Princeton Revisited: Clubs Are Changing

In February the snows will be melting at Princeton.

Groups of clubmen will gather in smug houses on Prospect St. to decide who will take toast and tea with them for the next two years, and who won't. It has been this way for 50 years.

But February, 1968, will be different. A real thaw has come to Princeton, a thaw that has been creeping over the grassy place for a decade. And, even though Bicker--the long ordeal of interviews and meetings that sophomores go through to get into a club--will still be around in February, a whole set of "social alternatives" has already been established. Princeton is changing.

Princeton President Robert Goheen, on the recommendation of the Board of Trustees, announced Nov. 21 that the University was opening a club on Prospect St. with membership open to anyone who wants to join. The club now houses Alumni Council offices, and before that, Court Club, a private club that folded in 1964 because of financial difficulties.

Goheen has also secretly negotiated the purchase of another club, Key and Seal. Old Court and Key and Seal are next to each other, and, since the beginning of the year, administration, faculty and students have been meeting to discuss how to run the new facility.

The University-owned club will be called Adlai Stevenson Hall, and already 80 sophomores have decided to join. Juniors, who have been quitting their own clubs in large numbers since January, and old Key and Seal men will put the number well over 150. Members will include the presidents of the sophomore and junior classes and basketball center Chris Thomforde. The new set-up will involve faculty as well. There will be a resident master and several associates, and plans for club-based courses and a lecture series with guest lecturers staying at the building.

Sophomore president W. Joseph Dehner said last week that the two buildings of Stevenson Hall may be connected by a tunnel, with old Court Club used for dining and Key and Seal for a library and study.

Secret Negotiations

The founding of Stevenson Hall represents a leap forward in the progress of the Princeton social system. In five years the University may be running nearly all the clubs and they will probably look very much like Stevenson. As more and more sophomores decide that private clubs are not for them, the clubs will feel a financial squeeze. They need members to survive. Even now, Goheen is secretly negotiating with three more clubs. They might be bought out before February.

Meanwhile, the University is setting up a second alternative, a quadrangle system similar to Harvard's Houses and Yale's Colleges. According to still unofficial plans, the quadrangle will be associated with the Woodrow Wilson Society, which will provide dining, social and study facilities for quad residents. The Wilson Society was set up in 1957 as the University's first alternative to the clubs. It has been criticized, however, for being just as ingrown and cliquish as Prospect St. About 40 sophomores join every year.

The membership of the quad will include non-club undergraduates and graduate students, Julian Jaynes, Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society, said in an interview two weeks ago. Jaynes hopes that a senior tutor will be appointed next year to head the quad. 90 sophomores are ready to join, Dehner said.

While the University is working from the outside to bring change by offering alternatives to the clubs, club members are trying to change the system from the inside. Eighty-four of them announced in a full-page advertisement in The Daily Princetonian last week that they were resigning. The list included the presidents of the junior and senior classes, the vice-president of the Undergraduate Assembly (UGA), and the past and present chairmen of the Princetonian. Fourteen of those who quit Nov. 1 were members of Ivy Club, one of the two or three most prestigious.

Graduate Boards

Terrace Club has voted to hold "open Bicker." As long as there is space, anyone who wants can join. Campus Club also voted to open its books in February, but its graduate board, which effectively runs the club, would not allow it. Thomas K. Babington, president of Campus, made the announcement last week: "The board is not amenable to the idea of non-selectivity for a mere segment of the street. They will support this club in maintaining the principle of selectivity." As a result, 11 members have said they will resign in protest.

At Colonial, probably the most progressive of the top five clubs (others are Cottage, Ivy, Cap and Gown, and Tiger), members decided to keep Bicker this year in a close vote. Bicker won last month, 42-36, but 13 club members resigned before the crucial ballot over a complicated "moral" issue. They would have swung it.

The "moral" issue involved the University's participation in setting liquor rules and women's visiting hours for clubs but not in overseeing the selection of club members. The University cannot say that it is neutral in the affairs of private clubs if it sets social rules, the 13 argued, so they would not sign an agreement to obey those rules, required of all club members. Colonial is an influential club, and if the resignations had not been so untimely, it is clear that other clubs would have followed the Bicker boycott.

Cloister Inn had also been discussing a boycott of Bicker until its graduate board told club members to stop stirring up trouble. After the remonstrance, Cloister's president Valery H. Taylor took a poll in which members split nearly in half on whether or not to Bicker.

According to Dehner, only 500 sophomores out of a class of 800 will participate in Bicker this February. Last year the number was 750. As a result, some clubs will not be able to fill their rolls and will have to draw on their reserve finances or fold. Sensing this, many old grad clubmen have been trying to use some of their influence to keep the clubs alive. No doubt some of the clubs will last indefinitely. Several have huge endowments, larger than many colleges. But running a large house and keeping a squad of servants is becoming more and more expensive.

There is a kind of sorrow about it all. James W. Newman, the president of the graduate board of the Inter-club committee, commented two weeks ago on the University's purchase of Key and Seal: "The passing of an institution that has received the dedicated efforts of many people over the past 50 years is always a sad thing, no matter what the institution." He might have been talking about the club system.

But it seems that most of the people involved are not sad. They are optimistic and excited. Even Goheen and the Trustees, who appeared last year to be frightened that alumni would stop contributing to the University, are pushing hard, making statements that sound nearly revolutionary.

Said Goheen last month at a press conference: "If this movement [at the Wilson Society] and the move to the new club were to snowball it would certainly put pressure on some of the clubs ... [The Trustees committee] envisages a changing pattern of dining arrangements and social life for undergraduates at Princeton, neither eliminating clubs as such, nor perpetuating their present overwhelming dominance."

No More Thrashing

In the past year the opposition to the club system has become more constructive. Its tone has changed from anti-Bicker to pro-social alternatives, From a blind, vindictive thrashing has come something that resembles a new system. At first, no doubt, it will be chaotic. In February there will be Bickering clubs, open clubs, University clubs, and the quad -- all claiming over 100 new members.

Eventually, things will sift out and settle down. Most likely the quad system will have more appeal than the University clubs and it will involve nearly everyone at Princeton. Financial pressures should wipe out most private clubs. A few of them will remain, however, and the situation in about five years will resemble that at Harvard and Yale.

But for Princeton there could be a new, complicating factor -- women. Goheen has expressed interest in getting a girls' college to associate with the University for a long time, and a Faculty report last year recommended coeducation as a solution to Princeton's social problems. Feelers are out. Sarah Lawrence turned down a bid to hook up with Nassau Hall last year, but Goheen is still trying.

The final solution, which has reportedly been discussed by Goheen with several student leaders, sounds so blasphemous it would have made Amory Blaine go to Harvard: a quadrangle system for Princeton's men with the women living in the Prospect St. clubs.