The only regret I have about being in an eating club is that I'm not in every eating club. Truly, this serves as an endless source of personal anguish, as, let me tell you, eating club life is decadent and, as we all know, decadent times 11 equals much more decadent. Yet I am not one to turn my back on societal catch phrases, and the two catch phrases that have most successfully burrowed inside my undiscerning eardrum are these: "Save the Whales" and "Burn the Eating Clubs." "Save the Whales" largely bears its charm on account of its potential for being turned into a joke at the expense of inordinately large, water-engulfed humans. On the other hand, "Burn the Eating Clubs" finds resonance in my mind based both on the fact that I belong to an eating club and on my desire not to be caught inside it when the University sets it aflame.
Thus, for once, I have decided to become a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem. Here I propose ways for the University to counteract the eating clubs so that I may escape gruesome death by fire.
1. Turn Fine Hall into a gigantic Mongolian Grill. Let's just admit that we're all really terrible at math. Hence, according to the Pythagorean Theorem, it becomes only logical to convert Fine Hall into an enormous grill. Who needs eating club fare then?
2. Make Peter Singer the kitchen manager for the 'Street.' Dinner's on and it's tofu and Grandma cutlet!
3. Establish a "Big Brother" program between amnesiac trustees and University students. Each trustee, who conveniently has forgotten his four years of bliss doing naked handstands on Cannon's cannon, will "show the town" to inexhaustible, party-hungry students. Pursuits such as stamp collecting and bathing in money can be passed on to a new generation.
4. Buy the eating clubs, stuff a lot of books inside them and play them off as centers of amorphous, statistical pursuits, such as researching populations.
5. Attempt to create a frat-based social scene where selectivity reaches a higher pitch and parties exist in such locations so as to require students to drive under a state of semi-intoxication in order to shuttle between them.
6. Pander to a Reunions spectacle that in no way celebrates alcohol consumption and in no way promotes the construction of an obscure, gluttonous fence-work so as to circumvent state sobriety law.
7. Combine campus events into hip, must-see cultural phenomena every Thursday and Saturday night between the hours of 11 and four. An example: Antonin Scalia performs "The Vagina Monologues."
8. Increase the size of 2-Dickinson, 'cause, let's face it, we all tried to get in there first.
9. Kidnap DJ Bob and thereby make the 'Street' meaningless.
10. Turn Hal Shapiro into a Mongolian Grill.
Now that I've amassed an amazing list of suggestions, I feel confident that I will not become a practicing combustible any time soon. And yes, I too have learned that anti-eating club sentiment is a fun thing to hang one's progressive hat on. But, shhhh, sometimes, what I find even more fun is the feeling of community and the sensory delights offered by the eating clubs themselves. But them's fightin' words!
(Eric Bland is an English major from Richmond, VA. He can be reached at ebbland@princeton.edu)
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