Straying from the Street

During his junior year, Ted Price ’10 had trouble finding time for regular meals at Ivy Club, where he was a member. He was a distance runner on the track team, and he found himself spending large sums of money on food, beyond his Ivy membership dues.

This year, Price drew into Whitman College and purchased a shared meal plan with Ivy, an option he said has provided him with the “best of both worlds.”

“When I’m at practice and when I’m at class, I usually eat my meals at Ivy,” he explained. “When I’m in my room or when it’s the weekend … I always come [to Whitman] and sometimes for lunch if I don’t have class.”

Since the creation of the four-year residential college system in September 2007, dozens of students like Price have shifted to eating in the dining halls instead of the clubs. Some have shared meal plans, while others have opted to live and eat exclusively in the colleges.

An October 2009 evaluation of the first and second Committee on Background and Opportunity (COMBO) surveys by the Analysis of Princetonian Attitudes Committee (APAC) suggests that the creation of the four-year college system may have influenced the membership of eating clubs. The data show that students reporting membership in a sign-in club decreased by 9.7 percent from 2007 to 2009. Over that same period, the number of students who reported not being in a club increased by 6.7 percent. Membership in bicker clubs, however, did not change significantly.

“I think that the residential colleges are becoming an increasingly attractive option for upperclass students, and I believe this has the potential to dramatically change the landscape of the club system in the very near future,” USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 said in an e-mail.

Though the APAC analysis suggests that some students may be forgoing membership in sign-in clubs for residential college life, many of those interviewed said they believe the apparent changes in membership were not too significant and not necessarily related to the advent of the four-year college system.

“All the clubs go in cycles, especially the sign-in clubs, in terms of the degree of popularity and student membership,” Interclub Council (ICC) adviser Tim Prugar ’06 said. “This … happens every four to five years [about] a particular club’s numbers. I think that, historically, this conversation has happened several times, regarding the number of students joining clubs and not joining clubs.”

According to the COMBO data, membership numbers among all of the sign-in clubs except Charter have fallen between 2007 and 2009, though APAC noted in its report that the data may overstate the change in membership numbers. APAC cited statistics from the Bric-a-Brac yearbook indicating that the number of members at Terrace Club and Cloister Inn actually increased during the same timeframe.

This movement in membership numbers reported by COMBO data might suggest that the residential colleges and sign-in clubs appeal to a similar demographic. At the same time, some students and administrators say the two options do not compete with one another.

“My goal in trying to ‘level the playing field’ is not to steer all students in any one direction, but to make every student feel that he or she has a range of choices and can enjoy their dining experience, wherever they are,” Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson said.

Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Maria Flores-Mills expressed a similar sentiment. “I see some students who didn’t previously have a choice now have a viable other option,” she said.

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Whitman resident David Sprunger ’11 said he considered joining a club instead of a four-year college, but “not very seriously.”

“Generally, I’m just more comfortable here,” he explained.

Michelle Lu ’11, another Whitman resident, opted to remain in Whitman after her sophomore year. Some of her friends chose the same option, and it was convenient for her to have a University dining plan.

Lu explained that, though other friends of hers joined clubs, she does not feel that being a member of a residential college has limited her socially. “In terms of social life, the residential colleges do try to do a little something,” she said. “Whitman has study breaks and upperclass social hours and stuff.”

Lu added that she does not feel her choice has cut her off from her friends in the clubs. “You still run into people, and I feel like the people I know best, if they’re in eating clubs, we still keep in touch. It’s not like we can never talk to them anymore,” she explained.

The four-year college system was not intended to draw students away from the clubs, Dickerson noted. One goal was “to create an equilibrium in social life whereby we didn’t diminish the influence of the clubs in general,” she said, adding that the system could provide “really happy choices for students who don’t want to be a part of the club lifestyle.”

Prior to the introduction of the four-year residential college system, Flores-Mills explained that she “had a strong feeling … that there was some subset of students who could not fathom feeding themselves on a daily basis without some kind of plan [and] so were more de facto members of clubs than people who joined the clubs and found it a very formative experience.”

In response, the University created a system in which upperclassmen could elect to remain in the residential colleges with a University meal plan. “What we tried to do was to follow a policy that says to students, ‘There are now a range of options that includes clubs, that includes residential colleges, that includes independents … that includes co-ops. You decide,’ ” Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said.

A significant feature of the plans for residential colleges was the introduction of shared meal plans.

“In the beginning of the planning for the four-year residential colleges, there was no anticipation that there would be shared meal plans,” Durkee said. But, he added, “shared meal plans seem to have been quite popular.”

