A Princeton decade

More properly, in fact, four years at Princeton is a generation. But four years to a college student represents roughly the same proportion of his or her life as a decade in the life of our parental cohort. (My apologies to all the mothers who will be celebrating their 39th birthday, again, over the coming year.)

Four years is as long as our collective undergraduate memory. The Daily Princetonian is today running a collection of articles from the past decade illustrating the life of the University since before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a line in the chronological sand that separates the Belle Epoque 1990s from the gloom-and-doom Bush Era. At Princeton, the most frequently debated issue over our past “decade” has been grade deflation.

I wish well by our incoming dean of the college, Valerie Smith, and I take some heart from her promise to look into the policy. For a long time I struggled to understand why Nassau Hall’s response on this issue seemed redolent of Bush-era foreign policy, before realizing that it was the denial of reality, the refusal to apologize and face facts, which seemed the hallmark similarity between the two. The ostrich approach of both President George W. Bush and Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel, regarding foreign wars and grade deflation, respectively, seems to have been that the proper response to a failed policy initiative is to deny that anything is going wrong rather than to acknowledge one’s mistakes and attempt to rectify them. I would hope that Smith takes her opportunity as incoming dean to gracefully review the policy and suggest that a noble experiment has failed, quietly letting the thing die, and thus allowing us all to move beyond the single most divisive campus issue in “living memory.”

The second-most frequently debated topic of campus politics has been the residential colleges and the eating clubs. I applaud the University administration for expanding the undergraduate student body. But the expansion of the residential colleges has been attacked as a way of undermining the eating clubs, whose Bicker system has been a third major topic of debate.

If the purpose of the colleges has been to replace the eating clubs, then I think they have failed thus far and will probably continue to do so. This seems to me a problem inherent in how the colleges operate: They are too open to foster any sense of unity or familiarity among the students. I wrote a column once before to urge the administration not to expand Whitman College into Spelman Halls on architectural grounds. Given the free flow of students among dining halls and the general lack of any degree of social cohesion within the colleges, the main sources of college identity are architectural style and location.

If Nassau Hall really wants the inhabitants of the residential colleges to get to know each other very well, it should restrict where they eat and whether other students can eat with them — I am not suggesting this as an advisable policy, only pointing out that some similarly drastic effort is required to evolve the colleges beyond useful administrative units into social centers.

Finally, the Bicker system comes in for perennial criticism, usually during February. A brief review of old ‘Prince’ columns will reveal most of the arguments for and against the concept in general — my major problem with the system is that it leaves some eating clubs dominated by a few athletic teams and fraternities and sororities. My general sense is that Princeton fraternities and sororities exist only as feeders for the eating clubs, but in reverse, some of the eating clubs seem to have been conquered by the frats. The amendment of University financial aid policy to factor in the cost of joining an eating club was a laudable effort, but until something is done about the connection between Greek life and the bicker clubs, this will only partially resolve the problem.

With the possible exception of grade deflation, I expect these debates will continue to fester in the halls and dormitories for another Princeton generation: As they say, nothing ever happens in Princeton. But part of the magic of this campus is that nothing really seems like a major problem for very long. Frustration over deflated grades or endless quarrels over feminism and hummus vanish with the first fall of snow or the first buds on the trees. And all too quickly, our four years are over and we step out of FitzRandolph Gate into the world of 10-year decades.