To the Editor:

I fully support the Institute for Advanced Study in its plan to expand its faculty housing. It is essential for communities to give proper weight to former fields of battle while balancing remembrance with the requirement to maintain rational and eminently reasonable development.

The Institute needs to provide affordable housing for its unique community of scholars, and I have to believe that all Princeton residents can appreciate the need for affordable housing. The recent demands that Institute land should not be developed because it is “hallowed ground” simply stretch credulity.

Over 234 years have passed since the guns fell silent on the Princeton Battlefield. The hallowed ground is the common grave on State Park land, holding the mortal remains of 15 American and 21 British troops. Much of the battlefield has been preserved — the expansive fields, the common grave, the Clarke House, the Washington Oak, and the young Mercer Oak.

We Princetonians take seriously our charge to be faithful guardians of our heritage for future generations. The current State Park, coupled with efforts of such groups as the Princeton Battlefield Society, Spirit of Princeton, and the Princeton Regional Schools have fully integrated the battle into the life of our community, and in so doing Princeton benefits profoundly.

Opponents to the Institute’s plans highlight the fact that some 52 battle-related artifacts were found in a past survey on the land in question, while downplaying the fact that over 700 agricultural artifacts were also found. After the battle, the fields reverted to their original agricultural use — so much for the “hallowed ground” argument.

In Europe, no stranger to wars, fields are tilled where battles once raged. Cities, once scourged by house to house fighting, now ring with the laughter of children. Battlefields serve as a memento mori and as a cautionary tale, with the enlightened understanding that the human landscape is far more important than the topographic. Princeton Battlefield State Park as currently constituted ably fulfills both duties.

Communities must have the flexibility to grow, or they run the very real risk of stultification and decline. We must not let our society become a cult of the dead, especially at the expense of the living; nor should we allow our future to be held hostage by distorting the past.

Mark Scheibner
Prospect Avenue