The proposed automatic matching system for determining eating club membership (Notebook, June 2) will likely produce an atomistic result. The club section will be a group of individuals preferring or being preferred by the club. They may have little relationship to each other. Building a cohesive club section will take more time in an already short period of student membership. The medical schools actually exercise more discretion in building their class and residency groups.

Providing the option of students applying together in contracted small groups of friends or “ironbounds,” as they could in the early 1950s, would overcome the atomistic result but at the expense of bidding cliques.  

Clubs would profit by combining groups that would amount to an efficient club section. Friendly groups in club sections will occur anyway. Better to have them early, rather than later.

Fred Fraley ’54