College Night was originally intended to reduce overcrowding at Whitman, get people eating at their own residential colleges and foster a sense of community within each residential college. Though I've never been convinced that College Night was effective or even good, I can see the value in the original goals of the idea. When College Night was new and universal and featured ice sculptures, there was a certain niceness to it. I'm told that even Wu and Wilcox had very good food for their College Nights.
But College Night didn't last very long as a University-wide institution. Some colleges have it, while others, like Butler, don't. For Whitman, that means that on Tuesday nights only college residents can eat there, but also that they have the option of eating elsewhere if it suits their fancy better. The result seems to be that Whitman on Tuesday is nearly empty or, at best, half full.
In essence, the only one of College Night's goals that has been met is reducing the crowding at the dining hall. Even that, however, is a questionable victory, since the dining hall is still crowded for dinner the rest of the week. Why is Whitman overcrowded in the first place? Either the dining hall is too small, or Whitman offers particularly good food that draws in people from other colleges. It's a bit late to fix the former, which is fine, because the problem actually lies in the latter. Whitman has good food and offers reliable variety. Rocky and Mathey also have good food, but they're far away from the other residential colleges. Whitman's dining hall is conveniently close to Wu and Wilcox which, even now, have notoriously bad food. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the rest of the story - the problem isn't that Whitman is too good, but that other dining halls aren't good enough. For fairness' sake, that really needs to change.
By now, College Night has had a chance to prove itself, and it hasn't succeeded. This semester, College Night has provided us with a nearly empty Whitman dining hall that stands in direct opposition to College Night's stated goals. The turning point, when it became obvious that College Night was doomed to failure, came last year, when the college staff tried to impose a dress code. To be fair, it was actually a really nice idea to celebrate the seniors' graduation with class, but of course, most people couldn't be bothered. I felt bad about breaking dress code and had dinner with my friends in Rocky.
Short of forcing students to participate in formal sit-down dinners, you can't force people to come together in a community over food, but Princeton isn't a prep school. College Night is only one of the symptoms of Whitman's failure to become a cohesive four-year residential college community like the ones found at Harvard and Yale. The college staff is really amazing - they're caring, lovable, and involved people - and yet, despite this, Whitman's failure to live up to expectations was easily predictable. Whitman's most visible attempts to build a community rely heavily on luring people in with shiny things. I appreciate the shiny things, but the problem is that a lot of the people attracted by the shiny things just wanted the shiny things. Who doesn't know an upperclassman in Whitman who just wanted to get a good room? Contrast the student of Italian who eats at Butler on Tuesdays despite the lackluster food because she enjoys the company the Italian language table offers.
The residential college has had a troubled history at Princeton ever since Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, dreamt it up. Wilson had about as much success with the residential colleges as he had with the League of Nations. It's understandable, then, that the fight for the four-year colleges continues to be an uphill battle. But College Night, which exalts the negative exclusionary aspects of community rather than its positive ones, isn't the answer.
Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York, N.Y. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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