The war on friendship

though I have touched on some in the past

The working group’s report defends its recommendation of a freshman year prohibition on rush by arguing, “We believe that Princeton’s goals for undergraduate residential and social life are best achieved when students do not narrow their social circle before they gain a full sense of the opportunities Princeton has to offer them or experience the full diversity of backgrounds and interests among their fellow students.” Indeed, it would be quite a shame if freshmen, upon arrival at Princeton, divided into impermeable social bubbles and shirked interaction with organizations unfamiliar to them. They would miss an enormous range of potential friendships and experiences, and their peers would lose out on interactions with them.

But the working group, chaired by University Vice President Bob Durkee ’69, has failed to support a central argument for its proposal of a freshman year prohibition on rush: that “early engagement with fraternities and sororities makes it much less likely [that diverse social interactions] will occur.” My two years on this campus have led me to believe otherwise, despite the fact that I’m not in a fraternity. The members of these organizations whom I know have, if anything, been more likely to branch out on campus as a direct result of their Greek affiliations. How many of us know athletes who, were it not for their fraternities or sororities, would likely spend all their free time with teammates? How many of us have friends whose experiences echo those of the sorority president who told the ‘Prince’ on Wednesday, “Personally, everything that I’m involved in I became involved in [because of] my sorority”?

In recent days, Durkee has budged somewhat, acknowledging that affiliated students tend to do a lot more on campus than hang out with their fraternities and sororities. In justifying the lack of data in the report on extracurricular involvement of Greek-affiliated students, Durkee told me by email that the working group was already “well aware that students in fraternities and sororities are also active in many other areas of campus life and never meant to suggest otherwise.”

But this response betrays the incoherence of the working group’s argument. What, exactly, is Durkee claiming if he admits that members of Greek organizations are not limiting themselves to social interaction within their fraternities and sororities? Do the Greek organizations prevent students from outside socializing, or don’t they? Do fraternities and sororities “narrow [students’] social circles” or not?

Durkee hasn’t settled on a clear answer. On Friday, he told the ‘Prince,’ “You don’t bring [freshmen to Princeton] so that the first thing they do is find a comfortable social setting and become encompassed in that, even if while doing that they’re doing other things.” But if finding a “comfortable social setting” does not preclude (and may, in fact, encourage) “doing other things” and, in the process, making other friendships, then what is the problem?

Perhaps Durkee and the working group see the kind of “comfortable social setting” students get out of membership in sports teams, performing arts groups, and Greek organizations as inherently bad for them. Or maybe the social engineers at Nassau Hall are convinced that when students lack that kind of social support system, they will come to depend on the residential colleges to direct their socializing in a utopian manner that makes no distinctions based on race, class, gender, religion, academic interests, social preferences, hobbies, personality or any of the other factors that so often, rightly or wrongly, form the basis of friendships in the real world. They might truly think we’d be better off if we found all our friends by random association.

But not everyone is good at spontaneously making friends. Some could use the help of the tight-knit social structure provided by sports teams, performance groups or Greek organizations to develop the deep and lasting bonds that are the greatest assets we can acquire at Princeton. The working group’s report argues, “there are numerous other campus organizations where students can exercise leadership, build friendships and organize meaningful and productive activities.” But as most students surely recognize, the social opportunities offered by residential colleges and most activity-oriented student groups tend to pale in comparison to the social networks provided by the kinds of organizations the working group finds so problematic. To suggest otherwise is naive.

As Jake Nebel ’13 put it in his open letter to President Tilghman, “No matter how much effort the University puts into the residential colleges, there will always be freshmen who seek and would be well served by a different kind of community — a smaller one, and one they can choose.”

As someone who, despite my extracurricular involvement on campus, has lived for two years without such a community, I know how lonely Princeton can be when one is forced to wing it. Vice President Durkee, why cut future freshmen off from this enormously valuable resource?

Jacob Reses is a sophomore from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.