nash, the depiction of Nash's initial days at Princeton were filmed on campus. Although the film is a fictionalized biography of his real life, Nash did receive his doctorate from Princeton and was a Senior Research Mathematician at the university's mathematics department till his death in 2015.
• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) features Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, who pretends to have gone to Princeton, and at one point in the film can be seen wearing a crested Princeton jacket.
• The movie I.Q., which stars Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins with Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein, takes place in Princeton. The scene in which Tim Robbins' character gives a lecture was filmed in Room 302 of the Palmer Physics Laboratory, which is part of Frist Campus Center.
• In the film Risky Business, Tom Cruise portrays a high school student whose father wishes him to attend Princeton. Joel Goodeson, Cruise's character, is interviewed by a Princeton alum.
• Spanglish, a film featuring comedian Adam Sandler, is presented as an essay on a fictional Princeton application. The film was released in 2004.
• In the movie A Cinderella Story, a major part of the storyline revolves around Chad Michael Murray's and Hilary Duff's characters both aiming to attend Princeton to study writing.
• Across the Universe's Jude, played by Jim Sturgess, comes to America to find his lost father at the university. He thinks his father is a professor but discovers that he is in fact a janitor. While Jude is searching on campus, he encounters Max, played by Joe Anderson, an actual Princeton student.
• Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale's character in the film Batman Begins, attends Princeton as an undergraduate. Though he informs butler Alfred Pennyworth that he likes the university "just fine", he drops out and flees to China to begin his training with Henri Ducard.
• In the Scott Derrickson 2008 remake of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, Jennifer Connelly plays the role of Dr. Helen Benson, a professor of astrobiology at Princeton University.
• In Stay Alive, a 2006 ghost story/computer-gaming cross-genre movie, the lead female character, Abigail, tells her friends that she got into Princeton, but later admits she was lying.
• In The Happening, a 2008 horror movie by M. Night Shyamalan, one of the scenes takes place on Princeton's campus.
• Scenes from the 2009 film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were filmed at several locations on campus in July and August 2008 as main protagonist Sam Witwicky attends his freshman year at college.
• The university is one of the destinations of Harold and Kumar, the main characters of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Though the characters visit campus locations filled with undergraduate students, the film was actually filmed in the graduate dormitories.
• The film Admission is based on the story of a fictional Princeton admissions officer and is also partially filmed at Princeton University.
• In the 1979 film Last Embrace, Ellie Fabian is a doctoral student at Princeton who is secretly murdering descendants of the Zwi Migdal as revenge for the organization having enslaved her grandmother.

Television

• The characters of House, M.D. work at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. The outside façade of the fictional hospital is represented by exterior shots of the university's Frist Campus Center. Guyot Hall, home to the EEB and Geosciences departments, is also often visible in the outdoors shots, and so are Fine Hall and the Lewis Library. Four years after the show's first season, fact followed fiction as ground broke on the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro.
• In the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Carlton Banks' dream school is Princeton University (which his father, Philip Banks, also attended) and he eventually attends the university as the series ends.
• In Family Ties, "Young Republican" Alex P. Keaton spends the first two seasons of the series preparing to attend Princeton. While visiting for an on-campus interview, Mallory has an emotional crisis. Ultimately, Alex chooses to tend to her rather than complete his interview, thus destroying any possibility of attending Princeton.
• In the FX series Atlanta, Earnest "Earn" Marks is a Princeton dropout, and struggles to make it in the Atlanta music scene as a manager for his cousin, rapper Paper Boi.
• In The Flintstones, season two episode "Flintstone of Prinstone" Fred Flintstone attends Prinstone University (Which is a parody of Princeton University) as Fred took night classes to better himself, but instead he plays football.
• In The Newsroom, season one episode 9, ACN's mock Republican debate takes place at Princeton. In season three, Don Keefer is asked to investigate a Princeton student's story of sexual assault for a potential broadcast.
• In The Simpsons, season eight episode "Brother from Another Series" mentions Cecil Terwilliger having spent four years at Princeton, which his brother Robert alludes to as ‘clown college’.

References

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