I am responding to the Dec. 8 letter from Chloe Kovner ’91. I should state that I was never a member of a selective club and never aspired to be.
Ms. Kovner’s statement that the only way to fit in at Princeton is to be a member of a selective eating club is nonsense. About half of all sophomores never bicker, and many of those who do are never admitted — how can over half the student body not “fit in”? To say that after rejection by a selective eating club you have to spend the next two years going to New York on weekends is absurd.
There are more than plenty of great people and social opportunities outside the selective eating clubs, and if Ms. Kovner never found any in two years, I would suggest that Princeton is not to blame. I continued to make new friends throughout my time at Princeton, and some of my closest friends are people I met as a senior.
Members of selective eating clubs are only an elite if you make them one. If Ms. Kovner’s friends ignored her after they were selected and she wasn’t, that means they weren’t really her friends, and she would have found this out eventually. She admits that she didn’t really want to bicker and didn’t think she would get in. It’s a shame she didn’t take her rejection as an opportunity to find her true friends, but that isn’t any reason to deny members of selective eating clubs their freedom of association. By her logic, Princeton itself shouldn’t exist, since everyone who wants to attend can’t.