New selection process proposed for clubs

The task force totally forgot about ­co-ops, which I assume still exist and which have a limited number of spaces due to kitchen size, etc. Someone might have a first choice of a co-op and a second choice of an eating club. Or someone might have a first choice of Spelman and a second choice of a co-op and a third choice of an eating club. I think co-ops and Spelman must be included. Don’t forget — just because they are awesome doesn’t mean they don’t have limited space as well. Also, I don’t see groups included here — some people want to make joint decisions and all go to the same place as their best friends. For example: If A and B both bicker the fictional “Geranium” club and B gets in and A doesn’t, but B wants to club with A, then both of them might want to join Colonial instead.

I agree with John Daniels ’61, but if any system like this goes into effect and has legal or quasi-legal status, I would advise every selective club to hire a lawyer to advise and oversee the process.  

If the selective club’s first list contains the club’s first choices, I do not see why the options do not include going to a second round to pick up those on its first list who listed the club as their second choice but were not selected by their first choice. In other words, I would think that a selective club would want to fill its section from its first list, regardless whether the club was the bickeree’s second, or third choice, before going to the alternate list.

I don’t think the selection process makes a bit of difference as long as there is a reasonable alternative facility for those who do not wish to play the game. In my day, it was Wilson Lodge.

I have been reading with fascination the bicker debate in these pages, and recently attended a Princeton women’s conference where it also was discussed. I am happy to hear that the University has launched a task force to look into what is so clearly an exclusive and elitist process, unparalleled at any of the other Ivies.

I graduated in ’91 when Ivy and T.I. were still all-male, so the process didn’t feel equitable on that fact alone. I knew I didn’t want to bicker and probably wouldn’t get in, not being particularly conventional, but my friends were doing it and I thought that my place was probably with them.

To those who say that the process of getting rejected in bicker prepares you for real life, I respond that my rejection from the club was one of the most excruciating and humiliating processes I have ever had in life.  

Twenty years later, I can’t remember a moment that came close to the one when my accepted friends passed under my window in a group and averted their eyes so as not to see me. It put a blight on my Princeton experience, and I’m sure on that of many ­others.

The clubs do ruin friendships and split you from the people you were close with as underclassmen. As much community as they provide, there is the alienation that they expound just by their very existence. In the real world, if you don’t fit in, you probably can find somewhere you do. At Princeton, if you don’t fit in, you’ve got two years on your hands. I went to New York every weekend. 

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.

I recently joined a golf club that was not my first choice. I chalked this up to “that’s life.” I did not feel “hosed” nor find the application process (not dissimilar to bicker) “cruel.” In fact, I have made friends with people I otherwise would not have met.

This experience led me to reflect on the report of the Eating Club Task Force. The panel proposes to replace bicker with a computer-matching system, which I find incredibly naive. I have always thought that one of the goals of a Princeton education was to prepare ­students for the real world. And bicker, with all its flaws, is one component of this preparation. The panel’s recommendation flies in the face of freedom of association, a concept pounded into my head in courses at Princeton. It reinforces a sense of entitlement. I am reminded of students criticizing Princeton’s grade-deflation policy, believing they should receive an “A” for less than superior work. As Mick Jagger sang, “You can’t always get what you want ... ”

After reading the full task force report on eating clubs, I arrived at a few conclusions with comments.

One of the draws and among several reasons I applied to Princeton was there were no fraternities, which I thought were “sophomoric” and undemocratic organizations that thrived at “lesser” universities. Though the eating clubs were Princeton’s answer to where upperclassmen ate and socialized, and we had either 100 percent or close to it class participation in one of the 17 clubs in the early ’50s, there still remained a divide and social stratification expressed that didn’t sit well. Still, it was more democratic and less divisive than today. I was a member of Colonial Club, to which I still contribute. The initiation was receiving a club tie – and that will be $5, please. There was drinking in the clubs, usually confined to football and select party weekends, but with the exception of a few of us, I never was aware of steady rampant alcohol consumption. We were too busy studying and participating in athletics and extracurricular activities. We were there to absorb a first-rate education, which didn’t allow for alcohol bingeing, which was thought of as unbecoming and in poor taste. (But – sin of sins – many smoked.) And the University was not a broadly diverse student body in the early ’50s, with about an equal divide between private and public school students and three black students in my class. All we knew was war, and that had a sobering maturing effect.

