With every year’s Princeton Pre-read, I introduce incoming first-year students to the intellectual life of the University through the experience of reading and discussing a book together. The Class of 2029’s book is Dean of the College Michael D. Gordin’s On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience. This is my foreword to the Pre-read edition, which the incoming class will receive this summer. I encourage all alumni to read along with us!

Dear Members of the GREAT Class of 2029,

Warm greetings from Princeton! My colleagues and I look forward to welcoming you to campus later this year. Your talents, interests, and perspectives will add tremendously to this community, and I am confident that you in turn will develop and grow through the experiences, interactions, challenges, and opportunities that await you here.

I am delighted to share with you this copy of the Princeton Pre-read selection for 2025, Michael D. Gordin’s On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience. The Pre-read is one of many traditions you will encounter at Princeton and is part of a series of activities that will introduce you to the scholarly and communal life of the University. I like to think of it as a scholarly counterpart to the Pre-rade, a joyous ceremony in which incoming undergraduates mark their arrival at Princeton by parading out from Opening Exercises.

I had many reasons for choosing On the Fringe as this year’s Pre-read. One is that it is a fun way to acquaint you with Princeton’s Dean of the College—the senior administrator responsible for our undergraduate academic program. Michael Gordin began his deanship in 2024 after more than twenty years on the faculty. He is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and has authored, co-authored, or edited more than a dozen books.

Another reason that I like On the Fringe is that it grew out of a class that Dean Gordin taught to Princeton undergraduates. Perhaps for that reason, the book is a marvelous introduction to a wide range of topics—from logical positivism to quantum mechanics to the shameful history of eugenics— that will provide useful background for courses you might take at this University. (On the Fringe also discusses subjects less likely to recur in your studies, such as the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness Monster.) Dean Gordin, moreover, writes clearly and with flashes of dry humor that may have you laughing aloud as you read.

I also like On the Fringe because, though it is neither partisan nor overtly political, it bears upon some public controversies much in the news, including issues about vaccine safety and climate change. Denouncing views as “pseudoscientific” can affect—justifiably or not—how they fare in political as well as scholarly debate.

Most importantly, I chose On the Fringe as our Pre-read because it invites conversation about the purposes of the liberal arts curriculum that awaits you at Princeton. Our admission website says that Princeton’s liberal arts education aims to give you an “expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.” Yet, the University interprets “all kinds” in strikingly limited fashion. We not only distinguish science from pseudoscience, but, more broadly, we count some arguments, investigations, and fields as “scholarly” and others as not. Thinking about how and why we draw these distinctions will help you to benefit fully from your time studying here.

Professor Gordin will take the stage during Orientation Week to talk with us about On the Fringe. Over the course of the fall semester, we will offer Pre-read discussions in the residential colleges that will provide opportunities to discuss the book and the broader issues it raises. I anticipate that these conversations will range over many topics, but here are three you might consider as you read the book this summer:

1. What is the “demarcation problem?” (p. 1). Does it generalize beyond science? For example, does it make sense to ask how to tell what is “literature” and what is not? (Can we say definitively that Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is “in” but that Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” is not?) What if we ask what counts as a liberal arts discipline and what does not—or, to put the question more specifically, why Princeton offers a major in Economics but not Business?

2. What is the appropriate response to fringe theories or projects such as the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab that operated from 1979 to 2007 (pp. 70-71) or other parapsychology experiments? Should we ignore them, actively debunk them, or engage respectfully with them? More generally, how do we decide what theories and ideas deserve our engagement, attention, and respect?

3. Dean Gordin distinguishes between “politicized” and “hyperpoliticized” science (p. 29). What do you think of these categories? Can you apply them to the controversies that erupted during the COVID pandemic? For example, in a provocative new book, Princeton politics professors Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo argue that the scientific establishment suppressed debate by stigmatizing dissenters as unethical. Lee and Macedo, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025) p. 105. How would you go about assessing that claim?

I look forward to examining these topics and others with you, and to welcoming you when you arrive on campus later this year. In the meantime, I hope that you enjoy On the Fringe, and I hope, too, that you have a wonderful and refreshing summer.

With very best wishes,

Christopher Eisgruber