What do we mean that someone is influential? Do we mean people whose influence is still keenly felt today even though they themselves are no longer very active? Paul Volcker ’49 stepped down as chairman of the Federal Reserve 30 years ago, but we still live in a low-inflation economy that he did much to build. “‘Influential’ has a descriptive and a prescriptive element. “It’s a difficult word, isn’t it?” observed Nunokawa - an English professor, obviously. In other words: Put the list together and then see what it looked like and what it might tell us about Princeton and its place in the world today. We asked our panelists to choose without concern for balance by race, gender, age, or specialty. Why limit it to the quick and not the dead? One could easily argue that Madison, for example, remains one of the most influential Princetonians today because we still live under the Constitution he helped write, but we wanted to tease out a different list. Only living undergraduate and graduate alumni were eligible for our list. Ultimately, as you can see on page 38, our panel selected 25 Princetonians, distributing them among 18 positions: The panel could not resist the urge to group some alumni together. Our panelists were: Dean of the College Jill Dolan, a professor of English and theater Peter Dougherty, who recently retired as director of Princeton University Press Michael Gordin, history professor and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts Kevin Kruse, history professor William Massey, professor of operations research and financial engineering Jeff Nunokawa, professor of English David Spergel ’82, astrophysics professor and member of NASA’s advisory council and Sandra Sobieraj Westfall ’89, national political correspondent for People magazine and the chair of PAW’s advisory board. On a night in mid-October, we gathered for dinner at Prospect House to debate the question and, with luck, distill a dauntingly long list of strong candidates down to a few dozen true influencers. READERS RESPOND Picking the Most Influential Alumni - and Defining Influence Who, however, is doing the most to shape the world of 2018? Returning to this topic a decade later, we decided to convene another panel and ask a somewhat different question: Who among Princeton’s living alumni are the most influential right now? Influence of the sort Madison and Turing exercised can take generations to be felt. Luminaries James Madison 1771, Alan Turing *38, and Woodrow Wilson 1879 topped our list as the Most Influential Princetonians of All Time.īut “all time” is a long time. Ten years ago, PAW asked a sweeping question: Who are the most influential people ever to have graduated from Princeton University? We assembled a panel that considered movers and shakers across the centuries and in all fields and selected 25 names.