Fast forward to today: a much more widely diverse coeducational undergraduate body that one would think would lend itself to a more democratic and level playing field. But I am surprised that this is not so. Instead there is more social fracturing and division, with unseemly consequences for some students. This is not the Princeton I admired. The University at long last should take full control and dictate the terms of club membership. No more bicker allowed. All clubs must be nonselective. All fraternities and sororities should be dissolved and banned on campus now. That they were allowed to spring up at all shows how the camel gets his nose under the tent. The University runs the show, not the club trustees and alumni. The University trustees should take a stand loud and clear. And any trustees who belonged to selective clubs should announce that bicker will be dissolved. Does the University fear that some alumni will revolt and it will affect Annual Giving and the Aspire capital campaigns? I think not. If so, then are “the inmates running the asylum”? 

The task force recommendations appear tepid and half-hearted and wrapped in the soft-talk nuances of corporate-speak “best practices.” Now is the time for real, decisive change to remove the trappings of social exclusivity akin to the Edwardian 19th century and the roaring ’20s in a university that reaches out to admit students from all economic and social spheres. There is no social or economic discrimination in admissions, and that must be observed in all aspects of campus social life. To foster alternative social settings to the clubs merely sidesteps the root problem. 

When interviewing applicants to Princeton as a member of the Alumni Schools Committee, perhaps I should indicate Princeton has two admission processes: one to enter Princeton, the other to belong to a club. Many applicants have little knowledge of that social construct. Those who do are offspring or friends of alumni/alumnae or wired in through their country-club sources. Those 40 percent of admits whose parents can foot the whole bill are among those who seem to be accentuating and fostering a social-class divide on campus that keeps Princeton in the limelight of a country-club institution for those few well-heeled. The roaring ’20s are alive and well at a big slice of Princeton.

Time to grow up, Princeton, and enter the 21st century. Focus on academics, and make the residential colleges and campus center the key place for social life. Otherwise the Princeton “family” is not all-inclusive, not quite as big a tent as broadcast. Now that is what the “elite” Princeton should Aspire toward. Presidents Woodrow Wilson 1879 and William Bowen *58 would, I think, agree. And so would my granddaughters.

(Note: The following is an expanded version of a letter published in the Sept. 22, 2010, edition of PAW.)

Have little in common with your residential college-assigned roommates? Or do they, too, want to find a smaller community of friends with whom to feel “at home”? Would you like to follow in the footsteps of family or friends with national sorority or fraternity ties? At a minimum of time and expense, would you like to become upwardly mobile when it comes to campus organizations and off-campus eating clubs that interest you? If ’12 s and ’13’ s experience is any indicator, no less than 16 percent of the Class of 2014 will have answered “yes” to some or all of these questions and “gone Greek” by now.

But that was before the Undergraduate Student Government's survey in the spring of 2009 found that extracurricular groups like the Greeks and sport teams appear to serve as pipelines to bicker clubs (Notebook, Feb. 3). Of the students who identified themselves as members of fraternities and sororities, 89 percent entered bicker and 61 percent joined bicker clubs. This was in marked contrast to all other students, only 38 percent of whom bickered. Less than half of those, 18 percent, were successful. As members of the Class of 2014 realize the doors to Greek affiliation are open, the numbers rushing the some 10 fraternities and four sororities should jump.

If there aren’t enough chapters to meet the demand, or if your mother’s sorority or father’s fraternity is unrepresented, consult the National Panhellenic Conference or North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC). Or perhaps you’d feel more comfortable or challenged in the predominately black Divine Nine and the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPC). Other ’14s will team up with the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations or LGBT-friendly fraternities and sororities. Almost all their headquarters should welcome your efforts to become founding members because they are spared the expensive of chapter houses. Princeton’s eating clubs have already taken care of that.