This popularity is reflected in the increasing number of students who elect to live in the residential colleges. According to data from COMBO II, for upperclassmen’s current dining options as of spring 2009 and sophomore’s intended dining options for the following fall, 53 percent belonged to eating clubs, 16 percent had residential college meal plans, and 9 percent had shared meal plans. Another 19 percent were independent students, and 3 percent were members of co-ops.

For those students who cannot obtain shared meal plans, integrating life at the clubs and life in the colleges may help prevent students on either side from feeling isolated.

Durkee noted that the University wanted to avoid a social environment that put the eating clubs and the residential colleges in “two separate worlds.”

“The hope was that there would be much greater integration,” he said, citing the two free dining hall meals upperclassmen receive each week as part of the effort to encourage this integration.

Data from COMBO II show that 28 percent of upperclassman respondents said they ate two meals per week in the dining hall, while 44 percent said they either ate one meal per week or did not eat in the dining halls at all.

The University assumed that students would use those two free meals for breakfast since the dining halls are generally closer to dorms, but upperclassmen have been eating dinner at the residential colleges as well, Durkee explained. “The experience has been that people have been using those meals, and this is a way to push against the sense of bifurcation,” he said.

Whitman resident Kaitlin Hay ’10 said her decision to join a residential college while many of her friends joined eating clubs had an effect on her personal relationships. “I’m noticing … that a lot of the tight, tight friends that I’ve made in Rocky all seem to have transferred to Colonial [Club], and I don’t see them that much,” she said.

But, Hay added, “I’m friends with a ton of freshmen a ton of sophomores because I’m in the dining hall … I’m able to maintain friendships with more people from different classes.”

Hay is also a senior photographer for The Daily Princetonian.

Durkee noted that the changing size of the student body was also taken into account as the four-year college system was implemented. “The number we adopted for planning purposes was roughly equivalent to the increase in the number of juniors and seniors as a result of the expansion of the student body,” he said. “The expectation was that at least as a planning concept … the number of students who would stay in the clubs would most likely remain very stable.”

Colonial president Alex Man ’10 said his club is increasing its efforts this year to recruit sophomores.

“Residential colleges, in many ways, have been a positive effect on the club system,” he said. “It highlights the difference between an eating club and a residential college even more … We focus now more on the things we operate in differentiation with what a residential college does.”

And the appeal of belonging to a selective club may explain the discrepancy in membership trends between the sign-in and bicker clubs, Aran Clair ’10, president of Cloister and the Interclub Council, said in an e-mail.

“I think the biggest factor contributing to this decline is the mentality of the Princeton student,” he said. “Princeton students by nature are highly competitive … Once here, I think a lot of people feel entitled to belong to whatever group on campus that is most selective, and the bicker clubs are the highest on that list of selective groups. The problem comes in when the person who isn’t accepted refuses to see him or herself at another eating club because of misguided ideas about social status. That drives me bananas.”

Jordan Bubin ’09, who left Tower Club after his junior year to become an independent, shared Clair’s sentiment. “I think [of] the bicker clubs as having a stronger identity than the sign-in clubs, not because of the prestige, but the fact that certain groups enter the bicker clubs and are screened particularly for [that club],” he said. “That gives you a stronger identity in a pool of students.”

If the membership of sign-in clubs is in fact decreasing, as the data suggest, most agree that the clubs must take further steps to make themselves more attractive to the student body.

Ben Weisman ’11, a member of Terrace Club, said he thinks there may be a point where the University should intervene when a club’s membership becomes too low. “Because things change so much every few years … you could be limiting people’s options in the future simply because this year, ‘x’ number of people want to join this club,” he explained.

Weisman is also the director of advertising sales and development for The Daily Princetonian.

Prugar said the clubs should strengthen their focus on fulfilling student demand. “I think the best thing for clubs to do is what they have been doing: Be responsive to students and student needs. A little bit of healthy competition is good for the clubs and the University,” he said.

Flores-Mills said she has heard from both club presidents and members of the clubs’ graduate boards that the eating club system “really is a market.”

“If your membership is lagging, then that means you’re not providing what students want,” Flores-Mills explained. “And that’s the responsibility of the club itself … to figure out what students want and fill that niche.”

Diemand-Yauman also said the eating clubs were responsible for maintaining membership numbers. “Declining membership for any group is usually a negative thing, and I hope that the ICC and [Graduate Interclub Council] will work to support one another in times of financial hardship or fluctuations in membership to ensure that the club system will remain strong and vibrant,” he said.

Though the majority of upperclassmen still elect to join eating clubs, some of those who choose other options say they do not feel marginalized in any way.

“I don’t feel like I’m missing out on ‘the’ Princeton experience,” Sprunger said. “I don’t believe it exists.”

This is the second article in a five-part series on the eating clubs and the COMBO data.