Public displays

On Friday, the Editorial Board called for a less ostentatious pickup process, claiming that it “seems wildly implausible that new members require a crowd of people at their door to drum up excitement.” I would like to qualify their assertion: Public displays of rejection might be essential to uniting the members of some campus organizations, eating clubs being no exception.

There is a warm and fuzzy feeling that we derive from public displays of group unity, such as shouting the name of another East Coast university in conjunction with a term that describes creating a partial vacuum to draw liquid into one’s mouth. Obviously, rituals that demonstrate our commitment to a group are ubiquitous on campus, whether it is Forbesian intramural pride, carefully designed shirts for every organization we belong to or full-page ads detailing religious beliefs in the 'Prince.' Even the heckling of friends and alumni of Princeton’s dance groups at their shows probably serves less to motivate the performers than to show that the heckler shares some kind of intimacy with the respectable folks on stage — after all, he knows their names and dares to shout them!

It seems that a large part of our pleasure depends on other people knowing of what groups we are a part. There are some reasons why such signaling of affiliation might be beneficial; group memberships allow us to succinctly convey information about our support network and pastimes — as in “Hi, I'm in Triangle” — and may thus lubricate social interactions. Moreover, loyalty and devotion of time to club activities that are public goods are more easily enforced. If the commitment is made public — for instance, by giving someone a shirt from your eating club — it might be the best way to ensure that he will play dodgeball for you and not for the opponent’s team.

Some students might even engage in activities that are highly visible but not very productive. It probably surprised no one that the recent hummus spat turned out to be more about the raising of awareness of an idea than the availability of mashed chickpeas. Similarly, students pay enormous premiums for dubious reasons for the “fair” bananas at Witherspoon's. This extra cost is supposedly made up for by feeling as though we are part of the “people who care.” Similarly, when several Princeton students are manning a table together in Frist Campus Center collecting donations for issues such as breast cancer, their motivation must be partly the fact that everyone will publicly see them as a “good person.” Aside from that rationale, their intake of donations per hour would have to consistently exceed their combined potential income from working a job instead of manning the table, which cannot be true for all such events. However, while silently working for a good cause in the library, they might not feel and others might not notice that they are “people who care.”

Now that all the candles have burnt down and the flowers have started wilting, it should be easy to see that Valentine’s Day shares a theme with eating clubs: Everyone is waiting to see who got “picked up” — by a romantic partner, that is — while the unlucky ones complain about having to witness the displays of affection. The fact that public acknowledgement of association also matters to the couple involved is demonstrated by the hectic buildup to the day. In fact, a dinner and flowers to signal love would be cheaper and easier on almost any other day of the year; nonetheless, many couples choose Valentine’s Day, because the signal is more valuable when everyone is taking note.

Eating club members are not exempt from these feelings. I doubt that some students would feel as connected to their clubs if all the public signs of exclusive affiliation such as sweatshirts, passes for parties or public pickups were removed. The idea that simply having a good time inside a club without anyone knowing about it would always be enough is contradicted by the fact that even the secret society on campus wants to keep its exclusivity no more secret than the dodgeball tournament for which it regularly fields a team.

The question of whether or not to discourage pickups is difficult. Since time immemorial, it has taken lots of loud screaming in public and shaving cream to mold an almost arbitrarily diverse group of individuals into a tribal band of destiny. Pickups are often an integral component of an organization's need to use visceral emotions to forge bonds between its members and thus other, possibly worse, public excesses might simply spring up in their stead to fulfill this need. However, there is also the option of relying more on the sheer attractive force of the enthralling activities within an eating club, a campus group or even a relationship to engender a sense of pride and belonging. An "internal" demonstration of quality is preferable to the hurt feelings that may come with a public display. In this vein, the clubs that have opted for less ostentatious pickups should be commended for their ability to form a cohesive group without excessive reliance on the latter. Other student groups should follow, but it is not clear if all of them would or could do so without changing in other fundamental ways as well.