Don’t delay rushing because of the August 2010 letter you and your parents received from Nassau Hall. Since becoming Princeton’s president in 2001, Shirley Tilghman has caused one to be sent every year (and I regularly thank her for making the Greek presence so widely known to entering freshmen). Just remember, her chief accomplishment to date has been to bring into being Woodrow Wilson’s Quad Plan: all four undergraduate classes assigned to what are now termed residential colleges.

When Wilson told the eating clubs that they must either become quads or close, Ivy sent a team to Oxford and Cambridge to investigate and report on the residential colleges that, had inspired his plan. Before condemning, shouldn’t President Tilghman see what Greek life has become since the College of New Jersey sought to ban it in 1855?

According to 2005-2006 NIC figures, 48 percent of all U.S. presidents and 40 percent of U.S. Supreme Court justices have had Greek affiliations, as did 42 percent of the U.S. Senate and 30 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time. Its 73 member organizations have 5,500 chapters enrolling 350,000 undergraduates. The NPC’s 26 sororities have 268,998 undergraduates in 3,011 chapters. And while the several million Greek alumni/ae make up only 3 percent of the population, they comprise 10 percent of the honorees in Who’s Who. Closer at home, Woodrow Wilson 1879 himself was not only a Phi Kappa Psi, but president of his chapter at both the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins. So three of Princeton’s six 20th-century presidents were Greeks. Three of Ivy’s 1879 founders, too, were Zeta Psis. For more on the long history of fraternalism at Princeton, see my prior PAW articles, “Bring Back the Frats” (Jan. 11, 1982) and “The Frats Are Back” (Sept. 21, 1983).  

Today Professor Cornel West *80, an Alpha Phi Alpha, is a leading light in African-American studies. Countless other faculty, coaches, and staff also have Greek ties. When President Tilghman lightens up and accepts the fact that the Greeks are here to stay, many have told me they stand ready to provide the counseling that chapters elsewhere enjoy. (At first, her predecessor, the late Bob Goheen ’40 *48, opposed coeducation. In 1965 he said that he believed coeducation “would bring more new problems to Princeton than it would cure.” So I am hopeful that our current president can be persuaded to rethink her position on Greek life.)

Ivy Club, according to its historian, Frederic C. Rich ’77, was willing to discuss its perceived shortcomings with Woodrow Wilson in 1907. But the club’s “continued existence was non-negotiable.” So, too, today’s Greeks are addressing alleged hazing and drinking. At the time some infraction comes to the administration’s attention, Cynthia Cherrey, vice president for campus life (and the other signatory to the August 2010 letter), knows how to get in touch with the erring chapter’s headquarters. After all, she was in charge of Greek life at Tulane and knows it is her risk-management partner.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon, too, is zero-tolerant of hazing and was more than willing to investigate an alleged incident, even though unreported by anyone for two years.

This spring, The Daily Princetonian rightly criticized the administration for denying Sigma Chi a place to hold an alcohol-awareness workshop for all the campus. The Princeton town library, just down Witherspoon Street, obliged instead.

Completely dry as a national policy, Phi Delta Theta colonized its 27-man, New Jersey beta chapter at Princeton on May 15, 2010, followed by a celebrity dinner at Thai Village with officials and Rutgers brothers.  

By the spring of 2012, the 30th anniversary of the Greeks’ return to Princeton, I’m working toward the re-establishment of all 12 19th-century fraternities. Then, joining hands with the several others that are enlisting Princetonians every day, let’s expand the number of sororities that, too, are composed of Hispanic, Afro, and Asian undergraduates from every socioeconomic walk of life.

Meanwhile, the Class of ’14 should note that the other signer of their August 2010 letter was Dean of Undergraduate Students Kathleen Deignan. Her office’s list of some 250 recognized student groups is devoid of the names of all 10 eating clubs. They, like Princeton’s fraternities and sororities, are proudly independent, self-governing institutions.

Editor's note: The Eating Club Task Force released a report in May that offered a number of ­recommendations, including a new method of selecting club members based on the medical-school match program (Notebook, June 2). PAW also reported that the University planned to review its position of not recognizing fraternities and sororities. Following is a sampling of reactions from alumni; more can be found among letters at PAW Online, and additional ­letters will be printed in future issues.

