Two class members, Gen. Mark Milley and Tibor Baranski Jr., are featured in the latest print and online editions of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Gen. Milley, the Army Chief of Staff, provided a Q&A in PAW's March 16 issue. The interview starts:
Is there a cultural divide between the military and Ivy League universities?
It’s as much a geographic issue. The Army demographic is heavily weighted toward the Mountain West, the Midwest, the Deep South, and the Southwest. The two coasts are numerically underrepresented. As we move further into this century, the requirement for very technologically sophisticated, highly adaptive people is going to grow, and we’re missing out on the two parts of the country with very high education levels.
I would like to see more students from the Ivy League serve; I think it’s healthy for the country. On the other hand, I think it’s overstated how few Ivy League graduates there are. It’s that people don’t know who they are.
On March 11, PAW published its "PAW Tracks" interview with Baranski titled "Citizen of the World." In it, Baranski discusses his family's move to Canada and then Buffalo, New York following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Once in Buffalo, he attended a Catholic school with a strong foreign-languages program, which perfectly fit with his budding interest in languages, as he related:
The Asian languages were all taught by native speakers, and the selection was Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, and Hebrew. I had a tremendous interest, for some reason, in learning both Japanese and Chinese. I started to learn Chinese in September 1969 at Calasanctius in Buffalo, N.Y. I recall one day coming home, as I was 11 years old at the time, and my father had asked me, “Young man, I understand that you have chosen Chinese instead of Latin or Greek. Why?” I explained to him that I thought it was a very ancient civilization [as an] old country [with a] long history and a lot of traditions and people, and so it was a very important country that merited study. So my father looked at me and said, “That’s fine, but please do take it seriously, and don’t quit after a few months.” So here we are in 1969 to now 46 years later. I took it quite seriously.
Baranski goes on to relate his move to Taiwan to study Chinese, and then his language studies at Princeton. The work paid off--he's been a Shanghai-based lawyer for many years, putting his language skills to excellent use.
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