To the Editor:

It appears that Rider University is now determined to close down the Princeton campus of Westminster Choir College and move the whole college or whatever parts they can pick up and ship it all to Lawrenceville. This academically excellent college has educated so many singers, choir masters, musicians, and composers, and has prospered in its beautiful Princeton campus, but is now to be melded with Rider’s rather banal university, which only became a university when Rider acquired Westminster. It seems inconceivable that Westminster will ever again be anything like what we have known and admired for so many decades.

Rider simply wants out of the Princeton campus — and to keep the college as it is, Rider has asked for tens of millions of dollars. So how about it, millionaires of New Jersey? How about getting together $40,000,000 or whatever Rider is looking for and simply buying Westminster from Rider? As long as Rider is rid of its presence in Princeton and can get its money, it does not care where the money comes from. And this is an era in which we are told there are more and more billionaires in America, many of whom are profoundly generous with their funds. So how about it? Instead of building yet another McMansion or spending millions to get yourself elected to some political office, how about using your money to do a great service for the students and teachers of a renowned school of the creative and performing arts, not to mention helping Princeton retain a beautiful academic campus in a quiet residential neighborhood?

If you can save Westminster from dissolution, or if you know people who have the star power to help raise the needed money, I can assure you that you and they will be beloved by all the students, teachers, and townspeople who care for Westminster, and you will be fondly and gratefully remembered for many decades to come.

Marvin Harold Cheiten
Meadowbrook Drive