Ivy, Tiger Inn, Cottage, Cap & Gown, and Tower, watch out! You are the real targets of the administration’s reported threat to “review thriving Greek organizations” (Notebook, June 2).

A whopping 74.6 percent of the Class of 2012 elected to bicker you. And the 2010 Eating Club Task Force has discovered that 57, 50, 27, 21, and 14 percent of your members, respectively, are affiliated with Princeton’s some 10 fraternities and four sororities. Composed of undergraduates of every race, creed, homeland, and sexual orientation, these chapters share with those five oldest, most prestigious eating clubs the right to select their members.

This is what really concerns Nassau Hall. It frets over losing some of its brightest, but socially challenged, applicants to Harvard and Yale, where only 10 percent of the undergraduates belong to the former’s finals clubs and the latter’s senior societies.

Will Princeton’s similar, four-year ­residential colleges marginalize these bicker clubs down to that level? We’ll see. But eating-club expense is now
part of ’11’s and ’12’s financial-aid package. If the administration is serious about ’13’s and ’14’s less affluent succeeding on Prospect Street, it now should also cover the modest cost of Greek affiliation!

Instead, President Tilghman said that, according to PAW, one way to ban Greek life would be to require matriculating students to pledge not to join fraternities or sororities, the same method used when fraternities were banned from Princeton between 1855 and World War II. Let’s not go back to that era, when women, blacks, and gays, too, were unwelcome at Old Nassau. Rather, President Tilghman should continue the hands-off-the-Greeks-and-eating-clubs policy of her immediate predecessors: Bill Bowen, a Sigma Chi, and Harold Shapiro, a Zeta Beta Tau.

Editor’s note: An expanded version of this letter is posted at PAW Online. Robinson, a member of Quadrangle Club and Beta Theta Pi, was a leading advocate for the return to campus of Greek organizations in 1982.

The University Task Force on Eating Clubs has produced a very relevant and well-thought-out report. All members of the study group should be thanked for their volunteer time that benefits the Princeton community by providing a factual framework for discussion.

The report recognizes the historic place of the upper-class eating clubs in the social mix that is the Princeton experience. Interestingly, it also describes in both an historic and contemporary context the fraternities and sororities that once were banished but are now in existence. My point: The University does not recognize the existence of fraternities and sororities at Princeton. Hence, since they are not recognized, they are not regulated. This was not the subject of the task force, but its observations on this subject seem to demand further inquiry and discussion.

One of the problems focused on in the report is the pressure to rush a fraternity or sorority in order to position oneself for a better shot at an eating club. All would (or should) agree that this is a dysfunctional social system. Freshman week should not be cluttered with a Greek rush process. Most schools I have researched ban fraternity/sorority rush until at least second-semester freshman year, and many until sophomore year. Our administration sends out a letter to incoming freshmen requesting them “not to participate in the Greek rush system upon arrival at Princeton.” This seems to be a weak approach. Banning such activity with the threat of expulsion would take care of the practice in one stroke of a pen.

The other aspect seems to be that the fraternities operate on campus, with the attendant drinking taking place in dorm-room parties. Again, this could be better regulated if the organizations were recognized and then told what is or is not acceptable behavior. Hazing must be an offense that is completely banned at Princeton (along with all forms of drinking games), and the consequence can and should be expulsion from the University.  

As one who advocates banning all freshmen from the upper-class eating clubs, I have been told I am out of step. One reason given in the past by University officials is that they have no alternative plan for freshman activity. Eliminate fraternities/sororities for freshmen and access to upper-class eating clubs, and our young scholars will find constructive things to do without the peer pressure of underage drinking. In my view, it just takes a well-thought-out plan, with accountability coming from the dean’s office.

Michael Mathews ’62

Skillman, N.J.

The recommendations of the Eating Club Task Force do not go far enough. The entire bicker process is indefensible and a blot on Princeton’s reputation. As a longtime Schools Committee chairperson, I have met many high school students who would not even consider applying to Princeton, as well as many admitted candidates who choose to go to college elsewhere, because they are turned off by the notion of selective clubs. When one asks students in selective clubs what the criteria for selection are, one hears terms like “fitting in,” which are often code words for class bias that one would hope a great university would strive to break down rather than reinforce. The defense that “life is selective” is particularly disturbing, as I hope that in “life” one is not “selected” based on where your family goes on vacation, apparently a common question during bicker.

