Why Bob Durkee '69 is wrong about eating clubs

First, if one bickers a club — Tower Club, say — and is hosed, instead of being told, “you’ve been hosed from Tower, but Quadrangle Club and Colonial Club still have room,” that student would be told, “you’ve been hosed from Tower, and now you’re in Quad.”

Second, sign-in week activities at the five sign-in clubs would be eviscerated.

Accepting, for the sake of the argument, this second effect as insignificant — and it’s not — Durkee’s system will have no meaningful effect on the Street whatsoever. For it to have such an effect, a higher proportion of those rejected from bicker clubs would have to join sign-ins under his system than currently do in the second round process. For that to occur because of the new system, we have to believe that Princeton students are inattentive enough to be bamboozled by a minor semantic change in a machine-written e-mail. Durkee’s suggestion that all students would be guaranteed a spot in a club under his system is meaningless, because this has been the case for decades. Durkee’s system accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Durkee’s stated purpose in proposing his system is ameliorating the hurt feelings that accompany the Bicker process, and incidentally, helping the sign-in clubs. The reality is that as long as there is Bicker, there will be hurt feelings; and, as long as the University continues to wage its war against the Street, clubs will be imperiled.

Bicker leads to hurt feelings because in hosing students, bicker clubs are telling those students that they do not like them enough to want to hang out with them more than irregularly and that they do not like them as much as they like many of their peers. A message like that is always going to be hurtful. Changing the wording of Bicker rejection e-mails in the hope of lessening these hurt feelings is roughly akin to painting a pig white in the hope that it will start producing wool.

As for helping the sign-in clubs, Durkee neglects to mention the fact that these clubs are imperiled precisely because the University has systematically discouraged eating club membership over the last half decade in an aggressive and unfair manner. When the four-year college system was first created, Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel’s favorite talking point was that the University was just trying to give upperclassmen more choices, that no ill-will was intended towards the clubs, and that her goal was a four-year college system living side-by-side with and sharing members with the clubs. This position was duplicitous and unfair.

The University made a conscious decision at that time that it would require residents of four-year colleges to buy college meal plans, making membership in both an eating club and residency in a four-year college prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest of students. The University then consciously set out to make the most desirable upperclassman housing at Princeton four-year college territory — Whitman’s rooms were more spacious, its facilities were more modern and better-maintained — while allowing the junior slums to wallow in neglect and disrepair. The message was clear: if you wanted to live somewhere nice, you had to eat in a college dining hall, not at a club.

Many of us involved in the club system implored the University to unlink residency and meal plans. It was clear to us that the University’s course would lead to the social stratification of Princeton. Clubs, predominantly sign-ins, would close, leaving an entirely wealthy, exclusive, Harvard-final-club-like appendage on Prospect, in place of the far more socially egalitarian, inclusive, welcoming eating club system that we have. All we asked for was that the University’s meal plans should have to compete on a fair basis with the clubs, without sweeteners like prioritized housing. If a student wanted to live with his friends in Whitman, but eat at Quad, he should be able to do just that. That would have been the correct course if the University was really just trying to provide more options for its students. We were rebuffed.

Half a decade on, and as Durkee cogently explained to The Daily Princetonian last week, “[t]he number of students who are now in the clubs is probably enough to sustain over the long term about nine-and-a-half [clubs], probably not 10.” When I got to Princeton, there were 11 clubs. Now, because of the four-year colleges, we don’t have the students to sustain 10. The University’s current course of continuing to buttress the four-year colleges, flooding them with resources and expanding their size, will kill off more eating clubs unless residency and meal plans are unlinked. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that the next club to close will be a sign-in club? If the administration doesn’t want a Bicker-dominated, socially exclusive Prospect, its course is clear. And that course has absolutely nothing to do with anything that University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee and his vaunted eating club task force have proposed.

William Scharf ’08 is a former Charter Club and ICC President and a current member of Charter Club’s Board of Governors. He writes in his individual capacity only. He can be reached at wscharf@jd11.law.harvard.edu.