Bicker isn't all to blame

This year, the volume of our annual conversation has only grown as the Task Force on Relationships between the University and the Eating Clubs proposed altering the timing of the selection process. The Editorial Board of this paper has proposed eliminating pickups. But the focus of these proposals are misplaced, because they only address the process by which students join eating clubs. The real issue is that the eating club system — in fact, the entire upperclass social system — is incompatible with the residential college system.

If September is the month of freshman orientation, it is also the month of junior disorientation. Before arriving on campus as a freshman, I was warned that the Princeton experience could be divided into two separate experiences: the life of an underclassmen and the life of an upperclassmen. This division is reinforced by more than just the academic rigor that comes with choosing a major. It is created mostly by the jarring disconnect between life in a residential college and life out of one.

Residential colleges are more than just a set of dorms. They are a community, a set of social norms and way of living. They engender certain rhythms; we grow accustomed to certain mealtimes, a certain flow of familiar faces and a certain pace for our daily interactions. These rhythms lead us to grow close with a certain group of friends. Of course, it is possible to spend a lot of time with someone from another college. But the University effectively discourages this interaction by forcing us to live in a residential college for our first two years.

After these initial two years, we enter an entirely new social system. Due to the perception — or the fact — that most students want to join a club, the vast majority of students look for a dining option outside of the residential college. Because of this mass exodus out of the residential colleges, we are all forced to confront a new social order, even if we ultimately choose not to partake.

This social structure and the residential college life are poles apart. One way of visualizing how different the two systems actually are is to think about population flows at meal times. If you’re an underclassmen, you probably walk along a north-south axis to get to your dining hall. If you’re an upperclassmen, you’re probably walking along an east-west axis at this same time. We rarely bump into each other.

More profoundly, this new social system almost inevitably interferes with the bonds among the friend groups that students form as underclassmen. The social options for upperclassmen are mostly well established and institutionalized and, therefore, rather inflexible. The clubs get much of the blame for this issue, because they are the 800-pound gorilla in the room — and it turns out that this particular gorilla likes to divide and conquer. It expect students to sort themselves into the clubs and does not expand, contract or change to fit the desires of the students. Most friend groups break down against this social maze. A few friends inevitably peel off into different clubs, join co-ops or go independent.

Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people make new friendships after junior year and live happily ever after. But this process causes a great deal of friction, most of which occurs around the beginning of junior year when people actually start eating at their clubs.

As to whether University administration has the political will to weld these two social systems together, color me skeptical. Considering the difficulty that the Task Force has had in making even cosmetic changes to the Bicker system, I doubt whether Nassau Hall can force the clubs to make fundamental changes. Also, the administration has invested so much in the college system that it may not be willing to weaken the colleges so as to minimize friction with the social options available to upperclassmen.

Still, I believe that the only way that we might be able to start the process of change is by talking about the problem when it occurs. For most students, the hardest time at Princeton is not the Friday of Bicker but the first school day in September when people actually start eating at their new dining locations. Next year, let’s start our hand-wringing while it’s still warm out.

Adam Bradlow is an anthropology major from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at abradlow@princeton.edu.