I just finished your piece concerning the selection process for eating clubs. Supposedly a task force concluded that the bicker process is “harmful and cruel,” and can “leave lasting emotional scars.” This follows on a piece you ran earlier this year concerning a public forum on campus concerning the grade-deflation policy (On the Campus, Feb. 3). In that piece, as I recall, some students complained that the failure to accord everyone an “A” created competition, which was implied to be awful.

Does the University really act “in the nation’s service” by coddling the immature? Shouldn’t it be inculcating that competition is a positive thing? Perhaps the students “scarred” by their rejection from an eating club will have some sympathy for, and therefore be able to work collegially with, the 90 percent of applicants who were rejected when they applied to Princeton. Perhaps the students who have to earn their grades will learn that life is a constant competition.  

Indeed, I recommend to the emotionally fragile another PAW article, “Nothing Succeeds Like Failure” by W. Barksdale Maynard ’88 (cover story, April 7), that should be required reading for all undergraduates. For example: “They [the professors interviewed] told candid stories of personal struggles and how, in the worst setbacks, they paradoxically pulled off big discoveries.” If we don’t challenge people to fail, then we, and they, will never learn their limits. As that article makes evident, introspection is much more valuable than unearned self-esteem. The first time a person is told that their work is not acceptable should not be when they are in their first full-time job.

I met my best friends through my sorority at Princeton. They welcomed me when I knew nobody and was alone on campus. And when I got to Princeton and a dear friend from boarding school committed suicide, who was there for me? My sorority sisters. I also met my fiancé at our eating club, Tiger Inn. I come from a broken home, and without these social networks and families (Tiger Inn has truly provided me with a family), I do not know where I would be. Bicker can be rough, yes, but so is the real world.

Elitism is a fact of human society. There will always be people who get great satisfaction from being a member of an elite group.  

The problem for a university community comes when a formalized elite group becomes such a significant percentage of the total group that it creates a kind of caste system. If the elite social organizations represent a very small section of the community, as I believe they do at Harvard and Yale, the other students and prospective students don’t give them much thought.

However, if the elite group represents a third of the population, that group becomes a class that everyone is aware of, both inside and outside the institution. As a Princeton sophomore you face the difficult decision of trying to make it into one of the five selective clubs, or of accepting a role as a member of a “lower” social caste. Even if you make it into the elite group, the process leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially if you have to abandon your friends in the process. It can make you question whether Princeton was the right choice for you in the first place.

In my opinion, adopting the computer-matching system that is proposed would greatly improve the social experience of the vast majority of students, with the beneficial results of more alumni support and more young people wanting to go to Princeton.

Wasn’t it George Orwell, when writing 1984, who pointed out the irony of portraying events and situations with descriptions that turn reality on its head? In her president’s   letter (June 2), President Tilghman says she hoped the Eating Club Task Force report will prompt “vigorous” conversations to “preserve the viability, vitality, and value of the eating clubs for many years to come.” Quite to the contrary, the clubs are well known to have been a dilemma to the administration for countless decades.

President Tilghman further tells us that the task force did not want to take issue with “the concept of selectivity.” That, however is exactly the primary focus of the recommendation that surfaced for a computer-managed non-bicker for assigning clubs their new members. This radical change could hardly “strengthen” or “benefit” the clubs, despite its being claimed.

Next, we are informed that under the new system, “painful separation of friends could be avoided.” Nevertheless, each of my three roommates and I happily joined different clubs, expanded our friendships, and still remained good friends. Finally, although Princeton strives to prepare undergrads for the real world ahead, there must be times when disappointment happens no matter how well-equipped they are. Not getting into your “first-choice club” might be part of the life-learning experience, instead of a “lasting emotional scar.” 

This proposed gradual, sure destruction of the University’s selective eating clubs will greatly harm the Princeton experience while diminishing students’ preparation for the world, instead of protectively enhancing it.