What Would John Witherspoon Say?

To the Editor: 

Princeton was once the nation’s center of common sense. John Witherspoon taught Scottish common sense philosophy at the university and it had a great influence on our constitution. What would Witherspoon think if he could come back today?

Because he dared to settle on Cherry Hill Road, the poor old doctor wouldn’t even be able to vote in the neighborhood named after him. In 1894 it had been partitioned in a dispute over school funding and his home was now in a different municipality. Though the school issue was finally settled in 1966, some folks still insist in 2011 that the partition must remain permanent in order to preserve the historic town.

The old man might wonder how cutting the heart of a town in half preserves it. He would see that as many historic neighborhoods are on one side of the partition as on the other. And almost as many citizens live in the historic core on one side as on the other. They live in the same kinds of houses, send their kids to the same schools, and share many of the same services. Over the years they have had to put up with confusion and complications about sidewalks, sewers, street paving, snow removal, emergency fire and medical services, and trash removal. The good doctor would have a hard time seeing any common sense in all this.

Oh, he’d be told, boundaries really don’t matter. They always divide something. But he would see little common sense in a boundary that requires 12 residents living in community housing at Harriet Bryan House to vote in one municipality while their 58 fellow residents vote in another. And so many student bedrooms are split at Witherspoon’s beloved university that in the year 2000 even the U.S. Census misreported where they live. This matters, Witherspoon would opine, because under the constitution the census count is used for legislative apportionment and those same numbers are used to allocate federal and state funds, no trivial matter.

He might be told that we have found ways to work around these problems—why we have 13 shared services! Well, Witherspoon might suggest, if you share that many services, what’s the common sense in having two governments? Why not put the town back together, cut costs and red tape.

Ah, he might be told, but that means we would have fewer officials representing the historic core. Well, Witherspoon might respond, if you remove the partition, citizens in the united core would have sixty percent of the votes and you would be better off because you would not have to negotiate with another governing body about downtown matters.

Be sensible, the old doctor would insist. Take down that imaginary wall in the middle of town and put the boundaries back out in the Millstone River (Lake Carnegie) and open fields where they’ll do less harm! The geese won’t care.

Ralph Widner
Princeton Borough