Always avoid anyone who employs excessive or otherwise annoying alliteration. This maxim, grounded as it is in the indisputable principles of continental hermeneutics, has served me well over the years.
For one thing, it prevented me from supporting the candidacy of George W. Bush. With his selection of such slogans as "A Reformer with Results" and "Prosperity with a Purpose," this "Compassionate Conservative" revealed himself to suffer, not only from severe dyslexia and clinical WASPishness, but also some sort of strange variant of Tourette's syndrome that might leave him, if elected, blurting out such phrases as "Pass the pork pie please, Papa!" in the midst of delicate negotiations with the likes of Inder Kumar Gujral.
It was thus with considerable trepidation that I first perused Princeton's booklet titled "Rights, Rules, Responsibilities." And, sure enough, my suspicions were sound. For University regulations include clauses that severely curtail students' freedoms of speech and assembly.
I speak, of course, of those passages on page 55 — smack dab in the middle of the ironically Caucasian-flesh-toned "orange pages" — which deal with the relatively recent University ban on the Nude Olympics. Admittedly, the Princeton administration has full right to prohibit undergraduates from engaging in activities that violate cherished norms of public decency and genital warmth. If the "RRR" merely banned the Nude Olympics themselves, I would still have some aesthetic objections to the code, but my civil liberties arguments would be utterly defanged.
No tyrannical power, however, is ever content with merely controlling the pale, flabby frames of its subjects. It seeks to control their every word, nay, their very thoughts. "The undergraduate student body," the "RRR" thus reads, "is advised that they may not attempt to organize or engage in any activity that is perceived to perpetuate gatherings or events that contain or encourage some or all of the behaviors that have been associated with past Nude Olympics."
If you didn't get lost in the twist and turns of the rule's legalistic syntax, you may notice something rotten buried deep within. Not only is the actual coed naked cavorting that marked the Nude Olympics of yesteryear prohibited by our Orwellian administration. The very advocacy of a return to these traditions — any "activity" that might be "perceived" to "encourage" the Nude Olympics — has also been declared verboten by the Princeton powers that be. Any protest, any organized dissent — even any collective expression of discontent with the prohibition on Yuletide streaking — renders a student, under this draconian code, "subject to suspension from the University for a period of at least one year." If I were an undergraduate, it is conceivable that the composition of this very column could have gotten me run out of town like a common criminal.
There, however, is the rub. For the nefarious text in question makes it all too evident that its strictures on this matter apply only to undergraduates. The graduate student body is free to experience the joys of winter shrinkage any time it wants to do so.
The only problem, of course, is that the graduate student body, as we ourselves are more than willing to admit, does not consist of the sort of people you would want to see running about in the buff. Believe me. I share a shower with a good percentage of the first-year class. We grads are also free, however, to advocate a return of the Nude Olympics for undergraduates. This advocacy, moreover, can be performed while keeping the buttocks fully hidden behind opaque fabric.
It is for this reason that I am calling on my clothed graduate colleagues to join me in the creation of a new organization: the Graduate-Undergraduate Alliance for Nude Olympics. Undergraduates are welcome to join G.U.A.N.O. as well, but the Stalinesque persecution that would result from their doing so would presumably serve as a formidable disincentive.
It was the Lorax that knew, as the trees have no tongues, another was needed to speak on their behalf. Today, unjust laws have reduced the undergraduates of Princeton to a state of almost arboreal muteness on the subject of the Nude Olympics. It is we, your elder peers and preceptors, who are left to fight your oppression at the hands of an administration as cold and unfeeling as a testicle exposed to the December elements.
And, come the first snowfall of the season, it will be we, your defenders, who will be enjoying the obscenely joyous spectacle of your newfound liberty. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.
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